Zombie

"The Unknown Painter" is an antislavery short story that first appeared in the mid-1830s.  Its author, original place of publication, and date remain undetermined.  It concerns the Spanish artist Bartoleme Esteban Murillo and his black slave, the painter Sebastian Gomez.  This paper analyzes the nineteenth-century publication history of the story, its translation, and the ideologies of its revisions and republications.  The analysis pays particular attention to racial content, its revision in Frederick Douglass' Paper, the zombie sub-theme, and translations.

مطمعن نیستم که موجودات نامیرا  وجود داشته باشند. و همچنین فکر می‌کنم این موضوع محل بحث و پرسش است که آیا امکان دارد کسی مانند آدم‌هایِ بد یا قاتلینِ سریالیِ درون فیلم‌های ترسناک فرا-طبیعی شرور باشد یا خیر. با این حال معتقدم این مسأله که نامیرایان دائماً به عنوان "شرّ" به تصویر کشیده می‌شوند، موضوعی مبهم و پیچیده است. من دوست دارم اینطور فکر کنم که اگر اتفاقاً یک موجود نامیرا سرِ راهمان سبز می‌شد، این احتمال وجود داشت که سایر انسان‌ها و موجودات زنده از اون شرورتر باشد. این حرف را به مثابه‌ی نقطه‌ی شروعی برای فهمِ بهترِ نامیرایان در نظر بگیرید.

A speculative examination of some manifestations of contemporary Horror through the lens of the Zombie; this article considers the relationship between Zombie Apocalypses, Zombies as agents (or not), and wider aspects of genre and theory including comic books and graphic novels, Science Fiction, and Fantasy.   

It surveys multimedia interest in zombies, mash-up novels, alternate universes, and the meetings of zombies with a range of other tropes in diverse narratives.

Full article online; please follow the link to read more.

Książka prezentuje nowatorskie podejście do tematyki zombie w literaturze. Miejsce centralne zajmują w niej rozważania genologiczne i antropologiczne, których celem jest zdyskontowanie powszechnego wyobrażenia o narracjach zombiecentrycznych jako tekstach wyłącznie horrorowych czy niezaangażowanych w istotne dyskursy. Popkultura stanowi bardzo czuły rezonator wszelkich przemian, kryzysów czy paradygmatów, co oznacza, że znajdują one odbicie w jej artefaktach. Dlatego istotnym aspektem zawartych w książce rozważań staje się prezentacja zaangażowania literatury zombiecentrycznej w przepracowywanie doświadczeń konfliktów współczesności. Wszystkie te kwestie są boleśnie niedostrzegalne dla wielu badaczy, przyjmujących a priori, że wytwory nienależące do mainstreamu czy niezakorzenione w tradycji literackiej nie odznaczają się wysokoartystycznością bądź reprezentują wyłącznie walor rozrywkowy. Książka "Narracje zombiecentryczne..." ma na celu wskazanie czy podpowiedzenie nieco innej drogi bądź sposobu oglądu tekstów wpisujących się w popkulturę i obudowanych wokół bardzo symbolonośnej figury zombie.

Outbreak scenarios negotiate fears of a lack of control over the human and non-human environment and over increasingly instable borders in an age of globalization. Recently, the zombie genre has incorporated the outbreak narrative, combining it with the apocalyptic. In the zombie outbreak narrative, the critique of capitalist exploitation of humans and the natural environment is centered on the figure of the zombie who combines fears of environmental catastrophe and global migration. Marc Forster’s World War Z (2013) provides an example of this, as it refers to a sense of global environmental crisis in its credit sequence, while visualizing the break-down of borders and the subsequent ‘migration’ of bodies (zombies) in the main film. It thus aligns itself with a feeling of threat from both environmental disasters and global capitalism by envisioning the ‘migrating’ living dead as at once the retaliation of a human-made ‘unnatural nature’ and a stand-in for a foreign surplus laboring...

This invited talk will be delivered as part of the University of Missouri’s Zombie Week. The talk seeks to explain the evolution of the modern zombie by combining the insights of reflectionist, production, and endogenous accounts of cultural change.

