Postracial Fantasies and Zombies

On the Racist Apocalyptic Politics Devouring the World

Eric King Watts

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9780520403772
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520403796
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

This book understands the postracial as a genre—like the zombie apocalypse—that signals a disturbance in society that is felt as terrifying and exciting. The postracial is repetitive and reproduces blackened biothreat bodies, rituals of securitization, and fantasies of the reclamation of white masculine sovereignty. Eric King Watts examines key moments when Blackness became an object of knowledge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, preparing the "scientific" and philosophical ground for interpreting zombie lore. The book treats the "Greater Caribbean" as a transformative space in which an antiblack infrastructure arose and interrogates the US's militarized domination of Haiti that was the context in which the zombie emerged. Watts traces variations of the form and function of the zombie to contemplate how it matters to our contemporary struggles with racism and pandemic policies.

Table of contents

• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Subvention
• Dedication
• Publisher’s Note
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. “Name Something You Know about Zombies”
• 2. Haiti’s Postcolonial “Shadows”: The Magic Island and White Zombie
• 3. “It Was an Accident. The Whole Movie Was an Accident”: The Perverse Postracial in Night of the Living Dead
• 4. “Zombies Are Real”
• Conclusion: Blackened Death and Zombie Relations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index