Apocalypse Anytime (2013)

2019

During the last decades, zombies and the horror tropes that surround them have become a staple of American popular culture, making them a familiar presence in movies, TV series, graphic novels, and video games. From their Caribbean folklore origins, the undead have evolved into potent metaphors for social issues and cultural anxieties. On the surface, much of these creatures’ appeal can be understood as the modern-day embodiment of age-old apocalyptic belief systems, alongside which morally meaningful identities can be identified within a value order that is increasingly perceived as disorienting and nihilistic. The resurgence of apocalyptic narratives and desires becomes visible in phenomena such as millennialism and catastrophe culture that embrace zombies as instruments to purge a seemingly unhinged social order. Perplexingly, zombies at the same time point towards the opposite of this longing for narrative stability and new beginnings. In academic discourses, they have long-since turned into avatars of the postmodern inclination to dissolve dichotomous ideologies and semantic superstructures. Here, the undead have been metaphorically conjured to lay bare a plethora of issue ranging from intertextuality and irony to revisions of race and otherness or the subversion of traditional narrative strategies. This article emphasizes the rarely recognized tension between apocalyptic desires to construct meaning and resurrect narrative stability through monstrous bodies on the one hand, and so-called postmodern interpretations that utilize the same figure to deconstruct existing convictions. Shining a spotlight on this supposed opposition, the article proposes that zombies amalgamate apocalyptic and postmodern mindsets by assuming the role as pop-cultural mediators that bridge the gap between increasingly polarized epistemologies in American society.

The Science Fiction Research Association Review 301 (2012): 30-38

Abstract Zombies have exploded their fictional boundaries in what is essentially a return to their supposed beginning in social reality. These horror icons have changed through their various manifestations in film, fiction and media, however, becoming more than just metaphor for capitalism or social conservatism. Although clear connections exist between the collective symbolism of zombies and movements such as the Occupy protests or on the other hand between zombie annihilation fantasies and colonial history, no single metaphorical interpretation seems able to contain the zombie phenomenon. They have become a powerful social technology capable of creating and dismantling meaning. This ability to simultaneously construct and destroy make zombies a powerful tool in deciphering individual transformations in post-apocalyptic fictional worlds and also a key influence in forging links between those transformations and real social change. In this chapter I argue that zombies are the same kind of ‘meaning machines’ J. Jack Halberstam discussed when she attempted to revise the definition of Gothic horror in her book Skin Shows. Via Kristevian abjection, I also explain why it is important that the Romero zombie has become the dominant cultural manifestation of this particular monster. Ultimately I examine the role the technology of the zombie plays in physically re-mapping human bodies in the post-apocalypse and do this through a sustained analysis of the AMC series The Walking Dead. I find these cartographies often transgress the boundaries of the fictional worlds they manifest in and establish themselves directly in our own social reality; this is best revealed by a sustained consideration of Afro-Orientalism as political alliance between the characters in the same television series. Finally, in attempting to demonstrate the function of zombies in these processes, I discuss unexpected but potentially important connections to the field of critical posthumanism – ending on the strange subject of zombie sexuality. This chapter appears in the book Imagining the End: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Apocalypse, Inter-disciplinary Press, 2015. Jeremy R. Strong and Thomas E. Bishop, eds. Please find the full volume here: http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/product/imagining-the-end-interdisciplinary-perspectives-on-the-apocalypse/

Amy: "The world ended: didn't you get the memo?"

Zombie narratives have seen a huge resurgence in both production and popularity in the twenty-first century. The purpose of this study is to examine some of the reasons behind this, to what ends, and how successful they are in achieving these ends. The empty signification of the zombie makes it a very malleable metaphor for cultural anxieties and socio-political issues. In their examination of society and selfhood, zombie narratives engage with possible solutions to modern issues such as cultural zombification through post-industrial labour and digital technologies. The study will range over key examples of post-millennial zombie narratives: including World War Z, The Walking Dead, and Shaun of the Dead. In their attempt to consider new ways of being, these narratives explore forms of evolution and revolution through a range of socio-political experiments, whilst attempting to imagine an ascendance to post-humanity through proto-societies based upon unification, collectivism, and the abandonment of outmoded familial and social systems. Ultimately, however, these experiments fail to succeed and repeat human failures whilst returning to previous and problematic systems; whilst aiming to achieve a messianic post-history, the narratives get stuck in the perpetual crisis of apocalypse. The essay finally exits the post-millennial canon to consider how Matheson’s I Am Legend provides the only successful option for attaining posthumanity and post-history by providing a third possibility which eliminates both humanity and the cultural anxiety embodied by the zombie.

2015

Empire’s Walking Dead: The Zombie Apocalypse as Capitalist Theodicy, 2015

The zombie apocalypse is now such common currency that the American Center for Disease Control has enlisted it, tongue-in-cheek, in its campaigns to raise preparedness for pandemics (presumably of the non-zombie variety). What explains the rise of this once-niche horror genre to cultural prominence? Reading The Walking Dead in conjunction with the employee self-help manual Who Moved My Cheese? (WMMC?, hereafter), I argue that the zombie apocalypse genre employs an updated version of the becoming-subject under capitalism. Like the “little people” of WMMC?, the zombie apocalypse hero (ZAH, hereafter) must engage in brutal sacrifices in order to survive: the ZAH must kill their recently-zombified loved-one before (it) can kill or zombify them. I argue that this killing is better seen as a double-murder, directed both against the ties of affection that thwart capital’s circulation, as well as against the bourgeois subject’s past, which capitalism constantly seeks to obliterate from memory. As with the worker-mice of WMMC?, the ZAH must forge a new identity based on flux rather than stability. The zombie apocalypse thus explains the modern subject to herself, through a mythic depiction of the internal disposition that capital demands from its increasingly deracinated workers. Without the tendrils of affection or the roots of a past, the subject is left sufficiently destabilized to be tractable to the pressures, dislocations, and anxieties of global capital.

This thesis is a reflexive examination of my own experience, as understood through my consumption of popular culture, specifically the television series and graphic novel, The Walking Dead. This project investigates the rich and complex sociocultural phenomenon of the self through an examination of my own self, as reflected and refracted through popular culture. The thesis is grounded in a feminist and cultural studies theoretical framework that examines the nature of knowledge and the production of meaning in our culture. The methodology for this project hybridizes two distinct ethnographic approaches: autoethnography and webnography. Specifically, I draw on the story arc of Lori and Andrea to demonstrate some of the ways that the post-apocalyptic world of the Walking Dead relies on a logic of masculinist protection to discursively and symbolically create a subordinate feminine identity, self or role for Lori and Andrea. I use my own emotional engagement with the series to expand the idea of apocalypse to more ordinary or quotidian aspects of our lives.

2015

The world is always ending, for someone.' This article closely analyses the comic Signal to Noise; arguing that this text redefines common tropes and symbols of the apocalypse (clock, sundial, bible, skeleton and so forth) in order to depict the apocalypse as an ongoing, static state. It examines the effects of this redefinition, specifically considering the depiction of time as cyclical and the denial of reality. By redefining the end of the world as cyclical, personal, and (in many senses) apocryphal, Signal to Noise rewrites the notion of the apocalypse in postmodern terms. The article argues that the comics medium is essential in achieving this. It demonstrates this by discussing the interplay between word and image; the effect of the comic's individuality of style (collages and abstract art; together with poetry and stream-of-consciousness language); the role of the alterity created by the aesthetic of the comics medium (where everything is overtly stylised/false); and the notion of non-linear time as epitomised by the comic book page.