This text examines the uses, symbolic meanings, and social roles of ghosts, vampires, and zombies in literature, film, and other forms of public representation. Special attention is given to the manifold ways in which the past is commemorated differently in different places and situations. The first part of the text examines various approaches to undead monsters as part of people’s concerns with a past that seems to “haunt” the present. The second part looks at the distinct features of these monsters’ imagined bodies, with particular attention to vampires and zombies, and considers their value as frameworks for the study of individual and social remembering.

In this essay, focusing primarily on the cinema of the walking corpse, I provide an overview of zombie studies and suggest potential avenues for sociological inquiry into zombie phenomena.  I argue that zombie films, comic books, novels, video games, and the like can be seen as significant cultural objects that reflect and reveal the cultural and material circumstances of their creation.  Despite emanating from complex culture producing institutions and (arguably) capturing extant social anxieties, sociology has remained quiet on zombie phenomena.  Issues of significance, history, and definition are discussed. I then locate three avenues of inquiry ideally suited to the sociological toolkit: symptomatic analysis of content, production, and audience response and interaction.  I conclude by calling for a multi-pronged sociological analysis into ‘zombie culture.’

This article analyses one of the most notorious TV trends in the last several years –the zombie–, and how its evolution is related not only to the usual dynamics that is a feature of every artisitic genre, but also to the “affective turn” that contemporary society is experiencing.
In order to analyse this cultural phenomena, firstly we will explore the metaphorical condition that traditionally has been associated with zombie narratives since George A. Romero’s reinvention of the genre. Next, we will study –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. Lastly, we will scrutinize three recent TV shows dealing with the zombie myth from stylistic, thematic and innovative ideological perspectives: In the Flesh (BBC Three, 2013-14), Les Revenants (Canal Plus France, 2012-15) and iZombie (The CW, 2015-).

This article discusses a series of performative walks made in terrains suggestive of the fictional landscapes of living dead cinema and literature. Drawing on the idea that the living dead sub-genre provides the dominant vision of apocalypse in the present stage of capitalist development, the walks explore how real world referents of this fictional apocalypse are unfolding in everyday spaces. The article describes the assembling of a taxonomy of ‘zombie spaces’, drawing on a review of the fictional spaces of living dead film and literature, and how its categories are deployed on five performative walks in towns and cities in Devon (UK). It then discusses some of the findings from the walks, including new categories to add to the taxonomy, the illumination of real world ‘apocalypse’ at the level of the everyday, and reflections on how this category-driven performative walking might be developed in future.

The body, whether considered in terms of biology, sociology or religion, is an inherent constituent of that which makes a human subject, complementing the mind and being subject to it. The only space that offers the body the freedom to be treated separately from the mind-subject that otherwise defines it at all times, is horror fiction. In horror fiction the body is free to rebel; horror texts rely on narrative strategies that refer to the intimate connection between the flesh and the mind. The mutiny of the body in horror fiction takes the form of the reversal of the relation between the mind-subject and the body. The aim of this paper is to identify and discuss the two best known and most common manifestations of this motif in horror fiction — manifestations known from legends and the earliest texts of the genre, both literary and cinematic: the animalised body and the undead body, represented by the werewolf and the zombie.

Deadgirl (2008) is based around a group of male teens discovering and claiming ownership of a bound female zombie, using her as a sex slave. This narrative premise raises numerous tensions that are particularly amplified by using a zombie as the film’s central victim. The Deadgirl is sexually passive yet monstrous, reifying the horrors associated with the female body in patriarchal discourses. She is objectified on the basis of her gender, and this has led many reviewers to dismiss the film as misogynistic Torture Porn. However, the conditions under which masculinity is formed here – where adolescent males become "men" by enacting sexual violence – are as problematic as the specter of the female zombie. Deadgirl is clearly horrific and provocative: in this article I seek to probe implications arising from the film’s gender conflicts.

"Representations", N. 129, Winter 2015.

The essay analyzes the project of maintaining the body of V. I. Lenin in the Mausoleum in Moscow for the past ninety years, focusing on the unique biological science that developed around this project, and the unexpected political role this body has performed.

A visionary adventure (nonfiction) from the Woodstock era to the present. Patterned in some respects after the Commedia (but mostly in prose), traversing different spiritual terrains—some of profound horror—by a real spiritual character, albeit, initially, an antihero wandering the howling archetypal heartlands of the Abyss.

