Abstract
What does the zombie teach? While this speculative question has been redressed through the interpretation of the zombie as a symptom of colonialism (White Zombie) contemporary consumerism (Dawn of the Dead, Land of the Dead), ecological destruction (The Bay) and geopolitical warfare (World War Z), there might insist a more pervasive ontological lesson at the crux of our fascination with zombies. That is, while the meaning of the zombie has been intimately linked to the “unsettled ecologies” against which it symptomatically emerges, this essay will speculate on the zombie in relation to a more pervasive albeit ‘passive’ ontological program (Cohen, Grey: A zombie ecology. Retrieved from http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2012/06/grey-zombie-ecology.html on September 13, 2012). Consequent of the zombie’s destruction in such video games as Call of Duty: Black Ops: Zombies (Ideaworks Game Studio, Call of duty: Black ops: Zombies (Video Game). Activision, Santa Monica, 2011), its exploitation in Curry’s (2006) Fido, and oppression in Romero’s (Land of the dead (Motion picture). Universal Pictures, United States, 2005) Land of the Dead, it might be suggested that what contemporary zombie fiction passively ‘teaches’ pertains to the question of what counts as properly and recognizably human (Nayar, Posthumanism. Polity Press, Cambridge, 2014).
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Notes
- 1.
While Samuels is portrayed as morally and socially unhinged throughout the fourth season of AMC’s The Walking Dead, of specific import here is the automatic horror with which her ethical treatment of the zombie is met.
- 2.
If zombie-life can be thought as a screen for a people yet to come, or rather, a revolutionary people in the process of becoming, the zombie composes an ‘malevolent art’ for the deterritorialization of what is. Here, zombie-life resists the very prospect of a future or rather, a future continually reterritorialized in a mirror image of what is. Apart from what is, the zombie continues to function as a unique cine-sign for surveying and assessing a life form born of the deprogrammed body, its savage metronomic pulsations, and the extreme revolutionary deterritorializations of capitalism (Land 2011).
- 3.
The Animal Liberation Front (ALF) argues that no specific statistics exist on the number of animals used in vivisection labs across the U.S., let alone world-wide. The ALF argues that this is due to the nondisclosure of industry information by biological suppliers. The inexact statistics on dissection pointed to by the ALF are corroborated by a number of Anti-Vivisection authorities (http://animalliberationfront.com/Philosophy/Animal%20Testing/School_Lab/school.htm). Most suggest avowedly conservative estimates on dissection at 12 million, while others, taking into account dissections in elementary and middle school, suggest 20 million (http://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-experimentation/classroom-dissection/).
- 4.
A common characteristic of contemporary educational thought is its contraction of life forces to prior interpretive commitments through which difference is brought into conformity with prior images or foundation for thinking. Such a strategy already insists that analysis proceeds via the reflection of some transcendent meaning, image, or concept with which the new is made to conform.
- 5.
Symptoms of this mutating Holocene suprabound. Increases in oceanic temperature over the past half decade have been linked to a fourfold intensification in the frequency of disasters related to violent weather and the concomitant emergence of so-called ‘mega-storms’ of unanticipated virulence and intensity (McKibben 2011). The ocean today is more corrosive than at any point in the past eight hundred thousand years, with pH fluctuations accelerating ten times faster than forecast. Familial ice core marker layers containing fallout from atomic testing in the 1960s have begun to disappear from ancient Himalayan glaciers, marking the accelerated erosion of glacial sheets.
- 6.
As Jagodzinski (2014) articulates, research emerging from the work of such leading climatologists as James Hansen of the Stolkholm Resilience Center have identified that no less that three of nine planetary tipping points have now been eclipsed. These include global warming, transformations of the nitrogen cycle, biodiversity loss, and the radical transgression of the planetary ‘carrying capacity’ by upwards of 30 %.
- 7.
Where the highest aspiration of education is to elevate human consciousness – that is to say a consciousness that reflects in the image of a unified self-aware subject –it labors to repeat a discourse that sustains the human as the horizon of being while presuming conscientization as a privileged mode of emancipation, hence covering over those varying scales and durations of molecular revolution that are not of the subject.
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Wallin, J.J. (2016). Into the Black: Zombie Pedagogy, Education and Youth at the End of the Anthropocene. In: Carrington, V., Rowsell, J., Priyadharshini, E., Westrup, R. (eds) Generation Z. Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-934-9_5
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