Urban Apocalypse, Global Precarity, and Uncanny Liminality in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One and Ling Ma’s Severance

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper will examine the representation of zombie apocalypse in Zone One (2011) by Colson Whitehead and Severance (2018) by Ling Ma. Whitehead and Ma both situate their narratives in New York City, a contested setting oscillating between utopian possibilities of progress and dystopian realities of alienation. The novels reveal the zombifying impact of capitalism that permeates local and global networks of exploitation, and perpetuates what Judith Butler identifies as precariousness and precarity of life. The representation of New York as a metonymic urban space, which displays the arrested development of global capitalism through a zombie apocalypse, renders Zone One and Severance critically relevant today. Whitehead and Ma articulate the catastrophic consequences of uneven development as well as the reader’s ontological proximity to the liminal category of zombies. I argue that the authors’ narrative choice of total collapse over survival in and of New York, albeit the discursive privilege of urban growth, is a powerful gesture of “creative destruction” toward unsettling, if not breaking, the detrimental cycles of capitalist repetition. Whitehead and Ma reflect the anxiety of the contemporary moment by subverting problematic assumptions about cityscapes and civilization with their innovative combination of urban fiction, zombie tropes, and apocalyptic discourse.