Zombies, Migrants, and Queers

Abstract

The alarm and anxiety unleashed by the Great Recession found fascinating expression across popular culture. Harried survivors negotiated societal collapse among zombies in The Walking Dead. Middle-class whites crossed the literal and metaphorical Mexican border on Breaking Bad or coped with a lack of freedom among the marginalized on Orange Is the New Black. Camilla Fojas uses representations of people of color, the incarcerated, migrants, and trans/queers--vulnerable populations all--to explore the contradictions created by the economic crisis and its freefalling aftermath. Television, film, advertising, and media coverage of the crisis created a distinct kind of story about capitalism and the violence that supports it. Fojas shows how these pop culture moments reshaped social dynamics and people's economic sensibilities and connects the ways pop culture reflected economic devastation. She examines how racial capitalism persists through the proliferation of diverse forms of racial domination and non-European imperialism in the neoliberal era. Racial hierarchies are supplemented by other typologies, ones that are racialized but contain different symbolic capacities, particularly that between migrant or refugee or displaced person and citizen and global North and global South. Zombies, Migrants, and Queers shows how racial capitalism creates new tributaries of oppression in its neoliberal imperial form.