Slaves, Cannibals, and Infected Hyper-Whites: The Race and Religion of Zombies
@article{Mcalister2012SlavesCA, title={Slaves, Cannibals, and Infected Hyper-Whites: The Race and Religion of Zombies}, author={Elizabeth Mcalister}, journal={Anthropological Quarterly}, year={2012}, volume={85}, pages={457 - 486}, url={https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:144725423} }
The first decade of the new millennium saw renewed interest in popular culture featuring zombies. This essay shows that a comparative analysis of nightmares can be a productive method for analyzing salient themes in the imaginative products and practices of cultures in close contact. It is argued that zombies, as the first modern monster, are embedded in a set of deeply symbolic structures that are a matter of religious thought. The author draws from her ethnographic work in Haiti to argue that…
72 Citations
Black monstrosity and the rhetoric of whiteness in Disney’s Zombies trilogy
- 2023
Sociology, Political Science
ABSTRACT Drawing from strategic whiteness and guided by racial rhetorical criticism, this article analyzes Disney’s Zombies movie trilogy. Situated within the context of anti-Critical Race Theory…
Be Rising Multitude: Zombie Invasion and the Problem of Biopolitics in Max Brooks's World War Z
- 2023
History, Political Science
This essay outlines the transnational history of the zombie, arguing for the figure’s revolutionary potential. Approaching the zombie as a complex social practice, I recall its ritualistic African…
Zombies in Unexpected Places: Rebellion, Subversion, and the Undead in Romantic Depictions of Obeah
- 2024
History
Abstract:The lineage of the zombie myth is complex, reaching far beyond Haiti and Haitian folklore. To expand the zombie's literary history and further complicate our understanding of its cultural…
The Haitian zombie motif: against the banality of antiblack violence
- 2022
Sociology, History
The circulation and consumption of the images of suffering and lifeless black bodies is a longstanding feature of US visual media. Since each archive of suffering and dead black bodies operates…
Figures of terror: The “zombie” and the Haitian Revolution
- 2017
History, Political Science
ABSTRACT 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…
Raising the living dead in postrevolutionary Haiti: Glory, salvation, and theopolitical sovereignty in the kingdom of Henry Christophe
- 2023
History, Political Science
ABSTRACT This essay deploys the notion of the political zombie as a lens through which to examine the symbolic, metaphysical, and spectacular dimensions of the Haitian kingdom of Henry Christophe. I…
Revisited THE GOTHIC MODE AND MILLENNIAL HORROR TRENDS In the opening sentence of his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature
- 2015
Art
A B S T RAe T: This article analyses how sociocultural anxieties are evoked through representations of the abject in the horror genre. Evaluating deeply held sociocultural fears and concerns, as they…
Interrogating on the Essence of the Zombie World
- 2019
Philosophy, Sociology
The chapter discusses critically the ontology of zombie world, as well as its interlink with the Thana-capitalism, as a new stage of capitalism where the Other’s death is gazed, consumed and…
Locating Zombies in the Sociology of Popular Culture
- 2013
Sociology
In this essay, focusing primarily on the cinema of the walking corpse, I provide an overview of zombie studies and suggest potential avenues for sociological inquiry into zombie phenomena. I argue…
Black Masculinities and Postmodern Horror: Race, Gender, and Abjection
- 2015
Sociology
In this study, I employ Kristeva’s (1992) theories of affect and abjection to analyze two postmodern horror films (i.e., Night of the Living Dead, 1968, and Candyman, 1992). These films were selected…
50 References
Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone
- 2002
History, Sociology
How is the slave trade remembered in West Africa? In a work that challenges recurring claims that Africans felt (and still feel) no sense of moral responsibility concerning the sale of slaves,…
Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition
- 2002
History
In Wizards and Scientists Stephan Palmie offers a corrective to the existing historiography on the Caribbean. Focusing on developments in Afro-Cuban religious culture, he demonstrates that…
Conjuring the past: Slavery and the historical imagination in Cuba
- 2008
History, Sociology
In this article, I examine the ritual mimesis of slavery in Cuban Palo Monte. Here, the past is not just a temporally situated arena in which to stake claims of identity and belonging but an…
Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing
- 1987
Sociology, Political Science
Working with the image of the Indian shaman as Wild Man, Taussig reveals not the magic of the shaman but that of the politicizing fictions creating the effect of the real. "This extraordinary book .…
Free To Be A Slave: Slavery As Metaphor In The Afro-Atlantic Religions
- 2007
History
Scholars tend to regard enslavement as a form of disability inflicted upon the enslaved. This paper confronts the irony that not all black Atlantic peoples and religions conceive of slavery as an…
The History of Gothic Fiction
- 2000
History
The History of Gothic Fiction debates the rise of the genre from its origins in the late eighteenth-century novel through nineteenth-century fictions of tyrants, monsters, conspirators and vampires…
Playing in the Dark : Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
- 1993
History, Sociology
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison provides a personal inquiry into the significance of African-American literary imagination. Her goal, she states at the outset, is to "put forth an…
Thinking with Ngangas: Reflections on Embodiment and the Limits of “Objectively Necessary Appearances”
- 2006
Philosophy
As Marcel Mauss (1967: 46) famously remarked, western societies draw a “marked distinction… between real and personal law, between things and persons.” Writing at the height of self-conscious early…
Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and Millennial Capitalism
- 2002
Sociology, Political Science
What might zombies have to do with the implosion of neoliberal capitalism at the end of the twentieth century? What might they have to do with postcolonial, postrevolutionary nationalism? With labor…
Zombie culture : autopsies of the living dead
- 2008
Sociology, History
Zombie Culture examines the living dead through a variety of lenses. By looking at how portrayals of zombies have evolved from their folkloric roots and entered popular culture, readers will gain…