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128
secrets, and as this was 1936, there were several groups who might fit the notion of the
“wrong sorts” of people (the Nazis, the Japanese, and the Communists, to name a few).140
Americans are the only ones who can contain the threat.
The need to re-claim control is a current throughout early zombie films. Not only
did the Depression throw the individual’s lack of control over his/her own economical
well-being into stark relief, but control made perfect sense in an era when Italy and
Germany were threatening to expand across Europe and Africa, when Japan was making
steady inroads into China, when Spain was locked in a vicious civil war, and when Indian
and Indochinese peoples were rising up against their colonial masters. This need to
control may explain why the earliest zombie films were explicitly located in colonial
situations: although colonial control was never as universally successful as colonizers
would have people believe, colonies could still offer the fantasy of control, or in the
context of the tumultuous period from 1932 to 1968, the fantasy of re-imposing some
sense of traditional forms of control. These zombie texts could thus be read as nostalgia
for the colonial world and the sense of order it represented.141
Yet, the colonial subtext in these early films is deeper than this—French
colonialism helps link the earliest major zombie films to one another.142 With Revolt of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
140 In fact, King of the Zombies and Revenge of the Zombies (1943) cast their zombie masters as Nazis.
141 This is not the only argument drawing a link between early zombie films and colonialism; see n. 8.
142 The film Ouanga did come out in 1935, in between the releases of White Zombie and Revolt of the
Zombies, but it was a small-budget feature without a wide release.
Object Description
| Title | And the dead shall walk the earth: Zombies and the politics of death |
| Author | Kee, Chera Dezarae |
| Author email | ckee@usc.edu; ckee211@gmail.com |
| Degree | Doctor of Philosophy |
| Document type | Dissertation |
| Degree program | Cinema-Television (Cinema Critical Studies) |
| School | School of Cinematic Arts |
| Date defended/completed | 2011-03-08 |
| Date submitted | 2011 |
| Restricted until | Unrestricted |
| Date published | 2011-05-04 |
| Advisor (committee chair) | Marez, Curtis |
| Advisor (committee member) |
Kinder, Marsha Hoskins, Janet |
| Abstract | In October 2009, five pale, blood-stained teenagers sat on a curb in Newhall, California. They were not crime victims nor movie extras. Rather, these teens were “zombies,” waiting to participate in a Zombie Walk. These events, where groups of people dressed as zombies lumber through the streets, have been happening globally since 2001 and entice up to several thousand participants for each walk. Zombies are familiar characters in comic books, video games, television and film, but with thousands of people dressing as zombies and taking to the streets, it becomes clear that the kinds of work zombies do in U.S. culture provides insight into how we approach death, try to diffuse its potency, and use it to make political interventions into everyday life. Zombies are critical repositories of social fears and desires related to capitalist wage slavery, race, gender, and the political power of the masses, and as such, they demonstrate how representations and performances of death, in widely different forms, have served remarkably consistent functions in the United States throughout the past two centuries.; This project seeks to show that the zombie, as a creature of both/and—both slave and master, both living and dead, both black and white—is often positioned as that which invades the normative space of the living, a space that is generally conceived of in terms of whiteness, patriarchy, and heterosexuality. In forcing those who exist in this space to face a being who can encompasses both their ideals and that which their society rejects, the zombie can be used to try to support heteronormative ideals and the status quo while also undercutting those same ideals—often within the same text.; Chapter one provides a survey of zombie scholarship and describes the history of the figure in U.S. popular culture. Chapter two places zombies in their historical context, considering their ties to Vodou belief and U.S-Haitian relations. Examining travelogues, magazine articles, and official documents about Haiti circulating in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the zombie is identified as one in a long line of figures used in debates surrounding dependent territories, self-rule, and the limits of U.S. democracy. Early film zombies thus come to symbolize the paradoxes of capitalist democracy in the United States and as such, offer a potentially liberating imaginative escape from dominant systems. However, this idealistic feature of zombies is restricted by racism in early zombie films.; Chapter three considers how the zombie state in film is marked by race and gender, arguing that while the zombie can be terrifying, it also