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A History of Zombies as the Racial Other

10/23/2013

25 Comments

 
I admit to being somewhat surprised that my discussion yesterday of zombie narratives and race generated such a response, including Steve St. Clair’s claim that I was “race-baiting” in order to distract my audience…from what, I’m not sure—apparently the truth about the Sinclair world conspiracy. Since Halloween is coming up anyway, perhaps it’s worth some time to outline why I read The Walking Dead in terms of historical racial narratives. To do so, we need to go back to the beginning an understand the rise of the zombie in terms of the exotic racial Other.

The word “zombie” enters the English language in the early 1800s in close association with two concepts: devil worship and African revolts against white colonial rule. As early as 1808, a French novel made reference to African slaves believing in the “zombi,” which was described as a type of devil that the slaves, being inferior to white people, worship in their ignorance. In some African faiths, the word refers to a snake deity and was later applied to the divine essence, or soul, within the individual, which sorcerers can steal. This is the foundation for the concept of the soulless zombie of modern lore, the body absent its zombie-spirit. Later in the Victorian era, European scholars refined their early Satanic definition and suggested the zombie was a type of revenant. “Are these negroes fools or asses with their Zombi?” asked an 1839 short story called “The Unknown Painter.” The word can be found in association with racial panic as far back as the 1690s when black slaves in Brazil revolted against their Portuguese masters in an attempt to establish a black-run kingdom in Brazil. The kingdom, now forgotten, lasted for forty years until the Portuguese finally defeated it. The leader of this kingdom, and the elected monarch, went by the name Zombi (apparently in honor of the god) and linked the idea of the zombie to uprisings by restless black slaves and challenges to European hegemony.

The zombie was most prominent in Haiti, the first country to see a successful slave uprising that toppled a European colonial government. (Zombi merely ran a de facto state within a European colony.) But this only strengthened the connection between the mystical creature and slave uprisings—a situation that sent shudders down European spines, especially when the new dictator of northern Haiti, declaring himself a king, enslaved untold numbers of his countrymen to build himself a pleasure palace, Sans-Souci, caring not a whit how many hundreds died in the process.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the Zombi was willfully misconstrued in white circles as a wicked demon that caused Black people to revolt against their white superiors. Consider Grace Elizabeth King’s The Chevalier Grace de Triton (1891) in which a black person specifically claims that the Zombi, identified as a devil worshiped by blacks, causes her to be a wicked sinner, and that if only she were white she would not be consumed in sin:

That is the way! that is always the way! I tell Madame so. Zombi always gets ahead of God with me. Why did not God make me learn my catechism? If I had learned my catechism, I would have been in the room with my mistress; and I would not have heard the whistle, or I could not have come out if I had. But Zombi, he prevents my learning my catechism, he makes me put my mistress in a temper; she throws my catechism at my head, she orders me out of her room, and there I am in the kitchen, and the whistle comes; how could I know that the whistle was Master Alain’s? Zombi drives me around as if he were my master. Why does not Zombi go after my mistress? No! he is afraid of her; it’s only the poor negroes that he drives. God looks after Madame. He prevents her from sinning. Why does not God look after me? If I were white like Madame, God would look after me. How do I know what to do? God tells me to do things and Zombi tells me not; or Zombi tells me to do, and God tells me not. How can I tell what to do? Me, poor old Bambara? I can only tell afterward.

Lafcaido Hearn went to the Caribbean in search of the real meaning of the word zombie in the 1880s, and I have posted the results in my Library. At that time the zombie was something of a wonder-working demon that could take human form or not as it pleased and enjoyed scaring people and playing supernatural tricks. Hearn’s sources were adamant that these creatures were not dead people, for those were confined to their graves. The zombie was something else entirely. The disconnect between the Satanic being of Victorian imagination and the trickster folk creature of actual practice only widened after this point. The fictional zombie made almost a clean break from its traditional heritage.

So what does this have to do with our modern zombies?

Modern zombie stories come from a confluence of several threads. The first starts with William Seabrook, an alcoholic and depressive occultist, traveler, and writer, who sought transgressive horrors, largely among non-white people (though also Aleister Crowley), and reported them for the titillation of his upper class white audience. He went to Africa and reported on black cannibals, claiming to have partaken of their food himself, which tastes, he said, “like good, fully developed veal.” He went to Arabia and reported on devil worship among the Bedouin, and he went to Haiti, which he wanted to see because of his lifelong desire to explore voodoo, which he perceived as a type of occultism. His resulting book, The Magic Island (1929), described the cultes des mortes, and reported that Haitian wizards reanimated the dead to work in the fields, and that these were zombies. Seabrook described the Haitians as “blood-maddened, sex-maddened, god-maddened,” dancing and chanting in horrible rites of ecstasy and blood.

Here is the most important paragraph, which alters the Victorian zombie of Hearn into an explanation for Haitian slavery, apparently confusing symbolic explanations (i.e., “I have symbolically died because I am a slave”) for actual magic:

It seemed that while the zombie came from the grave, it was neither a ghost, nor yet a person who had been raised like Lazarus from the dead. The zombie, they say, is a soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life—it is a dead body which is made to walk and act and move as if it were alive. People who have the power to do this go to a fresh grave, dig up the body before it has had time to rot, galvanize it into movement, and then make of it a servant or slave, occasionally for the commission of some crime, more often simply as a drudge around the habitation or the farm, setting it dull heavy tasks, and beating it like a dumb beast if it slackens.

