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349
lives, so creating images of it or performing it becomes the only means of making it
legible, which takes death’s power and gives at least some of it over to the living.
In the performance or visualization of death, the power garnered from its
invisibility is weakened to the benefit of the living; however, Zombie Walks are not
necessarily about a performance of death. The living take on the guise of death to
perform zombiness, an imagined state somewhere between living and dead. And this is
where part of the political power of these events lingers: death is made legible, yes, but
walkers are also able to embrace, through performance111 and character,112 a dialectical
position in which the political potential of both the living and the dead is utilized.
Similarly, the walkers, by being embodied performers, are able to take spectacle
and use it to make an intervention into the social. In discussing the “Billionaires for
Bush” political activist performances during the 2004 election, Kavita Kulkarni muses,
Political activism has perhaps found its greatest antagonist in the culture
of postmodernity in postindustrial Western society. The relativity of
“truth” becomes all too apparent in a country overly mediated and
inundated by images and information extending from endless perspectives.
As mass communication and the mass media propagate a world of signs,
symbols, and icons, we are left to supplant our sense of reality and history
with an amalgamated collection of images and sound bites that present
only a manufactured semblance of truth.113
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
111 As the living playing at dead.
112 The zombie, which is living and dead.
113 Kavita Kulkarni, “Billionaires for Bush: Parody as Political Intervention,” E-Misferica 1.1 (Spring
2004), accessed on June 17, 2010, http://hemisphericinstitute.org/journal/1_1/kulkarni.html.
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 360 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Full text | 349 lives, so creating images of it or performing it becomes the only means of making it legible, which takes death’s power and gives at least some of it over to the living. In the performance or visualization of death, the power garnered from its invisibility is weakened to the benefit of the living; however, Zombie Walks are not necessarily about a performance of death. The living take on the guise of death to perform zombiness, an imagined state somewhere between living and dead. And this is where part of the political power of these events lingers: death is made legible, yes, but walkers are also able to embrace, through performance111 and character,112 a dialectical position in which the political potential of both the living and the dead is utilized. Similarly, the walkers, by being embodied performers, are able to take spectacle and use it to make an intervention into the social. In discussing the “Billionaires for Bush” political activist performances during the 2004 election, Kavita Kulkarni muses, Political activism has perhaps found its greatest antagonist in the culture of postmodernity in postindustrial Western society. The relativity of “truth” becomes all too apparent in a country overly mediated and inundated by images and information extending from endless perspectives. As mass communication and the mass media propagate a world of signs, symbols, and icons, we are left to supplant our sense of reality and history with an amalgamated collection of images and sound bites that present only a manufactured semblance of truth.113 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 111 As the living playing at dead. 112 The zombie, which is living and dead. 113 Kavita Kulkarni, “Billionaires for Bush: Parody as Political Intervention,” E-Misferica 1.1 (Spring 2004), accessed on June 17, 2010, http://hemisphericinstitute.org/journal/1_1/kulkarni.html. |
