The Anthropocene and the Undead

Cultural Anxieties in the Contemporary Popular Imagination

Simon Bacon

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781978788374
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Anthropocene and the Undead describes how our experience of an increasingly erratic environment and the idea of the undead are more closely linked than the obvious zombie horde signaling the end of the world. In fact, as described here, much of how we understand the anthropocene both conceptually and in practice involves undead entities from the past that will not die, undead traumas that rise up and consume the world, and undead temporalities that can never end. Fifteen original essays by cultural and anthropological experts such as Kyle William Bishop, Nils Bubandt, Johan Höglund, and Steffen Hantke, among others, study the nature of humanity's ongoing complicated relationship to the environment via the concept of the undead. In doing so, The Anthropocene and the Undead sheds invaluable light on adjacent concepts such as the Capitalocene, Necrocene, Disanthropocene, Post-anthropocene, and the Symbiocene to trace real and imagined trajectories of our more-than-human selves into undead and undying futures.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Undead Identity in the Anthropocene
• Chapter 1: (Un)Death of the Father: Self-Sacrificing Paternity in Modern Zombie Narratives
• Chapter 2: Undeath, Theatricality, and the Ecogothic in DC Moore’s Common (2017)
• Chapter 3: Maggie in the Necrocene
• Part II: Undead Spaces and “Zones” of the Anthropocene
• Chapter 4: The Uncanny Valley of the Anthropocene: Short Stories about the Undead under the Brightest of Lights
• Chapter 5: Mutants and Tourists: Horror Film, Sacrifice Zones, and Chernobyl Diaries (2012)
• Chapter 6: A Panic on the 4th of July: Municipal Malfeasance, Mutation, and Monstrosity in Barry Levinson’s The Bay (2012)
• Part III: The Anthropocene and the End of “Time”
• Chapter 7: “Dying All the Time”: The Future as the Extended Present and the Zombification of History in the Anthropocene
• Chapter 8: Avenging the Anthropocene: Returning the Dead to Life while Destroying the Planet in The Avengers Films
• Chapter 9: “To Remember Forever to Forget”: Into Eternity and the Anti-Anthropocene
• Part IV: The Disantnropocene
• Chapter 10: “You’re Next!”: The Enemy Within and the End of the Anthropocene as Seen in Adaptations of “Who Goes There?” and The Body Snatchers
• Chapter 11: Nonconsensual Eco-sex: A Guided Meditation to the Permeable Membrane
• Chapter 12: Back from the Dead: Tailings Ponds in the Albertan Oil Sands Mining Operations
• Part V: The Post-Anthropocene, the Symbiocene, and Undead Futures
• Chapter 13: Post-Anthropocenic Undying Futures: The Ecocritical Dystopian Posthuman in Lai’s The Tiger Flu and Bacigalupi’s “The People of Sand and Slag”
• Chapter 14: “‘Cause tonight is the night| When two become one”: Stranger Things, Parasitism, Assimilation, and the Abject
• Chapter 15: After the End: The Post-Anthropocene Future of Endzeit
• Index
• About the Contributors