Zombie Narratives Research Articles

Politics of the Living Dead: Race and Exceptionalism in the Apocalypse

The zombie, as a Western pop culture icon, has taken up residence in International Relations. Used both humorously and as a serious teaching tool, many scholars and professors of IR have written of the zombie as a useful figure for teaching IR theory in an engaging manner, and have used zombie outbreaks to analyse the responses of the international community during catastrophe, invasion, and natural disasters. The authors of this article would like to unearth another aspect of the zombie that is often left unsaid or forgotten: namely, that the body of the zombie, as a historical phenomenon and cultural icon, is deeply imbricated in the racialisation of political subjects and fear of the Other. Through a critical analysis of biopower and race, and in particular Weheliye’s concept of habeas viscus, we suggest that the figure of the zombie can be read as a racialised figure that can provide the means for rethinking the relationship of the discipline of IR to the concept of race. We read The Walking Dead as a zombie narrative that could provide a critical basis for rethinking the concepts of bare life and the exception to consider ‘living on’ in apocalyptic times.

Fear and utopia in the millennial zombie: Digging deep inside Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead

Abstract This article analyses Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead through Fredric Jameson’s three horizons of textual interpretation to demonstrate how the film, as an example of the third-strain millennial zombie narrative, supports a socially conservative ideology while simultaneously pointing to the Utopian possibility of communal action in the face of an overwhelming threat. The first horizon compares the formal differences of the visual effects between the remake and Romero’s 1978 original, showing how the removal of the original’s campy special effects repurposes the millennial zombie as a threat to conservative culture, not a vehicle for social satire as Romero had hoped. The second horizon, viewing the remake as a post-9/11 film, sees the symbolic conflict of social classes globalize and manifest as the human-capitalist-American bourgeoisie versus the zombie as the anti-American-terrorist proletariat. The third horizon, focusing on the historic progression of the means of production, sees the film as functioning through the politics of fear and the personalization of fear to serve as a conservative, capitalist economic motivator, while simultaneously inspiring the Utopian hope that humanity might be able to work together as a community.

Introduction: Race, Politics, and the Humanities in an Age of “Posts”—Rethinking the Human/Race

This Special Issue of Humanities comes at a time when the viability of the humanities are challenged on numerous fronts. [...]

파국의 기원과 멜랑콜리 : 2000년대 한국 문화에 나타난 좀비 서사 연구

파국의 기원과 멜랑콜리 : 2000년대 한국 문화에 나타난 좀비 서사 연구

Vulnerable Life: Zombies, Global Biopolitics, and the Reproduction of Structural Violence

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.

Family Splatters: Rescuing Heteronormativity from the Zombie Apocalypse

ABSTRACTAlthough many scholars argue that zombie narratives position the apocalypse as a new way to imagine social relations, recent cinematic and televisual examples of the genre feature the resiliency of the heteronormative nuclear family as the central formation from which a new social world is to spring. By analyzing 21st-century zombie narratives that have been among the most financially successful (e.g., Zombieland; AMC’s The Walking Dead) or innovative (28 Days Later; Shaun of the Dead), this study maps neoliberal ideological representations of heteronormative family relations as a key feature of popular contemporary zombie media. Moreover, these new familial narratives rely on strong female characters who, despite impressive survival skills, consistently embody essentialized feminine difference and ultimately choose to return to a traditional domestic sphere. Overall, we demonstrate why contemporary zombie media has yet to fulfill its potential to radically reimagine social relations in transformative ways by instead working to recenter the heteronormative family as the essential feature of a functioning society.