The book was illustrated with wickedly racist artwork by Alexander King. Here is the world’s first image of what zombies were supposed to look like: stereotypical black people marching in fearsome procession, led by a wizened voodoo practitioner and followed by Death on a mule.

Picture
Alexander King's illustration of a zombie procession for "The Magic Island" (1929).
What few today realize is that Seabrook was writing during a period of Haitian resistance to the American occupation of the country which had begun in 1915 and would last until 1934, and the Haitians themselves, unbeknownst to Seabrook, viewed zombies as an uncanny revival of colonial-era slave-holding practices, a symbolic expression of the dehumanizing effects of the colonial (and later capitalist) exploitation of black labor, as Gyllian Phillips explored in an essay for Generation Zombie. It is inextricably tied to colonialist and imperialist fears, and emerges in the context of Haitian resistance to American involvement in the country—an occupation most modern Americans know nothing about. The American government invaded Haiti to protect white interests from a group of Germans who had intermarried with native black Haitians in order to gain economic power over the island. Other white communities, especially the Americans but also the French, refused to integrate into the black-run state and used force of arms to maintain control over the island.

This is the origin point for the concept of the undead soulless and typically black corpse as a figure of horror. The success of The Magic Island led directly to White Zombie (1932), the horror movie based on Seabrook’s book. While the plot is essentially a remake of Dracula, the locus of horror shifts from the idea of the risen dead to the horror that a white woman could be taken by a half-caste voodoo master to serve among the black zombie slaves. The title pretty much gives away the central racial horror. Zombie movies down to 1968 would follow this pattern, exploring white people’s fear of the wild, unrestrained, often sexually aggressive Afro-Caribbean Other, playing on American stereotypes of black people as sexually inexhaustible savages with a lust for white women, a trope so ingrained in American culture that I trust I don’t need to illustrate it with examples. In these films, zombies were ravaging hordes of black people under the control of forces of satanic evil.

I am not the only person to see this. Kyle W. Bishop did graduate research on the racist and imperialist underpinnings of zombie narratives.

The second thread starts with George Romero, who did not start out to make a zombie movie.

Romero originally tried to make a science fiction comedy in the vein of Plan 9 from Outer Space, with human corpses serving as the aliens’ food. It was not to be, and instead he became taken with Richard Matheson’s vampire novel I Am Legend and wanted to make a film version without actually buying the film rights. (Matheson’s novel would also serve as the basis for The Omega Man where Charlton Heston learns that vampires are people, too.) In Night of the Living Dead (1968), Romero therefore transformed Matheson’s vampires into “ghouls,” flesh-eating monsters drawn from the Arabian Nights, the Gothic novel Vathek, and early twentieth century occultism (whence came the brain-eating trope), but here betraying their vampire origins by remaining risen corpses, albeit decayed ones. (The SF angle remained only in the alien virus hinted as the source of zombie outbreak.) The Arabian ghouls were creatures that “wander about the country making their lairs in deserted buildings and springing out upon unwary travellers whose flesh they eat” (Arabian Nights, Night 31).

Pointedly, these were not zombies in the traditional sense, nor did Romero call them zombies. Romero also made a black man the hero of his film, but this was fortuitous and not part of the plan. Duane Jones (“Ben”) refused to perform Romero’s original dialogue, which would have made him a stereotypically uneducated and impoverished black man. According to the actors, much of the story was improvised, including much of Jones’ role as hero. Romero, however, turned this improvisation into social commentary about race in America, with the zombies killed off by a racist sheriff’s posse, recalling the Civil Rights protests of the era. Romero later moved from racial commentary to economic commentary in his later zombie films, which tended to make the zombies symbols of capitalist tensions in society.

Romero’s ghouls became conflated with the black Haitian zombies—largely after the 1980s and Wade Davis’s famous research into zombies, for a distinction is still seen in the 1970s and early 1980s literature—because both were speaking to issues surrounding what reactionary audiences perceived as uprisings against the old social order. Crazed voodoo priestesses with their armies of black undead merged with the ghouls who rose up to attack the symbols of the American social order. The Haitian zombie is largely forgotten in favor of the ghoul. Outside of Romero’s work, zombies are typically hordes of violent savages, usually in an urban environment, who attack a small group of largely white, usually upper-class survivors in order to make them part of their poor, oppressed teeming masses. Here the Other becomes the urban poor, who are disproportionately racial minorities, threatening the wealthy suburban elite.

The third strand is directly related to The Walking Dead, and that is the American Western narrative of Native American attacks on white settlers.

