“Beating an undead zombie? Not yet”

Abstract

Roger Luckhurst, Zombies: A Cultural History. London: Reaktion Books, 2015. 224pp. £16.00 (hbk).Sarah Juliet Lauro, The Transatlantic Zombie Slavery, Rebellion, and Living Death. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2015. 284pp. US$28.95 (pbk).Perhaps some researchers feel that the scholarship surrounding zombies has outlived its utility, but the continued interest just will not die, as the figure remains a trendy topic across a number of fields: sf, horror and gothic studies, posthumanism, film and media studies, to name just a few. That the zombie is linked to slavery by way of its roots and is viewed as a figure indicative of capitalist consumption - and that more recently it has been characterised by anxieties pertaining to pandemic contagions - has almost become common knowledge at this point, especially given the work of Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry, Kyle Bishop, Gerry Canavan and others over the past half-decade. Researching how exactly the zombie made such transformations cross-culturally and has consequently shifted its connotations, however, builds on such claims in novel and nuanced ways. If there is any truth to the notion that this popular figure's value to humanistic inquiry has gone stale, it seems that Roger Luckhurst's Zombies: A Cultural History and Lauro's The Transatlantic Zombie have breathed some life into the zombie.While sf studies has been interested in questions surrounding race and postcolonial studies for some time, especially given the increased attention to these topics after John Rieder's Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (2008) and the popularity of sf by people of colour across the globe, probing the zombie's colonial history and historiography is timely. Lauro gives us a theoretical apparatus to understand and trace the zombie's origins in Haitian culture along with its transatlantic appropriations and re-appropriations. Luckhurst, in contrast, gives us a broader survey, very much focused on US cultural deployments in addition the zombie's 'globalization', while still including a substantial account of its background in Haitian culture. Together, these works' respective treatments of zombies cover similar ground but do so from distinct approaches and for distinct ends. Despite their different methods with respect to history, when reading Lauro and Luckhurst together, the zombie's history as a material phenomena, as myth and trope in cultural texts and as a metaphor can be divided into three categories: colonial history, twentieth-century US appropriation and deployment in contemporary media.Though zombies are known to emerge from Haitian culture and slavery, the precise conditions of this emergence and documentation of it as a 'real' phenomena in addition to the zombie as metaphor require nuanced contextual understanding and extensive study of the original texts to mention the term. Following a chronological trajectory, Zombies: A Cultural History's first five chapters chronicle the colonial origins of the zombie and its entrance into the early twentieth century. Luckhurst shows how the ritualistic practices of Vodou darkened the reputation of Haiti as primitive and savage territory, thereby denouncing the legitimacy of the slave revolt of 1791. He articulates how the link between Vodou, human sacrifice, cannibalism and poisoning contributed to the colonial gothic characterisation of Haiti as degenerate, a position that William Seabrook would later espouse rather than rebuke. Luckhurst shows how these discourses informed the zombie in 1930s US pulp fiction, alongside Seabrook's The Magic Island (1929) and what Luckhurst aptly terms 'the first movie cycle', namely White Zombie (Halperin US 1932) and I Walked with a Zombie (Tourneur US 1943). Particularly informative is the contextualisation of how Seabrook inspired White Zombie within an earlier popular trend of sensational expeditionary films that 'documented' exotic savagery in Africa and the Congo. Similar to Lauro, Luckhurst demythologises Seabrook's role as the central figure in making the zombie American. …