Abstract
This chapter continues to think about the legacies of the plantation in contemporary texts by focusing on two zombie narratives: AMC’s television series The Walking Dead (2010–) and Bennett Sims’ novel A Questionable Shape (2013). Beginning with a consideration of the post-apocalyptic genre in the southern imaginary, the chapter then reviews the zombie’s ubiquity in contemporary culture and theory. Tracking the zombie’s transnational history requires an understanding of its roots in slavery, the Middle Passage, and thus in questions of life and death. Thinking about these ideas briefly in relation to The Walking Dead, the chapter turns to Sims’ novel for the way it engages questions of the human and memories of southern disaster. The novel’s focus on the zombie as an emblem of memory will be discussed in relation to biopolitics, racializing assemblages, and the turn to the posthuman.
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Notes
- 1.
Anthony Dyer Hoefer, Apocalypse South: Judgement, Cataclysm, and Resistance in the Regional Imaginary (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012), 7, 171.
- 2.
Eric Gary Anderson, Taylor Hagood, and Daniel Cross Turner, “Introduction,” in Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture, edited by Anderson et al. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015), 1, 2, 1–2.
- 3.
The Walking Dead, created by Frank Darabont (2010; Entertainment One, 2012), DVD. Quoted in the text from here on.
- 4.
Roger Luckhurst, Zombies: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion Books, 2015), 8, 9.
- 5.
Ibid., 15.
- 6.
Elizabeth McAlister, “Slaves, Cannibals, and Infected Hyper-Whites: The Race and Religion of Zombies,” Anthropological Quarterly 85, no. 2 (2012): 461.
- 7.
Ibid., 483.
- 8.
Luckhurst , Zombies, 15.
- 9.
Mel Y. Chen, “Lurching for the Cure? On Zombies and the Reproduction of Disability,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, no. 1 (2015): 24.
- 10.
Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry, “A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism,” boundary 2 35, no. 1 (2008): 87, 89.
- 11.
Shaka McGlotten, “Zombie Porn: Necropolitics, Sex, and Queer Socialities,” Porn Studies 1, no. 4 (2014): 326, 363.
- 12.
Lauro and Embry, “A Zombie,” 90.
- 13.
Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz, “Infection, Media, and Capitalism: From Early Modern Plagues to Postmodern Zombies,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 10, no. 2 (2010): 135, 136.
- 14.
Luckhurst, Zombies, 149, 150.
- 15.
Matthew Dischinger, “The Walking Dead’s Postsouthern Crypts,” in Small-Screen Souths: Region, Identity and the Cultural Politics of Television, edited by Lisa Hinrichsen, Gina Caison, and Stephanie Rountree (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017), 260, 261, 265.
- 16.
Katherine Sugg, “The Walking Dead: Late Liberalism and Masculine Subjection in Apocalypse Fictions,” Journal of American Studies 49, no. 4 (2015), 800–801.
- 17.
See, for instance, this amusing but insightful piece: Michael Harriot, “The Black Person’s Guide to The Walking Dead,” The Root, October 22, 2017, https://www.theroot.com/a-black-persons-guide-to-the-walking-dead-1819751001.
- 18.
Dischinger, “The Walking,” 267, 262.
- 19.
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 7–8, 14.
- 20.
Katherine McKittrick, “Plantation Futures,” Small Axe 17, no. 3 (2013): 2–3, 4.
- 21.
Bennett Sims, A Questionable Shape (London: Oneworld Publications, 2014), 15–16. Quoted in text from here on.
- 22.
Luckhurst, Zombies, 7.
- 23.
The linguistic richness of the narrator is noteworthy primarily because it upends those expectations of a “zombie novel.” Much like Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011), this novel plays with the zombie genre and so-called literary fiction, blurring the lines between the loose forms.
- 24.
I should note here that many of the quotes I’m using appear in footnotes; the narrator deploys them throughout, partly because, he says, “the footnote is the typographic mark most emblematic of undeath. By opening up a subjacent space on the page, the footnote digs a grave in the text, and underworld in the text. The words that are banished there are like thoughts that the text has repressed, pushed down into its unconscious. But they go on disturbing it from beneath, such that if the text were ever infected, they are the words that would guide it. Footnotes are a text’s phantom feet” (16n). This single footnote alone says so much about the novel’s interest in the (im)permeable borders between here and there, life and death, as well as the role of the revenant that lingers and haunts. That the footnote is, finally, a phantom limb underscores the idea that this is a corporeal text, and the undead is ever-bodily even in its state beyond life.
- 25.
Jill Bennett, Practical Aesthetics: Events, Affects and Art after 9/11 (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2012), 21.
- 26.
Astrid Erll , Memory in Culture, translated by Sara B. Young (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) 8.
- 27.
Dora Apel, Imagery of Lynching (2004).
- 28.
Kaiama Glover, qtd in Sharpe, In the Wake, 47.
- 29.
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 140, 8.
- 30.
I must admit that my previous work has indeed followed this trend. I am here revising how I see such biopolitical paradigms.
- 31.
Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2014), 1, 2.
- 32.
Ibid., 4, 131, 135.
- 33.
Ibid., 137.
- 34.
Robert Reid-Pharr, Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique (New York: New York University Press), 6.
- 35.
Weheliye, Habeas, 9–10.
- 36.
Sharon P. Holland, “The Last Word on Racism: New Directions for a Critical Race Theory,” South Atlantic Quarterly 104, no. 3 (2005): 420.
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Lloyd, C. (2018). The Plantation to the Apocalypse: Zombies and the Non/Human in The Walking Dead and A Questionable Shape. In: Corporeal Legacies in the US South. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96205-4_3
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