After his rescue, and graduating his training in spiritual warfare and discernment, embarking on an experience in the Apocalypse of John, and the sight afforded therein, with the result of opening the vision—relevant not only to the first century, but to the twenty-first, even to these violent and tumultuous days of 2020.

Also included in this work, the booklet, "A Poet Arises In Israel".

Classic literature and prophetic vision.

Esta tesis constituye el primer trabajo académico que aborda específicamente el personaje del zombi en el ámbito del cine español. La investigación abarca un corpus completo; es decir, revisa todas las representaciones que el zombi ha tenido a lo largo de toda la historia de la cinematografía española.

La tesis se divide en tres partes: una primera parte titulada ‘Antropología del zombi: génesis y construcción del concepto’, una segunda titulada ‘El zombi en la ficción occidental’ y una tercera titulada ‘El zombi en el cine español’. La primera parte tiene el propósito de establecer los antecedentes del zombi antes de su irrupción en el cine en los años 30 del siglo XX. A tal fin se abre con un capítulo titulado ‘El enigma zombi. Hacia una propuesta definitoria’, que establece los criterios formales por los que se puede considerar zombi a un determinado personaje. Para ello, la tesis ofrece, por un lado, su propia propuesta definitoria (la cual determina el corpus de películas a analizar), y por otro propone una posible taxonomía/tipología del zombi que ordene este mismo corpus. El resto de la primera parte apela a campos como la antropología y la literatura para rastrear los precedentes del zombi cinematográfico en las distintas tradiciones orales y escritas del mundo a lo largo de la Historia. Posteriormente, examina la presencia del zombi en el folclore de aquellas culturas, como la sudafricana o la haitiana, que constituyen el precedente y la inspiración directa de la introducción de este monstruo en la cultura popular occidental.

La segunda parte, ‘El zombi en la ficción occidental’, examina la evolución del zombi en la cultura popular de Occidente producida desde los años veinte hasta la inmediata actualidad, insistiendo de forma especial en la vertiente cinematográfica. Los capítulos siguen un orden cronológico, recogiendo aquellas convenciones y estrategias narrativas, subtextos temáticos y convenciones genéricas que se han ido incorporando en cada uno de los ciclos descritos. Esta parte demuestra cómo el cine estadounidense de zombis postula una serie de categorías estanca perfectamente definidas, tanto en lo que se refiere a la tipología del zombi como a la figura del amo de los zombis.

La tercera y última parte, ‘El zombi en el cine español’ constituye el corazón de esta tesis. Su estructura responde a los últimos enfoques en materia de estudios culturales sobre el estudio del cine de terror español. Esta parte empieza estableciendo el singular marco socio-industrial en que surge el cine exploitation europeo en la segunda mitad del siglo XX (del que forma parte el cine español del periodo), para a continuación plantear una discusión acerca de las señas de identidad de estas películas. A continuación, se establece el marco político, cultural e industrial en que tiene lugar la eclosión de películas de terror que el cine español experimentó desde finales de los años sesenta hasta mediados de la década siguiente (donde aparece el zombi por primera vez en una película española), examinando primero la tradición fantástica española pre-cine.

El resto de la tesis se concentra de forma específica en el análisis de la totalidad del cine de zombis producido en España. El orden es cronológico a fin de identificar, por primera vez en un estudio de estas características, los ciclos del cine de zombis español. Así, la tesis se ocupa de las primeras producciones locales en las que se detecta la presencia del personaje, localizadas en la década de los años 60. Después se aborda el periodo que va desde finales de los años sesenta hasta la caída del régimen franquista; es decir, los años en que se concentra la mayor producción de películas de terror en la historia de España. La siguiente sección aborda los años ochenta y la primera mitad de los años noventa como un periodo en el que el cine de zombis español acusó un considerable descenso de su producción. La tesis demuestra cómo a lo largo de estas décadas el cine española aplicó los protocolos de representación del cine exploitation a la representación del zombi, transgrediendo, hibridando y subvirtiendo las categorías que permanecían seguras en el cine estadounidense, e introduciendo un discurso netamente español: la vinculación de lo fantástico a lo religioso. Por último, la tesis se ocupa de la producción más reciente. Este último ciclo abarca desde los primeros años 2000 hasta 2012, y termina con el análisis de la franquicia Rec, describiendo la naturaleza postmoderna del último cine de zombis español.

