Reviewed by: Undead Uprising: Haiti, Horror and the Zombie Complex by John Cussans Chera Kee KEY WORDS vodou, William Seabrook, zombies, American popular culture, Haitian Revolution, Ian Fleming, chimères, Baron Samedi, George Romero john cussans. Undead Uprising: Haiti, Horror and the Zombie Complex. London: Strange Attractor Press, 2017. Pp. xiv +392. In the popular imagination, Haiti, Vodou, and zombies are often overlapping, intertwined concepts, to the point that it may seem nearly impossible to unravel one from the others. In Undead Uprising, John Cussans does not aim to unravel these concepts so much as to study the ways in which they have come to be tangled together. He does this by scrutinizing popular representations of Haiti, Vodou, and zombies in film and literature alongside the historical, political, and social contexts within which they were fashioned to consider how these representations have contributed to an exoticized and [End Page 483] demonized view of Haiti. Cussans’s ultimate conclusion, that popular representations of Haiti and Vodou tend to reduce the nation and religion to a set of caricatures that work to reinforce notions of Haiti as “a land mired in primitive superstition and irredeemable moral corruption,” (350) is not necessarily unique.1 But the strength of the book lies in its presentation of a wide variety of popular representations of Haiti juxtaposed against some of the ideological currents and the political and social contexts that may have shaped their creation. The book is split into two parts, each containing four chapters. Part One begins with “Leaving the Magic Island,” in which Cussans examines William Seabrook’s 1929 book The Magic Island, the book that first popularized the concept of the zombie for Western audiences. However, the zombie is only one part of the book, which also attempted to explain the Haitian way of life and the Vodou religion to mass audiences. Here, Cussans presents quite a bit of material that would not necessarily be new to anyone studying Vodou, Haiti, or the zombie phenomenon, including a section spent summarizing and interpreting large chunks of The Magic Island. However, he does provide a comprehensive and thought-provoking account of the contexts under which Seabrook wrote the book. Cussans’s work is strongest toward the end of the chapter when he connects the life and writings of Seabrook with those of Georges Bataille, arguing that there is a resonance between Bataille’s work on blood sacrifice and depictions of the Vodou Bois Caїman ceremony that Seabrook discusses at length.2 While the second chapter examines the phenomenon of the zombi,3 the Bois Caїman ceremony is taken up again in the third chapter, which considers the creation of the popular history of the role Vodou played in the Haitian Revolution. Cussans surveys contrasting views of Vodou in popular Anglo-American writing on Haiti during the U.S. Occupation (1915–1934) alongside later attempts within Haiti to recontextualize Vodou to emphasize its [End Page 484] African roots. Cussans shows how the Bois Caїman ceremony, in particular, played a part in how Vodou was made over by writers and thinkers in the twentieth century in an attempt to seat the religion at the heart of Haitian national identity. The fourth chapter focuses on Ian Fleming’s 1954 James Bond novel, Live and Let Die, and Graham Greene’s 1966 novel, The Comedians, to ponder how sensationalist Vodou myths, and specifically the persona of Vodou lwa (spirit intermediary) Baron Samedi, came to be associated with François “Papa Doc” Duvalier in the 1960s. Cussans ultimately concludes that Fleming, and later Greene and journalist Bernard Diederich, essentially created the archetypical and sensationalist image of the Haitian politician-as-Voodooavatar that Duvalier would later inhabit. Part Two begins with a chapter focused on George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and the transformation of cinematic zombies from slaves to cannibals, tying the newly re-imagined creatures to Marshal McLuhan’s ideas of media zombies. The next chapter explores Harvard ethnobotanist Wade Davis’s 1985 book The Serpent and the Rainbow and the subsequent Wes Craven film of the same name, tying Davis’s work back to William Seabrook and analyzing the ways in which...