In what follows, I propose a new framework for interpreting zombie culture, one that considers the zombie tale not just as political allegory, but as artistic statement.
I want to further explore the cultural work of zombies, but the significance I’m interested in describing here is more aesthetic than sociological. Such analyses suggest that the cultural function of zombie stories is essentially mimetic and metacognitive: they reflect back our fears about thralldom, and they provide a creative space where we can critique our history and politics. Scholars have read tales of the reanimated dead as, for instance, parables about class revolution, globalization, body politics, and national trauma. To this end, a wellspring of scholarship has converged on the zombie narrative as political allegory. The zombie embodies our anxieties about loss of control and freewill, but it can also signify resistance-after all, it defies not only death, but also social categories and civic governance. In its multiple iterations, the zombie has always signified a state of thralldom, variously operating as a metaphor for slavery, colonialism, industrial capitalism, consumerism, and social conformity. In the late sixties and seventies, the films of George Romero helped reinvent the zombie as a ravenous cannibal, a characterization that continues to the present day (though increasingly we see in the “zom com” subgenre a trend to humanize the zombie). The zombie first entered the American consciousness in the 1920s, via Haitian folklore, when it was popularly depicted as a reanimated corpse under the spell of a voodoo master. Historically, the zombie has proven to be a flexible metaphor. In his influential essay “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” Jeffrey Jerome Cohen reminds us that monsters signify, that they exist “only to be read” (4). Why has this particular monster so pervaded our popular imagination in the 21st century? Consider The Walking Dead, Land of the Dead, World War Z, Zombieland, iZombie, Resident Evil, The Last of Us-from film and television, to novels and comic books, to video games and public spectacles like zombie walks, what do all of these zombie stories tell us about the stories we tell and why we tell them? With this essay, I join the moaning hordes who have tried to explain the resurgent popularity of the zombie in American culture. “Sometimes you forget all about them in spite of yourself, but all too often the very first thing you realize when you wake up is that they are there again, settling in like bad weather, hovering like plague-bearing insects, swarming precisely as if they were indeed blue demons dispatched on their mission of harassment by none other than the Chief Red Devil of all devils himself.” Stomping the undead: a blues theory of zombie cultureĪdam Golub (California State University, Fullerton)
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