Monografia Groza i postgroza, powstała pod wspólną redakcją Kseni Olkusz i Barbary Szymczak-Maciejczyk jest siódmym tomem serii „Perspektywy Ponowoczesności” i trzecim już — po Zombie w kulturze oraz Światach grozy — poświęconym studiom nad fantastyką grozy. Roz­działom polskich badaczy towarzyszą również po raz pierwszy w historii serii przekłady prac wybitnych światowych znawców problematyki: Grego­ry’ego Claeysa, Elany Gomel, Mathiasa Clasena oraz Leigh M. McLennon

Erotic Nights of the Living Dead (1980) may have featured both animated corpses and hardcore sex scenes, but only recently have Re-Penetrator (2004) and Porn of the Dead (2006) managed to fully eroticise the living dead, allowing these creatures to engage in intercourse. In doing so, the usually a-subjective zombie is allotted a key facet of identity - sexuality. This development within the sub-genre needs accounting for outside of the contexts of porn studies, where it has only been briefly touched upon in relation to its "extremity".

Moreover, the gendering of the undead opens a discussion which expand the horizons of zombie studies away from the overt critiques of capitalism, race and psychoanalysis that have pervaded analyses of these narratives. The dichotomy of binary oppositions so often associated with psychoanalytic approaches dictates that "passive (non-phallic) = female", and "active (phallic) = male". In these terms, the zombies are feminine - soft-bodied and passive, despite their murderous intent (which has been accounted for, by Barabara Creed (1993) amongst others, by invoking the vagina-dentata motif). Humans (active) are deemed masculine, not least since they tend to dispatch zombies with "phallic guns". Taking this logic to an extreme, the zombie may be read as allegorising feminism: the "feminised" figures (zombies) become fearsome in their will to exert themselves despite their seeming disempowerment in the face of "masculine" hegemony. Ultimately, by grouping together as a force, they overthrow or at least significantly damage that "normality" (an ideological paradigm usually read in terms of race, class and economics).

En este texto se realiza una aproximación a la complejidad simbólica y representativa del subgénero japonés Anime profundizando en dos series que desarrollan tramas con personajes juveniles: unos que sobreviven a un apocalipsis zombi y otra cuya protagonista se convierten en zombi por voluntad propia.
Este nuevo género en América Latina y Norteamérica muestra una nueva etapa en los dibujos animados, principalmente porque son producidos en el continente asiático (un mercado emergente para las industrias culturales) y por qué abordan un género que, hasta hace apenas unos años, había sido exclusivo de las películas de terror; nos referimos al género zombi. En los últimos años, este tipo de producciones en dibujos animados ha atraído la atención de jóvenes y niños y ha sido llevada a historietas, videojuegos, Manga y Anime.
En este capítulo abordaremos algunos de los antecedentes del género zombi en el cine, posteriormente mencionaremos algunos de los aspectos más importantes del anime Japonés, sus orígenes, impactos en las nuevas industrias culturales y sus efectos en la definición de identidades juveniles e identicaciones trasnacionales (grupos otaku).
Finalmente analizaremos la trama narrativa de dos animes producidos en Japón cuyo impacto en los mercados juveniles muestra una nueva etapa en las representaciones del zombi (concepciones de vida y muerte) y las identidades de género juveniles, se trata de las series Highschool of the dead y Sanka rea.

Horror Video Game Remakes and the Question of Medium: Remaking Doom, Silent Hill, and Resident Evil. In Fear, Cultural Anxiety and Transformation: Horror, Science Fiction and Fantasy Films Remade. Scott A. Lukas and John Marmysz, eds. Lexington Books, 2008.