These narratives, which were wildly popular in nineteenth century pulp fiction and twentieth century cinema, generally posited a West where noble white people are spread thin across a desolate landscape where teeming hordes of violent, savage Indians could at any time erupt from the landscape to kill white people. In film, such stories began as early as The Battle of Elderbrush Gulch (1914) by the famously racist director D. W. Griffith (who eventually felt bad about his cinematic racism). John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) depicted Native people as bloody savages who attack without mercy and rape white women for sport. Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) had earlier set the template for the depiction, and both films contributed to zombie movies the trope that the endless waves of savage attackers needed to be shot. The kill shots used to put down nearly-rabid Indians are indistinguishable from the kill shots needed to put down modern zombies, for which there is no traditional folkloric need to shoot.

Here’s a clip of one stereotypical Hollywood Indian attack. As you can see, in its cinematography, blocking, and action, it is identical to your standard Hollywood zombie attack. The savage other attacks the heroes, who circle the wagons and shoot them dead. They keep coming, however, and hand-to-hand combat ensues. Some heroes are wounded, but the attack is repelled—though the attackers are not vanquished.

Most titillating of all were the capture and abduction narratives, popular since colonial days, which posited that white women and children could be taken by Native tribes, brainwashed or sexually dominated into joining them, and made to surrender their virtue and their claim to white civilization in favor of the savage Other. Parallel to White Zombie, two books called White Squaw from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, pretty much say it all. Captivity narratives are the subject of much scholarly work, so I am not going out on a limb to suggest this was a popular genre.

The Walking Dead purposely marries Western tropes and post-Romero zombie mythology and thus draws on both (though without taking the zombie name—that’s reserved for pop culture, as though conceding the troublesome past of the name). The series opens just like a Western, with a sheriff riding into town with his gun and on his horse. No clearer Western movie stereotype could be found. Although the show undermines Rick’s authority as Western-style sheriff and his ability to impose order on the lawless, besieged land, it nonetheless does so in the context of the Western. The stories the show tells are Western stories, even though the show is set in the Deep South of Georgia. The wagon-train-style trek across a deserted landscape (season one and part of season two) is a Western staple, as is the siege of an embattled homestead (season two), the encounter with an outlaw who promises order (season three), or the defense of the fort (season four).

In using these Western tropes, how are we to read the zombies except as substitutes for the savage Native Americans of the older Western narratives? As in the capture narratives and the white-zombie stories, the ultimate fear is being taken by the savages and losing one’s identity, culture, and claim to civilization in the face of the ravages of the uncivilized Other. Compare this, though, to Syfy’s Defiance, which is also a Western in form but recognizes the racial symbolism of the narrative and incorporates Native American characters within the community to forestall this, though also at the expense of having a genuine siege narrative.

You may argue that the producers of The Walking Dead, zombie fiction writers, and modern zombie-killing video games are not racist and simply view the monsters as “cannon-fodder,” a faceless enemy of no particular identity. This is a bit like the claims that Nazis are now “generic villains” who can be deployed in any narrative without the weight of their fascist and anti-Semitic baggage impacting the audience’s appreciation of the story. The zombie narrative as we have it today was jury-rigged from racist and imperialist fears of black culture and religion and grafted onto the Western Indian-attack narrative. Even if one does not mean it to, that history carries over into the story, both in form and in function.

Unlike European folklore monsters—the werewolf, the vampire, etc.—which have a patina of age and deep pagan roots (the ancients wrote of both), the modern zombie story is a recent invention, of known origin, and intimately tied to America’s experience dealing with the racial Other both on the frontier and in occupied territories. Narratives that utilize the zombie can undermine it, react against it, or embrace it—but they cannot divorce themselves from the creature’s origins any more than one can remove Egypt and Egyptian resurrection beliefs from tales of vengeful Pharaohs’ mummies, even if Brendan Fraser has no idea what the Pyramid Texts actually say.

Therefore, when I say that zombie tales carry this racial, colonialist, and imperialist baggage, this is not race-baiting and it is not an idle opinion based on the fact that zombies’ rotten flesh is brown but derives from centuries of history that I have researched and evaluated before opining about.

25 Comments
Brent
10/23/2013 08:28:24 am

Question:

At what point do you think a monster like the zombie and its associated tropes is able to cast off its roots? I might argue that zombies are especially (but clearly not exclusively) popular with younger people, who have no familiarity with the tropes' (such as hordes of "savages" attacking the wagon train) origins?

I know that for those that have seen those films that originated those tropes, Zombies must certainly evoke the same images/feelings, even if they were not aware of it. But I'm sure many of the younger people who enjoy Zombies wouldn't even have those memories to be subconsciously brought up.

Do you think it might be its own thing for them as viewers, even if it wouldn't be for the creators of the films/games?

I don't argue that Zombies don't, by their very nature, play on fears of the Other/ ignorant masses, or at least some sort of power fantasy...but for the viewers possibly unaware-even subconsciously- of the racial roots...does that Other have to be a racial one?

That kind of rambled on...sorry lol.

Thoughts, anyone?

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Jason Colavito link
10/23/2013 09:13:04 am

That's a great question. Undoubtedly with time symbols change meaning. We read stories of Zeus but no longer associate him viscerally with a cult complex focused on animal sacrifice, so that additional layer of meaning has faded away. That said, while young people may not recognize the reused topes in zombie stories (just as a sad number don't really have any idea what the Nazis did), they are bound to encounter them in viewing Westerns, or looking up the history zombies, etc. In that sense, the meanings matter because they will keep coming back to the surface (like zombies!) even if we don't intentionally go searching for them.

