Status Updates From Zombies: A Cultural History

Post-1945 -> the massified zombie. The border between life and death adapted from master-slave to mass genocide. Concentration camp as undeath, yet totalitarianism as well. Spiritual death of the soul, brainwashing, re-eduction. The red scare, the yellow peril. American paranoia, moral panics, and hyperconsumption.

Yo, this is crazy. Vodou, the Haitian Revolution, and the Black Jacobins were demonised by Confederate hicks, during the Civil War, as a cannibalistic cult of degenerates who sacrificed children—a panoply of tropes that still walks the earth today in reactionary conspiracies about liberal pedophile rings, adrenochrome harvesting elites, and stupid sexy black Flanders cuckolding all the stupid innocent white Homers.

"The essence of slavery is that the slave, in his social death, lives on the margin between community and chaos, life and death, the sacred and the secular. Already dead, he lives outside the mana of the gods and can cross the boundaries with social and supernatural impunity." - Orlando Patterson

Some fantastic historicisation already. The zombie as a consequence of colonisation, rationalisation, and alienation.