The United States of “Zombieland”: Migration in Popular Culture as Exemplified by a Zombie Outbreak

Migrations are one of the central discourses of contemporary society: they are the catalyst of social change; they influence changes in social structure, relations and positions, for migrants themselves as well as the residents of host countries. In the circumstances of a zombie outbreak the reasons and goals of migration can be simplified to one basic motive: leaving and avoiding areas populated by zombies with the aim of basic survival. I believe that the possibility of leaving represents the possibility of survival, which directly influences the formation of new networks of social relations, and thus, the survival of society. Following this logic, migrations emerge as one of the basic methods of survival in the zombie narrative, or rather, the basic method of rebuilding and redefining the social system.
 Even though there are different approaches to migration, authors who study this field do not mention or study migration represented in popular culture. At the same time, authors who study zombie movies do not give their attention to the process of migration. The paper points to a specific form of “invented” migrations, or rather a form of migration which, through its metaphorical narration displays patterns similar to patterns visible in contemporary society. The paper will analyze forms of migration which appear in pop-culture narratives, or rather, display the ways in which theoretical concepts use to define types of migration in real social contexts can be used to analyze the narratives of zombie movies.

Prozac for zombies. The contemporary sentimentalization of the living dead in television

This article analyses one of the most notorious TV trend in recent years, the zombie, and how its evolution is related both to the dynamics typical in every artistic genre, and also to the “affective turn” that contemporary society is experiencing. In order to analyse this cultural phenomena, we will first explore the metaphorical condition that traditionally has been associated with zombie narratives since George A. Romero’s reinvention of the figure. Next, by taking a close look at some examples, the causes for the ongoing humanization the living dead have gone through both in cinema and television will be studied. Finally, we will analyze three recent TV shows dealing with the zombie myth from stylistic, thematic, ideological, and emotionally innovative perspectives: In the Flesh (BBC, 2013-14), Les Revenants (Canal Plus Francia, 2012-15) and iZombie (CW, 2015-).

Laughing off a Zombie Apocalypse: The Value of Comedic and Satirical Narratives

In recent years, many international relations scholars have been discussing films, books, and television programs featuring zombies, largely because such narratives are thought to provide a compelling metaphor for thinking about a diverse array of contemporary threats. These range from relatively traditional threats posed by violent terrorists to nontraditional threats from epidemics or mass migration. However, because zombie narratives are generally apocalyptic, employing them can provide a misleading and dangerous understanding of international security. By contrast, satirical and comedic zombie stories provide interesting alternative narratives that coincide with the emancipatory objectives of critical security studies. Satirical narratives focusing on elites characteristically critique these powerful figures, often revealing them to be self-centered buffoons. Indeed, satire and black comedy can be quite subversive, reflecting critical and potentially transformative notions—about threats and other dimensions of security politics. Comedies typically center upon ordinary people, emphasize their regular lives, and end happily—aligning with the aspirations of the human security agenda.

Roamers versus biters: a rhetorical examination of the differences between Woodbury and the Prison Group in The Walking Dead comics

The Walking Dead has been a primary contributor to the resurgence of zombie narratives in the twenty-first century, and that, in part, has been due to the series’ verisimilitude afforded to the characters through the story’s narrative and writing. To that end, the current research employs rhetorical analysis to explore the opposing worldviews of the series’ protagonist, Rick Grimes (and his fellow survivors), with the perspective of the town of Woodbury and their leader, the Governor. The analysis reveals that Rick’s group views zombies akin to wild and feral animals, while the Governor views them as combatants engaged in battle.

“The Only Metaphor Left”: Colson Whitehead's Zone One and Zombie Narrative Form

This article explores Colson Whitehead's Zone One and the zombie narrative genre and outlines some of the ways each illuminates structural, generic, and aesthetic qualities in the other. Contrary to popular critical apologies, Zone One is largely a conventional zombie narrative that embraces the formal implications of the genre's tropes: notably the zombie figure itself, the barricade, and what this article calls soft and hard breaches. The zombie is a deconstructive and contagious anticharacter whose destabilizing role necessitates the construction of barricades that (1) protect the characters from infection and living death, (2) delineate a narrative space in which plot and character can develop, and (3) spatialize epistemological and aesthetic modes. Whereas hard breaches involve a narrative-threatening failure of diegetic barricades, the soft breach allows the zombie's destabilizing function to operate in the narrative space without posing a diegetic threat. Zone One's figures function similarly, as demonstrated by a formal and aesthetic analysis with specific regard to the novel's eponymous “survival space” and its constitutive barricade motif. Whitehead innovates in the genre by means of his own zombie contribution, the figure of the straggler, which facilitates more meditative thematic work than zombie narratives generally allow. This formal exploration of Zone One as a zombie narrative is meant to further zombie scholarship and to frame future critical work on the novel by contextualizing it in its genre.