Drawing on the well-established understanding of the zombie as metaphor for the deadening effects of consumer capitalism, this chapter seeks to account for three distinct changes that contextualise 21st century zombie fiction. The first is situational: the global economic crisis has amplified the anxieties that inspired Romero's critique of consumer capitalism in Dawn of the Dead (1978). The second is intellectual: as Chapman and Anderson (2011) note, there has been an “explosion of research on all aspects of disgust” in recent years. The third concerns the subgenre itself: zombies have become increasingly sexualised since the late 1990s. These issues intersect in a numerous recent zombie films - including Zombie Strippers! (2008), Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! (2008), Big Tits Zombie (2010), and Zombies Vs Strippers (2012) - that are centred around or within strip clubs. Stripping epitomises the logic of consumer capitalism, offering tantalising promises but little physical satisfaction. Stripping translates sexual desire into a voyeuristic transaction, evacuated of corporeal messiness. The zombie’s decomposing body epitomises disgust, and its presence in the strip-club disturbs the fantasy typically provided within that context. In the zombie infected strip-club, intimate contact is damaging rather than desirous. In these respects, zombies hypostatize numerous tensions that are usually masked by fantasy and financial exchange. In doing so, these zombies reify the horrors of late capitalism. Their disgusting bodies disrupt the foundational logic of consumerism qua desire.

Films use contemporary event related material to maintain complex and interesting plots that connect to audiences. Zombie films are an ideal example of the use of contemporary events in film, because the modern zombie film allows for flexible story-lines, which have the potential to explore a variety of issues. Subsequently, the zombie film genre features several disasters that are based on events including wars, disease pandemics, and social movements. In particular, George Romero's zombie films reference these aspects of social commentary and many more, thus they are an excellent sample of zombie films to study. This paper will discusses the existence of commentary on historic and contemporary events in Romero's six zombie films, beginning with his 1968 classic, Night of the Living Dead.

This article suggests a new reading of Romero’s second zombie film, Dawn of the Dead (1978), which is set in a zombie-infested mall. The established literature on the film has largely focused on Romero’s overt critique of consumerism. The corruption wrought by mass consumption is clearly one of Dawn’s themes. But the film also recognizes the importance of the mall to American society. For Romero’s zombies, it is not only an insatiable desire to consume, but a deeply held memory of the importance of the mall to their human pre-selves that calls them back. Romero suggests that this thread connecting people and place was strong enough to survive their traumatic reincarnation when so many higher order attachments and functions had been stripped away.

Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 25.2-3 (2014): 295-313.


In the West, property and the “human” are knotted. If posthumanism is about decentering the human, it would of necessity involve untying that knot. Reading George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978), and Land of the Dead (2005), along with Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead (2003 – present), this essay argues that zombies allegorize the “multitude” of the propertyless, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri put it. They relentlessly threaten both property and the “human” that is predicated on it. Bound up in this foundational thematic of zombie narrative, though, is the survivors’ response to the zombies’ deterritorializing threat: they retrench, assert ownership of territory through bodily labor, and then engage in internecine struggles in property’s defense. Indeed, the more the survivors seek to hold on to what is “human” through securing land and property at any cost, the more they themselves become monstrous.

Lien vers l'article complet dans la revue Ad Hoc n°7 : https://adhoc.hypotheses.org/ad-hoc-n7-valeur-des-corps

Résumé

Lorsque la science-fiction apparait en tant que genre littéraire au XVIIe siècle, non seulement elle s’oppose à la religion qui fait de l’âme un principe spirituel supérieur, mais elle s’attache au corps dont la nature matérielle donne à ses récits un caractère réaliste. S’émancipant alors clairement de la religion au XIXe, le corps devient l’occasion de questionner la science elle-même qui, le réduisant à son aspect matériel, en fait une source d’expérimentations sans morale. Les récits de science-fiction mettent alors en avant un corps malade ou dégénéré, qui agit de façon mécanique. Enfin, quand les textes contemporains racontent un corps cybernétique ou virtuel, ils poursuivent encore l’idée du bien et interroge la possibilité de son existence matérielle. Au fond, c’est toujours la nature humaine qui est visée à partir du dualisme classique du corps et de l’âme, le champ de la science-fiction permettant de radicaliser un des deux pôles afin de rendre les implications morales plus évidentes.

Mots-clés : science-fiction, dualisme, corps, âme, matérialisme, zombie, robot, cyborg, Cyrano de Bergerac, Herbert Georges Wells, Richard Matheson, Isaac Asimov

The zombie is a new myth which appeared in Western imaginary in the twentieth century and which gradually evolved into its present-day version: the apocalyptic
zombie. This work aims to review the zombie myth’s evolution and to offer some insight into why it is this new version of the myth the one we can find massively today
in both artistic and non-artistic discourses.

