Description
Book SynopsisEcology of the Zombie marks a significant intervention into the fields of world literature, film studies, ecocriticism, and Gothic Studies. Arguing that the zombie is a fundamentally ecological figure, the book offers original readings of a range of cultural texts from across the Caribbean and the U.S. In its various incarnations - from enslaved body toiling on fields, to vacant-eyed, light-skinned female imprisoned within patriarchal structures, to the cannibalistic mass zombie roaming apocalyptic scenarios - the zombie speaks powerfully to capitalism's systematic degradation of land and labour. Indeed, the figure gives expression to the metabolic rifts through which the modern world-system has unfolded. Boldly intervening in current debates around Gothic imaginaries, Ecology of the Zombie argues for the centrality of the Caribbean monstrous to understanding Gothic ecologies due to the region's pivotal role in the emergence of capitalist modernity. The book is distinguished by its striking comparative analyses, bringing the work of René Depestre, for example, into conversation with that of Ralph Ellison, reading Erna Brodber’s Myal in conjunction with George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, and examining The Stepford Wives alongside the fiction of Pedro Cabiya. In so doing, it provides an important new interpretation of the cultural history of the zombie.
Trade Review"This is a brilliant, highly original book that offers a wholly new perspective on the zombie figure as one that does not simply ‘possess an environmental history’ but which both mediates and contributes to the logics shaping global ecologies."
Sharae Deckard, University College Dublin
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Chapter 1: Greening Zombie Theory
Chapter 2: The Sugar-Zombie, Race and Cash-Crop Monocultures
Chapter 3: The Zombie-in-the-House, Nature and the Colonies
Chapter 4: Energy and the Emergence of the Petro-Zombie
Chapter 5: Zombies-of-Waste and Neoliberal Exhaustion
Conclusion