presents a fantasy of escape from white, heteronormative patriarchy. This fantasy state is often racialized, positioning blackness as more attractive than normative whiteness, and female characters frequently offer a point of identification with it. Many zombie films are therefore sites for staging conflicts over non-heteronormative desires, both promoting and punishing the transgressive and non-normative, often within the same text.; The fourth chapter considers the connection between the spectator’s relationship to images of death in 19th century presentations, like phantasmagoria shows and séances, to that same relationship in contemporary zombie video games. Arguing that certain visual technologies can encourage a sort of doubling of consciousness that empowers spectators/players, this chapter maintains that this empowerment, when placed in the context of representations of the dead-come-back-to life, allows spectators/players to enact desires that show death not as final, but as something that can be transcended, which ultimately robs the zombie of some of its inherent political potential.; The fifth chapter examines Zombie Walks. These events present a contemporary example of death being introduced into the world of the living to unsettle assumptions of how public space should be used. Public performances of zombiness disrupt the normative capitalist expectations of the spaces in which “zombies” walk while simultaneously allowing walkers to reject Western beauty ideals by dressing up as rotting, ugly corpses. In this way, zombie walkers offer an important example of the contemporary carnivalesque.; The final chapter of this project illustrates that while the zombie can stand as something that is both comforting and threatening, in either guise, it carries with it the potential of another way of imagining human society, and as such, it can represent the aspirations of any who feel that they are made over as slaves, cannibals, the infected, or the abject by their society’s standards. Thus, often, in the form of the zombie, death is not only made attractive in U.S. popular culture, it is made politically useful as well. |
| Keyword | zombies in film; zombie video games; Zombie Walks; voodoo in film; U.S./Haiti relations; race in film; gender in film; phantasmagoria; spiritualist phenomena; zombies and the carnivalesque |
| Geographic subject (country) | USA |
| Coverage date | 2001/2010 |
| Language | English |
| Part of collection | University of Southern California dissertations and theses |
| Publisher (of the original version) | University of Southern California |
| Place of publication (of the original version) | Los Angeles, California |
| Publisher (of the digital version) | University of Southern California. Libraries |
| Provenance | Electronically uploaded by the author |
| Type | texts |
| Legacy record ID | usctheses-m3808 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Rights | Kee, Chera Dezarae |
| Repository name | Libraries, University of Southern California |
| Repository address | Los Angeles, California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Filename | etd-Kee-4414 |
| Archival file | uscthesesreloadpub_Volume51/etd-Kee-4414.pdf |
Description
| Title | Page 139 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Full text | 128 secrets, and as this was 1936, there were several groups who might fit the notion of the “wrong sorts” of people (the Nazis, the Japanese, and the Communists, to name a few).140 Americans are the only ones who can contain the threat. The need to re-claim control is a current throughout early zombie films. Not only did the Depression throw the individual’s lack of control over his/her own economical well-being into stark relief, but control made perfect sense in an era when Italy and Germany were threatening to expand across Europe and Africa, when Japan was making steady inroads into China, when Spain was locked in a vicious civil war, and when Indian and Indochinese peoples were rising up against their colonial masters. This need to control may explain why the earliest zombie films were explicitly located in colonial situations: although colonial control was never as universally successful as colonizers would have people believe, colonies could still offer the fantasy of control, or in the context of the tumultuous period from 1932 to 1968, the fantasy of re-imposing some sense of traditional forms of control. These zombie texts could thus be read as nostalgia for the colonial world and the sense of order it represented.141 Yet, the colonial subtext in these early films is deeper than this—French colonialism helps link the earliest major zombie films to one another.142 With Revolt of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 140 In fact, King of the Zombies and Revenge of the Zombies (1943) cast their zombie masters as Nazis. 141 This is not the only argument drawing a link between early zombie films and colonialism; see n. 8. 142 The film Ouanga did come out in 1935, in between the releases of White Zombie and Revolt of the Zombies, but it was a small-budget feature without a wide release. |