The Law and Its Illicit Desires: Transversing Free Market Claustrophobia and the Zombie Imaginary in Dredd 3-D

With the rise of biopolitical modernity, states justify both the existence of zombies and their monopoly on coercive violence via an imperative to care for the populations within their purview. But biopolitics' intrinsic link to the rise of a neoliberal model of governance, demonstrated by Foucault (2008), places a contradiction at the heart of the entire project: The exploitation inherent to capitalistic accumulation runs counter to the interests of the subjects from whom the system extracts surplus value. This article examines how the zombie imaginary and free market claustrophobia reinforce each other, bolstering confidence in state-supported and often racialized forms of violence despite mounting evidence that the socioeconomic system itself is a primary source of social ills. A recent science-fiction (sci-fi) film, though not a zombie narrative in the strict sense, nevertheless provides a telling example of the generic pattern at play. By evoking the vocabulary of chronic social crisis, the sci-fi film 3-D (released in 2012, hereafter called Dredd) addresses issues regarding the policing of cultural difference that beset Western nations struggling to maintain a position of dominance in a shifting geo-politics. Rather than directing critique toward the structural determinates of this ongoing crisis (such as the role played by Western nations as the police force for a capitalist marketplace that produces the very crises it purports to manage), Dredd recuperates potentially dissenting energies back toward support of the system itself, displacing what should be a political-economic critique onto specific racialized and gendered subjects. These discriminatory, racist imperatives are hidden behind a superficial commitment to diversity and a more humane police force. Language: en

The Walking Dead and Gothic Excess: The Decaying Social Structures of Contagion

The Walking Dead and Gothic Excess: The Decaying Social Structures of Contagion

The legend of disorder: The living dead, disorder and autoimmunity in Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend

Abstract This article positions Richard Matheson’s 1954 vampire novel I Am Legend in the context of a zombie lineage, closing the widely discussed gap between the vampire and the zombie in order to address the way in which Matheson’s vampires not only literally inspire the emergence of the modern zombie but moreover highlight the model of infection that came to define the zombie. By tracing binaries in Matheson’s novel – order/disorder, immunity/autoimmunity – this article considers how Matheson’s vampires reveal the implicitly violent order in the zombie’s disorderly infection. I Am Legend’s model of infection – its zombieness –underscores the relationship between the plague and the order it induces, as well as the self-negating violence inherent in that order. As they extend the lineage from vampire to zombie, the living dead here draw attention to the underlying theme of contagion that runs throughout the zombie narrative. This article therefore locates Matheson’s work not only in a pop-cultural domain but in a larger theoretical discussion of biopolitics and autoimmunity (via Michel Foucault, Roberto Esposito, and Jacques Derrida) in order to argue that the very state of living dead disorder emerges as a positive state in its relationship to the category of the autoimmune, and that I Am Legend rescripts the categories of ‘disorder’ and ‘living dead’ from post-apocalyptic to redemptive.

Zombies Go to the Amusement Park: Entertainment, Violence, and the 21st Century Zombie in Zombieland and Left 4 Dead 2