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Erik G
10/23/2013 09:45:59 am

The youngsters I know who love zombies were introduced to them through video games like Resident Evil. I suspect they love zombies because it's okay to kill them as they're not human any more and dead already. Also they're ugly. Few of these youngsters read books or watch old movies. They watch The Walking Dead but I doubt the Western connection means anything to them. So yes, symbols change meaning over time. Look at what's happened to vampires over the last thirty years. And werewolves. And zombies are now becoming creatures of romance, as in the movie "Warm Bodies" this year. This pleases me immensely, because it might just mean the zombie craze is about over.

spookyparadigm
10/23/2013 11:25:43 am

Erik G, I agree that this is where much of the zombie revival began (it's way past that now, but that's where it began, and why [they were also easy for AI to control in games] IMO).

But those video games were just emulations and adaptations of post-Romero zombies. So all of the history is still there. And they appeal because of the deeper cultural myths Jason has laid out.

Nearly every zombie story today, certainly the popular ones, are a riff on Dawn of the Dead and to a lesser extent Day of the Dead. They're all post-apoc stories, and in America, post-Apoc is soundly in the Western tradition, and does relate to the tropes mentioned and others. In Britain, post-Apoc is about decline of the social order as existential crisis. Look at the artilleryman in War of the Worlds, who schemes about living in a new world without the old strictures. That guy is a lunatic in Wells. In American post-Apoc, that guy is the standard hero (see also Rand with her dreams of survivalists and post-Apoc that once can see so strongly on the populist American right in recent years) in a standard tale.

Brent
10/24/2013 01:36:07 am

There are some parts of this I agree with, but I mostly don't think the undertones are racial any more. However, I do have some thoughts on the Other and the intrinsic meanings of the monster/ tropes.

I think that the idea of Zombies being an Other is probably true. Ignorant, hostile masses against a small, educated band is something that appeals to people in the very Human sense that I'm right and you're wrong, I'm good and you aren't. So I agree that Zombies are an Other, and I acknowledge that originally that Other was a racial one (Your excellent article established that beyond any real argument for me). But for me, this is where Thane and Big Mike's points regarding subjectivity come in.

Art is subjective, but as Humans, I think we certainly can all feel the same sense (roughly, and this comes with some exceptions for more abstract art). In that sense, I agree that "Meaning still exists" and that its general direction is somewhat apparent.

But for me, that intrinsic, more apparent meaning that shines through is fear of the Other. The subjective part is what that Other is, I would say. For the time of the Zombie's creation, it was clearly racial. But now? Now, I would say it's about anything one would want it to be: a political Other, religious Other, or cultural Other.

I can certainly see how one would detest anything that promotes fear of the Other: it is a negative force in the world- period. I simply think that it has come far enough to cast off its undertones- at least in the sense of those undertones being racial. Honestly, I may be underestimating young people (I hope I am), but I don't think they really research it much, and while the Westerns they have seen were no doubt influenced by the older, more racist ones, those too have been removed by at least one degree, lessening the subconscious influence of viewing them, or so I would think. I'm a gamer, and I know a lot of dudes that just like Zombies from The Walking Dead and the Zombie mode of Call of Duty- they honestly haven't got a clue about context.

That said, I'm going to shoot my opinion in the foot a little here. Because while the viewers- younger ones at the very least- may not be aware of the racial subtexts (even if they are subconsciously aware of a fear of (some) Other), the same cannot be true of the filmmakers.

I could see an argument that the filmmakers know enough about their subject matter (movies...or just fiction in general) for the original racial subtext to resurface in their own process of creation, but I don't think it exists for the viewer, without (a lot of) help from the creators of the story.

The Other J.
10/24/2013 02:31:05 am

Brent: "I might argue that zombies are especially (but clearly not exclusively) popular with younger people, who have no familiarity with the tropes' (such as hordes of "savages" attacking the wagon train) origins?"

Jason: "That said, while young people may not recognize the reused topes in zombie stories (just as a sad number don't really have any idea what the Nazis did), they are bound to encounter them in viewing Westerns, or looking up the history zombies, etc."

Unless and until you can guarantee that a number of generations of North Americans won't encounter Western narratives or their tropes, slave narrative or their tropes, and/or race narratives or their tropes, then you won't be able to divorce the zombie narrative or zombie narrative tropes from its history.

