Status Updates From Zombies: A Cultural History

The Magic Island

Bit on “dead men working in cane fields”- mostly 2nd & 3rd hand reports

In contrast to the slippery confusion of Lafcadio Hearn Seabrook offers a precise definition of zombie: “The zombie they say is a soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave & endowed by sorcery w/a mechanical semblance of life- it is a dead body which is made to walk & act & move as if it were alive.”

Seabrook was immersed in that strand of modernism that expressed its disgust of bourgeois civilization after Great War by embracing what it perceived as the ‘savage’ vitality of the ‘primitive’ black world as an answer to Weatern decadence & decay.

Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)
Josephine Baker, 1925

Trip to Haiti was “to penetrate the cloud of rumor & myth that had grown up around Vodou”

William Seabrook: “self-mythologizing journalist alcoholic occultist primativist sadomasochist & exotic traveller”- moved in modernist occult & bohemian circles in NYC Paris & London

Spent time w/Alistair Crowley, hung out on fringes of surrealism in France: Man Ray photographed him doing various sadistic things to his lover

Visited Haiti 40 yrs after Hearn’s trip

Published The Magic Island in 1929

Lafcadio Hearn stay in Martinique 1887-89 to record folklore

Hearn: “I’ve pledged me to the worship of the Old the Queer the Strange the Exotic the Monstrous.”

Asked informant, what is a zombi? Can’t get straight answer: “sthg that makes disorder @ ngt;” not a ghost or dead folk: zombis go everywhere, dead stay in graveyard

“Zombi” was “oddly resistant to his urge for definitional knowledge.”

This book will attempt to reveal the very specific cultural history of the liminal Gothic monster & the path it has travelled from the speechless subaltern world of slavery into the heart of the Am empire & the networks of globalized popular culture…I’ll unfold the history in 8 chapters following the story chrono from the 1st appear of elusive zombi in 19c travel narratives to global pervasion 100 yrs later.

…of translation & mistranslation b/t cultures.

The passage of the French Caribbean “zombi” to the North American pulp fiction Z in the 1920s & 30s is a complicated but crucial story to tell. The American Z is a mistranslation & weird creative elaboration of the Caribbean Z yet all the time it keeps an undertow of violent colonial history in plain sight.

The Z is in fact one of the most unstable figures in the panoply of undead & has never stayed fixed for long.

Not surprising when you realize that “zombie” is a word emerging from the grim transports of pops b/t Africa, Eur & plantations of new world. The word originates from a belief system that’s a product of the slave trade…

Z is rarely stable b/c it’s syncretic object, product of interaction, …

…a runaway world always on the brink of apocalypse.

12: Since the overt satire of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead…this reading of Z culture is overt text.

Indeed this understanding of the genre is so fixed ppl get rather upset when there are slight changes or innovations—hard to recall now but was shocked collective intake of breath w/28 Days Later [“zoombies”]

…rugged individualism trying to wrest themselves from the unregarded life of the anonymized mass.

It is short leap then to reading the Z as the symbolic figure for contemporary capitalism…Marx didn’t have a Z metaphor to hand but he did sometimes wrote of capital as vampiric…

Now that capitalism is global & intensive this seems to make the Z horde the privileged emblem of globalized hyper-capitalism

The Z mass is a figure of the “statistical society” that fully emerged in late 19c…in which govt actuaries discard individuals for the analysis of…abstracted populations.

Z do not do cultural work of monstrous Others…instead they are simply us reflected back, depersonalized, flat-lined by the alienating tedium of modern existence.

Survival horror is the crisis of the last representatives of…

The real Q is why this particular figure of the undead has become so all pervasive (v vampires, ghosts, occasional mummy)…The unique twist the zombie offers is massification: the undead as a multitude. This it is common now to interpret Z as a distinctly modern contribution to the Gothic tradition…products of our industrial modernity.

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.