In 2009, not one, but two pop products, Columbia Pictures's Zombieland and the Valve Corporation video game Left 4 Dead 2, decided to give the plot a twist. Interestingly enough, they picked the same one. Zombies arrived at the amusement park. Both works still fall neatly within the zombie apocalypse genre. Their plots focus on a rag-tag band of survivors struggling to stay alive in a world overrun by the dead. However, both locate major portions of that struggle inside abandoned American lands. What's interesting is that these amusement parks aren't just grim, devastated ruins, backdrops used to contrast the levity of a pre-zombie world with the horror of a post-zombie one. Instead, both parks remain the pleasure centers they once were, although the fun is now not just in sampling the park's offerings; it is in fighting off the undead horde. In Zombieland and Left 4 Dead 2, the survivors bask in the adolescent dream of having the run of a carnival while delighting in combat against their assailants. They laugh and whoop for joy as they see the sights and ride the rides, their automatic weapons blaring. They diverge from the task of survival on the off chance of finding an unharmed Twinkie or concession stand, hoping to be the last person on Earth to savor the ambrosial flavor of junk food.While these post-apocalyptic trips serve mostly as light-hearted entries into the zombie-apocalypse megatext, they represent a compelling site for critical consid- eration when examined alongside earlier zombie narratives which have received attention from the academy, notably George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead. Through such intertextual comparison, Zombieland and Left 4 Dead 2's respective uses of the amusement park will provide an avenue through which insight may be gleaned into a spate of changes the zombie has undergone as a villain figure in past years. Part of the reason for this is that, while Left 4 Dead 2 and Zombieland do enter various zones of commerce throughout their plots, their move to place significant portions of their narratives at amusement parks seems a bid to establish the carnival as a new canonical setting for zombie combat, just as Romero did with the American mega mall in Dawn of the Dead. The mall, made famous via Dawn's scathing commentary on materialism, has become inextricably connected to the zombie apocalypse. In fact, critics have argued that Dawn's mall-based meditation was so influential that it created a situation in which modem zombie narratives are irrevocably associated with a critique of consumer culture (Robbins 75). Yet, in Zombieland and Left 4 Dead 2, a discussion of materialism is largely elided. Instead, the characters are incorrigible seekers of pleasure, hunters of junk food and joy, and ardent fans of the entertainment industry with propensities towards fan worship that cannot be obliterated even by a zombie apocalypse. This new generation of entertainment-fixated zombie survivors differs from their forbearers in the objects they desire to consume, yet their consumer desires remain.In examining Left 4 Dead 2 and Zombieland medially as well as diegetically, placing them in dialogue with Dawn, we will be able to see the interrelationships between material changes in present-day life and the shifts the zombie has undergone as a villain figure in popular fiction, particularly in regards to the dynamics of violence and pleasure. Via Left 4 Dead 2 and Zombieland we will see that the metamorphosis of the zombie narrative, its move from mall-based critiques of materialism to bloody-but-playful romps across amusement parks in search of entertainment, echoes the dematerialization and digitization of the contemporary life. In short, what we will find is the zombie has transformed from a device for cultural contemplation to a figure which has become a focal point for bloody fun, a newly justified target of aggression. These changes (metonymically captured in the shift from the mall to park as zombie battleground) are symptomatic of a continued transition from physical economies and societies to immaterial and information-based ones. …

Survival horrors, survival spaces: Tracing the modern zombie (cine)myth

Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend (1954) is most notably remembered as being among the first works of fiction to graft the vampire and zombie mythos with dystopian elements. However, two of the novel's principal narratological features – namely, the fortified home or enclosure (i.e. the 'survival space') and infectious, undead millions, both of which have since remained staples in nearly every subsequent zombie narrative – have gone relatively unnoted. Thus, prompting this article are two things. First and foremost is the need to map out the structural principia upon which modern zombies have generally come to be defined. Second, and perhaps more crucial, is the need to resituate the (terato)genesis of the modern zombie cinemyth to Matheson's novel, which has been obscured or devalued over time by the work of George Romero and an ever-increasing body of films and video games that, like Romero's films, have appropriated these two essential elements of Matheson's work. My contention, however, is not to diminish the significance of Romero's filmic work and its impact on zombie cinema, but to recognize, rather, both Matheson's and Romero's respective configurations of the zombie mythos that have helped to institute the particular tropes with which film-makers and video game designers have embodied and continue to embody the figure of the zombie. For, it seems to me, and this shall be the chief position of this article, that the intricacies of the multi - rather than singly defended 'survival space' that Romero introduces in Night of the Living Dead (1968) have not only afforded the zombie subgenre its longevity, but more crucially, offer us the most compelling conceptual tool with which to trace the zombie?s trajectory in popular culture and media.

"We Are the Walking Dead": Race, Time, and Survival in Zombie Narrative

"We <i>Are</i> the Walking Dead": Race, Time, and Survival in Zombie Narrative