I do wonder, though, how the trope is understood and experienced in other countries. No doubt Westerns and the history of the zombie film has reached other shores, but places like China and Norway and Tanzania don't really have the same historical experience North Americans have with the historical background to Westerns and zombie narratives. Do they just displace the Indian or black zombie with their own versions of savage outsiders? Or do they experience the narratives in completely different ways? For instance, I could see Australian Aboriginal people appropriating the zombie narrative but displacing the savage hordes onto the waves of European immigrants who displaced them and tried to breed them out of existence (almost the exact opposite of the native taking the white woman and making her savage).

kennethos
10/23/2013 10:07:25 am

Jason:
I've been a Walking Dead fan since 2004...with issue 7 of the comic. It's been described by Robert Kirkman (the book's creator) as a "never-ending zombie movie", where he's able to address various issues or stories he wants to. Current culture, living life instead of living, etc.
He's addressed many, many themes in the book. Like Romero, he uses zombies as a prism to look at society, a la Harry Potter using a magical school in the vein of British boarding school stories. Yet, it may be going out on a limb to insert, or inject, racism, or even zombies as a "racial other", into this, unless Kirkman himself, or one of the producers or writers of the TV series, has said as much.
Your research is accurate, granted, but if the comic and TV series are divorced from the historical basis, then what? There seems to be a lot of unproven assumptions here.

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Jason Colavito link
10/23/2013 10:15:52 am

This is an open question in literary and film criticism: Whose interpretation governs the understanding of a text? Is the author's intention the governing vision, or can a text have meaning beyond the author's intent? In Paradise Lost Milton's intention was to tell a pious story about the Fall to justify God's way to humankind, yet since its publication critics have viewed it as making Satan an epic hero. When an ignorant kid spray paints a swastika onto a wall, does it still communicate Nazism even if the kid doesn't know it as anything but a "bad" symbol?

Regardless of what the creators of the Walking Dead (and in the above I was referring to the TV series rather than the comic, unread by me) intended, I don't think you can divorce the text from its historical antecedents. It's like trying to understand David Icke's Reptilians without dealing with the anti-Semitic origins of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion from which he borrowed so much of his conspiracy.

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kennethos
10/23/2013 12:11:52 pm

Your concerns are understandable, in the grand scheme of things. You may be interested in reading Kirkman's thoughts on all of this, recorded in the first couple of graphic novel trade paperbacks, which ask some very thought-provoking. (They should be available in many public library systems, and are pretty inexpensive on Amazon and WalMart, as well.) By all means, the TV series are comic are now two different beasts, with similar sets of characters (in the comics, Andrea is still alive, contra the TV series). The comic addresses themes of survival and meaning of life. The TV series seems to be addressing some other themes.
Given how Walking Dead (the comic) has told its stories thus far, I don't see The Other, or racial issues, as being any of the foci, unless it's deeply buries (possible).

The Other J.
10/24/2013 03:07:40 am

kennethos

I'll give Kirkman this: The humans in his comic seem more diverse than the humans in the television series. There are more ethnic minorities, people of differing gender preference, gender is less determinative of power, etc.

But Kirkman -- and anyone who does a zombie narrative -- can't escape the imagery the waves of zombies present and the social history of that imagery. And the fact remains that even if kids these days are first exposed to zombie narratives via video games and other media where there isn't so much of a racial component, there will come a time when those kids see invading Indian hordes from a Western, or a scene from Serpent and the Rainbow, or that early Night Stalker episode with a black rampaging zombie, and then the images become merged and reinforced.

(Seriously, go look up the second episode of "Kolchak: The Night Stalker" -- it's all about a Haitian grandmother re-animating her dead grandson as a zombie to take revenge on his killers. It's loaded with the kind of racialized imagery noted above, and that was 1974, post-Romero. The way Kolchak has to stop the zombie is by filling his mouth with salt and sewing his lips shut, which even today is a disturbing image.)

The thing about history is it doesn't care if you're aware of it or not. It's a little like saying just because Serbs weren't killing Jews doesn't mean their ethnic cleansing efforts can't be viewed through or weren't influenced by the history of Nazi Germany, or that just because the Nazis weren't democratic their ethnic cleansing efforts weren't influenced by or shouldn't be viewed through the history of eugenics in the United States. (I know I just risked breaking Godwin's Law, but it was the first example that came to mind.)

And I don't think being ignorant of history is exculpatory. Look at all the conspiracy theories that get bounced around today and deconstructed on this website. Those sorts of theories are easier to promulgate when the history of the subject matter is either accidentally or deliberately ignored, or worse, deliberately misconstrued. And that's kind of what was happening with the commentator in the original piece Jason put up that started this zombie discussion -- he was purposely misconstruing a specific narrative (zombies) in order to re-cast its meaning as a political threat to his viewers, despite what the actual history of that narrative may suggest.

spookyparadigm
10/23/2013 11:17:25 am

And then there is possibly the most obvious zombie-indigenous of recent SF, the Reavers of Firefly. Yeah, Whedon SF's them up a bit in the movie, but they are for all intents and purposes, menacing Indians straight out of a traditional western tale, complete with the fear of being turned by capture (and unlike with the zombie, it is cultural/psychological). They aren't undead, but they are about as close as you're going to get to insane cannibal zombies who can still pilot starships.

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Jesse M.
7/12/2018 07:16:02 pm

Even though the movie gave them more of a science fictiony explanation in-universe, on a meta level I thought the Reaver raid on the isolated frontier town made it even more obvious that Whedon was drawing on tropes about marauding Indians from old Westerns, whereas in the show we only saw an isolated Reaver who behaved more like a killer from a slasher movie.

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Thane
10/23/2013 12:52:44 pm

I think it was Steven King that said "People love to be scared."

