Abstract
This essay offers an intervention in biopolitical theory—using the term “vulnerable life” to recalibrate discussions of how life is valued and violence is justified in the contemporary bioinsecurity regime. It reads the discursive structures that dehumanize and pathologize figures in U.S. zombie narratives against the discursive structures present in contemporary legal narratives and media reports on the killing of black Americans. Through this unsettling paralleling of structures, the essay suggests how the current ubiquity of zombies and the profusion of racial tension in the U.S. are related. In the process, the essay emphasizes the highly racialized nature of the zombie itself—which has never been the empty signifier it is often read as—and drives home just how dangerous the proliferation of postracial and posthuman discourses can be if they serve to elide historical limitations about the highly political determinations of just who is quite human.
Highlights
The zombie’s recent cultural ubiquity parallels, and is in some measure symptomatic of, an increasingly visible racial tension in the U.S That is not to say that such deaths as those of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Sandra Bland, to name just a few of those recently in need of memorialization, are a new phenomenon; nor is it to say that the structural disenfranchisement and systemic inequity that created the tense policing situations and rampant economic and political inequality in Ferguson, or Baltimore, or Chicago are new, either [1,2]1
One can take for example broad socio-economic disparities that persist, such as those identified by Teasley and Ikard in their criticism of postracial formulations [6]
The zombie, is uniquely suited to this purpose because in its history, as in the history of biopolitical discourse, race performs a foundational and structural function that has become obscured over time [40]
Summary
The zombie’s recent cultural ubiquity parallels, and is in some measure symptomatic of, an increasingly visible racial tension in the U.S That is not to say that such deaths as those of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Sandra Bland, to name just a few of those recently in need of memorialization, are a new phenomenon; nor is it to say that the structural disenfranchisement and systemic inequity that created the tense policing situations and rampant economic and political inequality in Ferguson, or Baltimore, or Chicago are new, either [1,2]1. The zombie, is uniquely suited to this purpose because in its history, as in the history of biopolitical discourse, race performs a foundational and structural function that has become obscured over time [40] This point is made in slightly different terms by Weheliye, he states on page 35: “If bare life embodies a potential dimsension of contemporary politics as such, we might ask, why certain subjects are structurally more susceptible to personifying its actualization[.]”. The inhuman fleshliness of the zombie in Seabrook’s firsthand account makes visible some of the racializing assemblages at play in U.S.-occupied Haiti in the wake of eugenics and the medical racism of the 1920s This underscores the importance of understanding the zombie not as a post-racial, post-human figure, but an always racialized and dehumanized/pathologized figure, a life that is absolutely vulnerable and perceived as absolutely threatening, and it is only through a clinical, scientific approach to understanding the figure (which is, a spiritual one) that its threat is dispelled. Both accounts connect the figure to an exploitative violence done to black bodies and associated with the threat of sexual violence
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