Group 13: Is the Zombie Apocalypse Trying to Tell Us Something More?

Abstract

In Vodou tradition, the concept of zombism was connected to fears about unnatural death and the vulnerability of the soul. It acted as a spiritual metaphor for hard lives that lacked agency or social acknowledgement. Though not a central belief in Vodou, it gained pertinence as the European slave trade that decimated African populations spread stories about “voodoo” among settler culture. Later, American entertainment culture sunk its teeth in: early cinema and pop literature created the grotesque figure of the Zombie, a violent, racially coded sub-human that reflected white fears of “reverse colonization”1 (think films like White Zombie [1932] or Voodoo Man [1944]). This poster will explore how the sociopolitical connotations of zombies changed in the latter part of the 20th century, when fears about racial Others were matched by fears about what we could create ourselves. Zombies became vehicles for speculative fiction about disease, overpopulation, and human interference in genetic science - and how it would lead to our downfall.2 Movies like 28 Days Later and World War Z present zombism as a pandemic, and the actions taken by the imaginary government are akin to those in real-life crises such as H1N1 or the ‘bird flu’ of the early 2000’s. This poster will show that the modern zombie apocalypse is less about flesh‐eating monsters and more about late modern fears over how long and how well we can sustain globalization.