Colonial fiction, especially tales of strange cultural practices....whether it be sexual a la Richard Burton (adventurer, not actor) or various penny-dreadfuls...would always be popular with the folks back home, regardless of economic situation. The stories had less to do with racism as we understand it today (abject hatred of the "other") and more to do with profiting by telling tall tales and boosting one's own reputation.

In the 1800's spiritualism was all the rage and people had a belief and a fear of the supernatural....especially of dark forces. Forces that threatened, corrupted, and that could destroy the pastoral goodness to which most people aspired.

so, in the vein that "people like to be scared", one thing certain to terrify is the threat you cannot defeat. The threat that resists your technology and guns. The threat that is alien to your personal experience. Native hoards swarming your caravan can be fought off...but creatures not of this world or under the power of some dark supernatural force. Now, that's scary because so much is at stake and you could succumb. You could no longer be in control of yourself....you could no longer exist.

As for the modern incarnations, symbolism and deeper meaning, are, for the most part, absent. It's about taking a popular trope and reinventing it. Night of the Living Dead certainly had a lot to do with re-awakening the Zombie horror tale but I also recall reading in the 1970's and '80's tales of Santeria and voodoo outside of "horror entertainment" and more of a "true story" construct. There were also role playing games that grasped for ANYTHING that could be a challenge in a dungeon-crawl or other adventure without there being any deeper meaning than they are an obstacle to be confronted and overcome. The current zombie fetish has been propelled by the publishing world when they took up the vampire hunter trope, which the author that wrote the first one or two has stated that it was a lark...just to play with established stories like Pride and Prejudiced...and a way to make money.

Like the piece of fanfiction I read wherein Bertie Wooster and Jeeves encounter Cthulu.

So, in short, there may have been some cultural otherness on display in colonialist fiction but in the mid 20th century to today, not so much.

Kids today, when they aren't loitering on my lawn (it's a joke, get it?), aren't reading much by way of contemporary literature and certainly aren't cracking open early and pre-20th century works nor history books. They are responding only to the pop-culture without any deep thought on obtuse symbolism or criticism, IMHO.

Sometimes fun is just meant to be fun.

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Jason Colavito link
10/23/2013 01:04:31 pm

I respect your view, but I respectfully disagree. Appealing to the audience's ignorance doesn't really wash away the background of these stories, and even at their basic core (us vs. mindless savage horde) reproduce the mental world that gave rise to the earlier imperialist-colonialist version, with a small, embattled in-group defending "civilization" against the out-group, even if it is not explicitly identifying the out-group with specific out-groups from past centuries. Even when the author doesn't intend to impose meaning, meaning still exists.

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Thane
10/23/2013 04:39:42 pm

"Even when the author doesn't intend to impose meaning, meaning still exists."

You mean subjective meaning exists. Sure, we all impart our own interpretation to what we read, see, and hear. It doesn't necessarily reflect the author's meaning.

Just because something may have been rooted in some past philosophy or world view does not mean that it's use today holds the same meaning and context. If the audience is ignorant of the context and past interpretation of the item, then it has no bearing on the audience's view and enjoyment of the item.

I like Brent's question above. When does the root of sonething cease to matter?

Things and interpretations and definitions change ALL the time. I lament the appropriate of words from their classic meaning. Gay no longer really means what it once did. From being a word related to joy, it now means sexual preference.

Personally, I think literary critics and others tend to read far more into things than is needed.....especially in our grievance driven culture these days.

Things are usually much simpler than some believe.

I do respect your encyclopedic knowledge, Jason, and I respect your analytical skills.....but it would be rare and unusual to agree on all things!

BigMike
10/23/2013 08:09:34 pm

"Even when the author doesn't intend to impose meaning, meaning still exists."

I'm not sure I can entirely agree with that statement. I think it really depends on the author and audience. The great literary masterminds do put a great deal of emphasis on virtually every choice they make about the details in their books, from the food and wine served in a given scene to which hand the villain tends to favor, for instance. The great authors could be telling us that this character or that is the bad guy by subtly hinting that the guy is left handed. Those authors are the type that expect an audience to understand those hints and draw meaning from them.

Hollywood script writers are not great authors.

That sentence had to stand alone. It's true though. television serial writers and movie screenwriters do not have the time to polish every last detail the way some of the great authors do. I'm sure, being a writer yourself, that you know the difference in quality that comes between the daily grind work and long-term book projects.
The audience is also a factor. You, and most of the great literary authors, can expect a certain amount of intelligence from your audience. That just isn't so of Hollywood, who are just trying to catch as many people as possible so they can shove commercials down our throats.
In the case of mass produced entertainment, sometimes (as Freud would say) a cigar is just a cigar. It's the quickest way to pound out the next episode so the actors can get to work.

As for the history of a something following it... well, there are a lot of things that have historically verifiable etymologies deeply based in racism or imperialism or socialism or other objectionable material that are so common and accepted today that only an expert in the subject could inform you of where it comes from.

Take the phrases "piece of cake" and "cake walk" for instance. Those are both incredibly common turns of phrase used by millions everyday to indicate that something is easy. I doubt that even a tiny fraction of those people know that those phrases are incredibly racist.

