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151
privilege) is threatened, fears of miscegenation rise, for much like zombies, the products
of miscegenation exist as both and neither: they live in-between categories. As Françoise
Vergès’s work on the island of Réunion, a former French colony, has shown, in a colonial
environment, mixed-race people were a potential threat: they presented the possibility of
an Other with claims to white privilege and rights, but these people also “troubled the
European imaginary because they were the signifier of forbidden desire, of the attraction
of the white for the black…”19
To police racial boundaries, sexual relations have to be policed, for mixed-race
people are typically also evidence of white access to black bodies.20 In the United States,
anti-miscegenation laws were in existence as early as 1661 and remained on the books
until the late 1960s. At the heart of the laws was a two-part process: pathologizing
interracial desire by making it illegal, which thus identified normal, accepted sexual
relations in relationship to abnormal ones.21 Furthermore, more often than not, the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
19 Françoise Vergès, Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Metissage (Durham:
Duke UP, 1999), 30.
20 The Revolution in Haiti did turn this around somewhat; there are reports of black male sexual assault
against white women, but as Jeremy D. Popkin observes of many of the firsthand accounts of such
atrocities, “Between the lines of these narratives, one can sometimes sense shame about the inability of
white males to fulfill their traditional roles as protectors and even [in at least one surviving account] a
recognition that white men had been equally lawless in their behavior toward white women before the
revolution” (Popkin, 28).
21 For lengthier discussions of miscegenation in the United States, see Peggy Roscoe, What Comes
Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford UP, 2009) and
Barbara C. Cruz and Michael J. Berson, “The American Melting Pot? Miscegenation Laws in the United
States,” OAH Magazine of History 15.4 (Summer 2001): 80-84; for a discussion of how miscegenation
was dealt with in Hollywood film up through the 1960s, see Courtney.
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 162 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Full text | 151 privilege) is threatened, fears of miscegenation rise, for much like zombies, the products of miscegenation exist as both and neither: they live in-between categories. As Françoise Vergès’s work on the island of Réunion, a former French colony, has shown, in a colonial environment, mixed-race people were a potential threat: they presented the possibility of an Other with claims to white privilege and rights, but these people also “troubled the European imaginary because they were the signifier of forbidden desire, of the attraction of the white for the black…”19 To police racial boundaries, sexual relations have to be policed, for mixed-race people are typically also evidence of white access to black bodies.20 In the United States, anti-miscegenation laws were in existence as early as 1661 and remained on the books until the late 1960s. At the heart of the laws was a two-part process: pathologizing interracial desire by making it illegal, which thus identified normal, accepted sexual relations in relationship to abnormal ones.21 Furthermore, more often than not, the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 19 Françoise Vergès, Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Metissage (Durham: Duke UP, 1999), 30. 20 The Revolution in Haiti did turn this around somewhat; there are reports of black male sexual assault against white women, but as Jeremy D. Popkin observes of many of the firsthand accounts of such atrocities, “Between the lines of these narratives, one can sometimes sense shame about the inability of white males to fulfill their traditional roles as protectors and even [in at least one surviving account] a recognition that white men had been equally lawless in their behavior toward white women before the revolution” (Popkin, 28). 21 For lengthier discussions of miscegenation in the United States, see Peggy Roscoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford UP, 2009) and Barbara C. Cruz and Michael J. Berson, “The American Melting Pot? Miscegenation Laws in the United States,” OAH Magazine of History 15.4 (Summer 2001): 80-84; for a discussion of how miscegenation was dealt with in Hollywood film up through the 1960s, see Courtney. |
