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228
living affairs, increasingly painted as imaginative fictions rather than real beings.13
Throughout the Middle Ages and up through the 19th century, then, death—as a social
process—and the dead—as members of the community—were undergoing tremendous
changes.14
In Philippe Ariès estimation, a new kind of death began to occur in the 16th
century, as dead bodies were gradually more and more likely to be hidden away; yet, a
preoccupation with funerary art and memorialization continued, albeit in new forms.15 In
the Middle Ages, funerary art was used to remind believers of the inevitability of death.
Art about death and the dead often focused on the fragility of the material world and the
perishable nature of all worldly things, especially the body, “so that representations of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
13 See Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the
Uncanny (New York: Oxford UP, 1995), especially Chapter Ten.
14 For an extended discussion of these changes, see Plinio Prioreschi, A History of Human Responses to
Death: Mythologies, Rituals, and Ethics (Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press, 1990); Thomas; and Morris
Berman, The Reenchantment of the World (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981). For an overview of changes in death
beliefs since the middle ages, see Philippe Ariès, “The Reversal of Death” and “The Hour.” See also
Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes Toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. Patricia M.
Ranum (Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP, 1975) and Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen
Weaver (New York: Knopf, 1981). Social historian Ariès has been influential in death studies and has
traced what he sees as the changing conceptions of death in the West in the last six centuries. While
Thomas, Prioreschi, and Berman would most likely agree with his assertions, Ariès’s chronology of death
beliefs in the West has been criticized for failing to notice continuities within the change. Still, Ariès
proves a good jumping off point for most dealings with the issue of death, as his books are among the most
widely read in the field.
15 See Prioreschi; James Deetz and Edwin S. Dethlefsen, “Death’s Head, Cherub, Urn and Willow,”
Natural History 76 (1967): 29-37; Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall, eds., The Place of the Dead: Death
and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge UP, 2000); and
Elizabeth Hallam and Jenny Hockey, Death, Memory, and Material Culture (New York: Berg, 2001).
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 239 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Full text | 228 living affairs, increasingly painted as imaginative fictions rather than real beings.13 Throughout the Middle Ages and up through the 19th century, then, death—as a social process—and the dead—as members of the community—were undergoing tremendous changes.14 In Philippe Ariès estimation, a new kind of death began to occur in the 16th century, as dead bodies were gradually more and more likely to be hidden away; yet, a preoccupation with funerary art and memorialization continued, albeit in new forms.15 In the Middle Ages, funerary art was used to remind believers of the inevitability of death. Art about death and the dead often focused on the fragility of the material world and the perishable nature of all worldly things, especially the body, “so that representations of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 13 See Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York: Oxford UP, 1995), especially Chapter Ten. 14 For an extended discussion of these changes, see Plinio Prioreschi, A History of Human Responses to Death: Mythologies, Rituals, and Ethics (Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press, 1990); Thomas; and Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981). For an overview of changes in death beliefs since the middle ages, see Philippe Ariès, “The Reversal of Death” and “The Hour.” See also Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes Toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP, 1975) and Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Knopf, 1981). Social historian Ariès has been influential in death studies and has traced what he sees as the changing conceptions of death in the West in the last six centuries. While Thomas, Prioreschi, and Berman would most likely agree with his assertions, Ariès’s chronology of death beliefs in the West has been criticized for failing to notice continuities within the change. Still, Ariès proves a good jumping off point for most dealings with the issue of death, as his books are among the most widely read in the field. 15 See Prioreschi; James Deetz and Edwin S. Dethlefsen, “Death’s Head, Cherub, Urn and Willow,” Natural History 76 (1967): 29-37; Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall, eds., The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge UP, 2000); and Elizabeth Hallam and Jenny Hockey, Death, Memory, and Material Culture (New York: Berg, 2001). |
