1/14/2024 0 Comments Danger zombies changeable signI will argue as well that the zombie’s confusion of categories takes us beyond the need for critical deconstruction to a place of human agency and hope. This makes it a powerful conceptual tool - enabling us to move beyond understandings that are brittle and static to things richer and more nuanced. By living to a degree, neither alive nor dead, it challenges our understanding of what it means to be human. By blurring the categories of life and death, it presents an ambiguous supplement, a something extra, to the binaries that order our existence. Its allusion to the lynching of black men by racist mobs is striking.ĭuane Jones as Ben in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.Īs the French philosopher Jacques Derrida pointed out, the zombie inhabits a liminal space. The film was released during the height of America’s Civil Rights Movement. Unwilling to be contaminated, they transfer him with pointy, curled meat-hooks that are gouged into the prone man’s flesh. As the credits roll, a succession of still images show the white militia placing Ben’s body onto a large faggot. ‘Good shot! Ok he’s dead, let’s go get him, that’s another one for the fire’. Spotting Ben from a distance and mistaking him for a ‘walker’, the militia leader tells his sharpshooter: ‘Alright Vince, hit him in the head, right between the eyes’. A large troupe of armed men are scouring and clearing the area. The protagonist of George Romero’s Night of the living Dead (1966) is Ben (played by Duane Jones), a black man who survives a zombie attack by finding refuge in a country house. From such beginnings the zombie came to represent the deep-seeded social insecurities and racialised fears of the global North. After hearing of her resurrection through local magic, her husband exclaims: ‘Surely you don’t think she’s alive? In the hands of natives? Oh, no, better dead than that!’ The film alludes to the distrust felt amongst settler colonists towards the slaves under their control, manipulating popular fears of racial miscegenation and the potential for insurrection, both in Haiti and closer to home. A young American couple are to have their wedding in a mansion near Port-au-Prince when the new bride is killed and then zombified by a jealous suitor. Victor Halperin’s White Zombie (1932) activates the Western travellers’ distrust of African-Caribbean culture and religion. The zombie enters popular culture after the US occupation of Haiti (1915–34), in William Seabrook’s The Magic Island (1929) and the cinema of the 1930s and 40s. Slavery was in part ensured through the manipulation of Haitian-Creole beliefs on the hideous premise that death offered no escape. According to Amy Wilentz, slave-drivers sought to control their subjects through fear, by invoking the power to transform them into zombies, which would guarantee their continued labour in a sort of undead, half-life. Though its relationship to Voodoo religion is disputed, the Haitian zombie has its origins in the historical trauma of slavery. This has no doubt been true since the zombie’s earliest incarnation in the mythology surrounding magical practices amongst plantation slaves in French occupied Saint-Dominingue. By radically denying what it means to be human, the zombie exacerbates social, political and ideological disparities. The zombie is a fascinating and suggestive trope.
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