Figures of terror: The " zombie " and the Haitian Revolution
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This article investigates the relation of the figure of the zombie to the Haitian Revolution, the only successful slave revolution in the Atlantic World. While existing research often stresses the strong link between the zombie and the slave, this is not borne out by the contemporary discourse on the Haitian Revolution. Whereas horror and terror are associated with the zombie from its inception, it is only with the US occupation of Haiti (1915–1934) that US-American writers and directors invented the zombie of popular North Atlantic culture: a soulless slave without consciousness directed by a zombie master. As I argue, this amounts to a neo-colonialist act of symbolic re-enslavement of the self-emancipated Haitians. This time they are deprived not merely of their freedom as under the slave regime, but even of their consciousness.
It Is Easier To Imagine The Zombie Apocalypse Than To Imagine The End Of Capitalism
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In recent years zombies and the zombie apocalypse have loomed large in the collective American imagination, in film and television, theme parties and marathons, shooting target companies and survivalist groups, videogames and counterterrorism training, and used in course curricula from elementary to college levels to teach topics from geography to public health to sociology. As a recurrent monster in the history of capitalism, with its origins in New World slavery in Haiti, zombies reflect what is monstrous in an economic system "that seems designed to eat people whole" (Newitz). As the "political unconscious" of late-era capitalism, what does this increasingly normalized pop culture obsession point to in the "non-human condition", of labor exploitation and unbridled consumerism? What apocalyptic futures are we repeatedly rehearsing, and how do they signal both despair of, and hope for, fundamental change? This piece examines representations in popular culture, draws out historical connections and diverse monster theories that help us see how we, in the United States in particular, are processing and making sense of systemic social and environmental horror.
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