The Other J.
10/24/2013 04:03:44 am

"Even when the author doesn't intend to impose meaning, meaning still exists."

I want to weigh in on this, because I have some examples where this matters. There's loads of scholarship showing how subconscious influences can work their way into a narrative whether the author realizes it, recognizes it, or not. Authorial intention just doesn't hold the weight we tend to confer on it. If it did, people wouldn't see every conspiracy under the sun in Stanley Kubrick films. Whether you're talking about Cleanth Brookes, Roland Barthes, T.S. Eliot, or W.K. Wimsatt, there's loads of criticism proving that to limit interpretation to authorial intention is a fallacy, and the more salient meanings are often the ones that weren't consciously intended. No need to get into the scholarship here, but it's important to recognize that just because an author doesn't intend a meaning doesn't entail that the meaning doesn't exist and it doesn't entail that others won't read it that way, even if the author didn't intend it as such.

One example is with the history of teaching Huckleberry Finn in high schools. Debates still go on today about whether it's a racist book or not, and whether teaching it reinforces racist ideas among kids or challenges them (and that's more salient in the South). Did Twain intend his novel to be racist? Most would say no, but that's not how everyone interprets the text, despite what Twain says.

A similar example occurred with Dave Chappelle's show on Comedy Central. His entire comedic career has been built on subverting racist scaffolding from within, and it's carefully crafted. He's consciously following in the footsteps of people like Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce. But Chappelle's Show reached such massive popularity so quickly that he couldn't manage the audience reaction like he could working a room. An example of this: My wife teaches high school, and at the height of his show, they had a little trouble with kids -- white and black -- constantly yelling out catch phrases from the show, often repeating race-baiting phrases that were inappropriate, and when said by white students, offensive to black students. Chappelle has stated in interviews that he pulled the plug on the show when he heard crew laughing at the wrong parts of the jokes, laughing AT instead of WITH, and he realized he'd lost control of the room. He feared -- with some evidence -- that his intention of subverting racist ideas from within was failing, and his show had actually begun reinforcing them, even though that wasn't his intention.

Years ago I interviewed the comic artist Joe Sacco about his graphic novel Palestine. Sacco is a journalist who presents much of his work in graphic form, and Palestine was the result of his two years interviewing people in West Bank and the Gaza Strip about the conflict in the early 1990's. In a section of of the book, he gets separated from his interpreter during a protest that turns into a riot. He was in a taxi, they were surrounded by protesters, and he had no grip on the language or what was going on. The splash pages for that section featured a number of narrative boxes that, when you stepped back from the page, were arranged in a question mark formation. There were three (almost four) pages like that. When I asked Sacco about those pages, he started to laugh and said he'd never seen that before, but he'd take credit for it. He also agreed that the imagery was appropriate, even though it wasn't intended.

Most of you probably saw the finale of Breaking Bad, and if you haven't yet but plan to, skip this paragraph. There's a scene where Walter White is visiting Skyler in her new (old) home, and he's standing in the kitchen while she sits at the kitchen table smoking a cigarette. Skyler is of two minds in this scene -- she doesn't trust Walter, but comes to believe him for the first time in months when he admits he liked doing what he did. In that scene, the duality of Skyler's opinions are visually reinforced by her distorted reflection in the glass of the microwave oven sitting on the counter directly across from the kitchen table she sits at. The editor of the episode congratulated Vince Gilligan for getting such a symbolic shot -- except Gilligan hadn't realized he got that reflection. It was a happy accident that the author hadn't intended, yet perfectly conveyed the meaning of the scene.

So Robert Kirkman's walkers or Joss Whedon's reavers may not have been intended by the authors to convey the racialized history of Other in the New World, but that doesn't mean the images don't bear the weight of their origins, or that the audience will or won't interpret them through that history. However, the problems start when unintended meaning CAN be found, and if left unaddressed, open the text up to contrary, ridiculous or even dangerous interpretations -- like claiming Kirkman's zombies are preparing Americans to accept socialism, and that's something we should concern ourselves with.

Shane Sullivan
10/24/2013 07:39:56 am

The Other J,

"However, the problems start when unintended meaning CAN be found, and if left unaddressed, open the text up to contrary, ridiculous or even dangerous interpretations ..."

This is all too true, but sadly, in an age where people are citing the decorative patterns on cookies as evidence of transatlantic conspiracies, it's unavoidable.

Joe
10/23/2013 03:18:17 pm

Jason, I first have to compliment you on the research and explanation into the origins of the zombie in horror and fictional literature. I understood that “zombies” had a racial origin but did not know the entire story and I appreciate the extensive work in compiling the information in your blog. But with all of the extensive work on the history of zombies I think fixating on the origins of the creation ignores the purpose of the creature. Yes I agree 100% that this is a racist origin to our current zombie creature but the origin of an idea or a fictional creation does not mean that creation maintain its original purpose. The simplistic nature of the zombie, in its single minded behavior, makes it a creature easily adaptable to symbolize any large social commentary that the author intends. As you state the original symbol might be the racial fears of the Victorian elite but that can change to communist fears of the mid sixties, to the societal fears of our present day. I do not think the current writers of zombie literature and media have a racial intent. I still agree it is important to recognize the origins of the zombie creation and if you are going to use the zombie you should understand where it came from and the implications of the creature.

