“Stop! Can You Hear the Eagle Roar?”: Zombie Kitsch and the Apocalyptic Sublime in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One

Abstract

This chapter takes as its starting point three provocative quotations. Colson Whitehead begins the three sections of his 2009 novel Zone One with epigraphs derived from Walter Benjamin’s essay “Dream Kitsch,” Ezra Pound’s poem “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” and Public Enemy’s song “Welcome to the Terrordome,” respectively. This constellation of intertexts foregrounds a set of concerns about capitalism, modern aesthetics, and freedom that I read as central to Whitehead’s novel. Whitehead begins the first section with Benjamin’s atmospheric line, “the gray layer of dust covering things has become their best part” (1).¹ His invocation of “Dream Kitsch,” an immediate precursor to Benjamin’s much longer engagement with kitsch and consumer culture, the Arcades Project, invites us to recognize that Zone One can be read productively as a twenty-first-century coda to that momentous study of modernity. If, as Esther Leslie suggests, Benjamin’s project in his fragmented observations about the arcades was to “portray … Second Empire Paris as a prototype, the ‘Ursprung’ of capitalist bourgeois civilization,” Whitehead produces a similarly rich and ambitious meditation on twenty-first-century postindustrial Manhattan, bringing a distinctive allegorical approach to bear on a broad cross-section of New York’s population of worker-consumers (Walter Benjamin 119).

Art teaches us to see into things … Kitsch allow[s] us to see outward from within things.

—Walter Benjamin, “Some Remarks on Folk Art”