And the dead shall walk the earth: Zombies and the politics of death
A ZOMBIE COMMUNITY
Zombies have often been popularly conceived of as crowds, masses, hordes and
swarms. As Gregory Waller remarks about Night of the Living Dead: "…Though the
creatures in Romero's film do not emerge from any one specific social class, perhaps the
living dead are our version of what in the past was called the 'rabble'."73 Of course, it
has only been in the last century that the crowd74 has been re-considered by theorists as
something other than a purely negative force.75 For years, writers in the tradition of
Gustave Le Bon saw the crowd as essentially barbaric and destructive.76 And there is, of
course, a reason that some would associate the crowd with such—the modern conception
of the crowd has long been connected with the American and French revolutions,
moments when the masses inverted traditional means of instigating political change.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
73 Gregory A. Waller, The Living and The Undead: From Stoker's Dracula to Romero's Dawn of the Dead
(Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 278.
74 Or the mass or mob, each of which has a slightly different connotation but a very similar denotation—
each can mean at its most basic "a large group of people;" mob may also mean "an unruly crowd/mass,"
but the other denotation is also used. For a discussion on the historical uses of "masses," which explores
both the notions of the crowd and the mob, see Raymond Williams, Keywords, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford
UP, 1985), 192. See also, Al Sandine, The Taming of the American Crowd: From Stamp Riots to Shopping
Sprees (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009). Furthermore, Gustave Le Bon and Elias Canetti, two
theorists of crowds, who hold radically different interpretations of them, both use the terms masses and
crowds somewhat interchangeably. See Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1896,
reprint; Batoche Books, 2001) and Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (1960), trans. Carol Stewart (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984).
75 See especially Canetti and Sandine.
76 As Le Bon quickly notes in The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, "Crowds are only powerful for
destruction" (Le Bon, 10). Al Sandine actually claims that Le Bon's crowds resemble George Romero's
zombies and notes that "The subtext of zombie fear is surely crowd fear…" (80).
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 program Cinema-Television (Cinema Critical Studies)
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
Rights Kee, Chera Dezarae
Filename etd-Kee-4414
Archival file uscthesesreloadpub_Volume51/etd-Kee-4414.pdf
Full text 334 A ZOMBIE COMMUNITY Zombies have often been popularly conceived of as crowds, masses, hordes and swarms. As Gregory Waller remarks about Night of the Living Dead: "…Though the creatures in Romero's film do not emerge from any one specific social class, perhaps the living dead are our version of what in the past was called the 'rabble'."73 Of course, it has only been in the last century that the crowd74 has been re-considered by theorists as something other than a purely negative force.75 For years, writers in the tradition of Gustave Le Bon saw the crowd as essentially barbaric and destructive.76 And there is, of course, a reason that some would associate the crowd with such—the modern conception of the crowd has long been connected with the American and French revolutions, moments when the masses inverted traditional means of instigating political change. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 73 Gregory A. Waller, The Living and The Undead: From Stoker's Dracula to Romero's Dawn of the Dead (Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 278. 74 Or the mass or mob, each of which has a slightly different connotation but a very similar denotation— each can mean at its most basic "a large group of people;" mob may also mean "an unruly crowd/mass," but the other denotation is also used. For a discussion on the historical uses of "masses," which explores both the notions of the crowd and the mob, see Raymond Williams, Keywords, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford UP, 1985), 192. See also, Al Sandine, The Taming of the American Crowd: From Stamp Riots to Shopping Sprees (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009). Furthermore, Gustave Le Bon and Elias Canetti, two theorists of crowds, who hold radically different interpretations of them, both use the terms masses and crowds somewhat interchangeably. See Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1896, reprint; Batoche Books, 2001) and Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (1960), trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984). 75 See especially Canetti and Sandine. 76 As Le Bon quickly notes in The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, "Crowds are only powerful for destruction" (Le Bon, 10). Al Sandine actually claims that Le Bon's crowds resemble George Romero's zombies and notes that "The subtext of zombie fear is surely crowd fear…" (80).
And the dead shall walk the earth: Zombies and the...