This paper suggests that reference to phenomenal qualities is best understood as involving iconicity, that is, a passage from sign-vehicle to object that exploits a similarity between the two. This contrasts with a version of the ‘phenomenal concept strategy’ that takes indexicality to be central. However, since it is doubtful that phenomenal qualities are capable of causally interacting with anything, indexical reference seems inappropriate. While a theorist like David Papineau is independently coming to something akin to iconicity, I think some of the awkwardness that plagues his account would be remedied by transitioning to a more inclusive philosophy of signs.

Here I shall discuss three closely interrelated points that connect the Tractatus to the contemporary analytical philosophy of mind. The first is the notion of Logical Space. The second involves the imaginability-based nature of the Tractarian notion of (logical) possibility. The last point is that the Tractarian notion is too broad to the extent that it embraces both metaphysical and nomological possibility. In this paper, I argue that because the metaphor of logical space strictly depends on the notion of logical possibilities, the boundaries of logical space are too undetermined. If that is true, how could we know if, for example, zombies are logically possible or not? However, the zombie argument is the sort of example frequently used to argue against physicalism. Then, in the case of the incoherency in the notion of logical space, the zombie argument would become somehow problematic. If that is the case, it might have repercussions for the conceivability arguments in the field of the analytical philosophy of mind. The Tractarian notion of logical space is a curiosity in its own right as an earlier variety of modal metaphysics, but it has a wider significance for the recent metaphysical arguments often used in the analytical philosophy of mind. ÖZET Bu çalışmada, muhtemelen Tractatus'u çağdaş analitik zihin felsefesiyle ilişkilendirebilecek ve birbirleriyle yakından ilişkili üç meseleyi tartışacağım. İlki Dünya, Gerçeklik ve Olgu Durumları Bağlamları arasındaki ilişkidir. Diğeri, Mantıksal Uzam kavramıdır. Sonuncusuysa, mantıksal olasılığın Tractatus türü kavramlaştırmasının tutarlı olup olmadığıdır. Bu üç sorunun tek bir makalede ele alınmasını gerektirecek kadar iç içe geçip geçmediği sorulabilir. Burada ben Mantıksal Uzam metaforunun mantıksal olasılıklar kavramına sıkıca bağlı olmasından ötürü cevabın olumlu olduğunu savunuyorum. Dolayısıyla, ikincisindeki tutarsızlık ve anlaşılmazlıklar, ilkini çok problemli hale getirecektir. Bu son dediğim doğruysa bu durum, çağdaş analitik zihin felsefesindeki tahayyül edilebilirlik temelli tezler için etkileri büyük olumsuz sonuçlar doğurabilecektir. Tractatus'taki mantıksal uzam kavramı modal metafiziğin erken dönemli bir çeşidi olarak kendi başına da oldukça ilginçtir. Fakat daha önemli olan, onun analitik zihin felsefesinde sıklıkla kullanılan yakın dönemli metafizik argümanlar için barındırdığı sonuçlardır.

This article uses Pedro Valencia's play Con Z de zombie (2013) to theorize the Mexican drug war through the lens of the zombie apocalypse. As the play's title shows, Valencia asserts a connection between zombies and drug traffickers; indeed, the entire play allegorically critiques the ideologies of the drug war and advocates for sincere dialogue between narcos, civilians, and the state. The playwright employs theatrical techniques that challenge biopolitical constructs that have kept different segments of society apart from each other since the war began. Building on the work of Roberto Esposito, who argues that modern states aim to " immunize " individuals against the excesses of " dangerous communities, " I assert that the three characters of this play represent different segments of society that have come into conflict with each other as a result of the drug war. Valencia asserts that this divisions undermines any attempts at peace when his human characters befriend a zombie who has regained consciousness. These characters soon learn that they can only successfully navigate the zombie apocalypse if they work together. At an allegorical level, then, the play asserts that the state must facilitate a communion between (repentant) narcos, civilians, and the military if it wishes to mediate drug violence in the country. Pedro Valencia's play Con Z de zombie (2013) uses the backdrop of a worldwide zombie apocalypse as an allegory for contemporary Mexican drug violence. The story is set in the nation's capital, which has generally avoided the effects of organized crime that has plagued