I for one am not a fan of zombies and have watched some of the Walking Dead and found it to be mediocre at best. To me in general zombies are a lazy villain, they do not require any character development and are an easy cop out character. This being said in the right writers hand they can be successfully utilized as solid social commentary in their . I am a big fan of science fiction but as anyone can tell you, the best science fiction is when the fiction part is well done.

Not to jump around but it is sometimes hard to state an argument in a commentary section of a blog. But looking at your origins of our current zombie creature I do see your opinion on racist undertones but I think it is more then simple racism at play. Instead of just a black hordes attacking the white, I see more of an exploitation or exaggeration of foreign cultures. That Seabrook took his travels around the world and exaggerated his experiences for his Victorian audience. At the time those buyers and audience in Victorian Europe were intrigued by foreign people and the mystery of their culture. It was easy for Seabrook to play up these differences and exaggerate his observations for I am sure personal gain. So in this case where you see racism I see exploitation of others, I do agree there are racial undertones but I think this more goes to the general attitude of Europeans of the time.

I think that if someone wanted to they could find racism in other science fiction movies if they look hard enough. Be it the Sand People of Tatooine in a very similar western trophe in Star Wars. To the overt racial sterotypes that happens in Avatar. I can even make a stretch in stating that Starship Troopers has racial undertones. But I think a more accurate argument is the universal idea of an individual person or group against foreign masses. This seems to be a common premise in many SF stories and prior to that in pulp fiction. The western theme story is used over and over again in SF, does that mean that these SF stories have the same racial undertones or is it more likely that the basic story structure is a popular structure that is being adopted by SF writers? That prior to the Victorian and western stories that these same themes of the known hero against the mass “others” plays as a cultural constant in fiction?

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Brent
10/24/2013 01:41:05 am

Just wanted to post a separate (non-dissenting) comment to say that this article was a really interesting read! It was both informative and entertaining, I enjoyed it greatly.

Also, its nice to read an article where I don't get all nerd-ragey at Scott Wolter or Daniken or Discover/ History, etc. Lol.

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Gunn
10/24/2013 04:47:28 am

It looks to me like zombies can be very real. I watched a program a few years ago that showed how the Puffer Fish is the primary factor in creating real zombies. So, in other words, the modern scare is rooted in real zombies.

Beyond this, there is the Devil connection. The issue isn't entirely racial...its also spiritual, in the sense that many people believe the making of zombies is devilish, at the root. That's why voodoo is so frightening to some people, those who believe it is real and a physical and spiritual danger.

But of course the whole image and nature of the zombie has changed, in movies, from the original context, wherein the victim was turned into a dull slave as social punishment. Apparently, this really did occur. So zombies were (are?) real, but their gruesome image and nature changed. For example, modern zombies appear to be hungry, while the occasional, real zombies were probably fed at least as well as livestock.

http://www2.webster.edu/~corbetre/haiti/bookreviews/davis1.htm

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Only Me
10/24/2013 12:57:14 pm

And this illustrates the first and second halves of "The Serpent and the Rainbow".

At first, the protagonist is trying to find a scientific basis behind the zombie, before becoming embroiled in the supernatural ritualistic power of voodoo in the latter half of the movie.

Overall, it's still one of my favorites.

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Sean
11/7/2013 08:18:01 pm

Some tangential thoughts that this thread brought up. I've recently been reading quite a few 1930s American comics, since I was curious about the origins of those characters, like Superman and Batman, which became the most famous faces in the world of comics.

The fear of the racial Other is an overwhelming theme through many of the comics. It becomes tiresome how often the heroic white explorers in Africa/Asia/South America or any other undifferentiated corner of the primitive, non-white world encounter a white girl about to be sacrificed by the savage natives. Scheming yellow men (drawn with actual yellow skin) plotting the downfall of white civillisation are another common scheme.

Oddly enough, though, this narrative is mostly absent from the western comics - there are no stories reminiscent of The Searchers. Indians are rarely featured - the bad guys are usually rustlers or nefarious businessmen trying to force the ranchers off their land. When Indians do appear, it's often in a patronising sidekick role. The one racial category which is treated as almost universally evil, for reasons I don't quite understand, appears when the setting moves up to Canada - the halfbreed. The halfbreed is always of French ancestry, and usually called Pierre or Henri.

I don't have a general point here, it's just an odd reflection on shifting racial stereotypes.

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Jason Colavito link
11/7/2013 10:36:10 pm

The literary Western as we know it today grows out of Owen Wister's Virginian, which wasn't the cowboys-and-Indians narrative we now associate with Westerns. The Western movies that used that trope (in search of action to depict on screen) derived it more from the British colonial narratives about savage Africans and (sub-continental) Indians besieging and attacking British positions.

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Anonymous
10/19/2014 10:15:08 am

I just wanted to inform you that you have a grammatical error in your first sentence. I did not read the rest. *generated

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