Politics of the Living Dead: Race and Exceptionalism in the Apocalypse

Fishel, Stefanie; Wilcox, Lauren

doi:10.1177/0305829817712819

Cited by 16 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…The relationship between the checkpoint, borders and asymmetric security apparatus has a broad literature, with paradigmatic cases such as Israel’s radical militarisation of Palestinian lands (see, among others, Hammami, 2010, 2015; Kotef and Amir, 2007, 2015; Rijke and Minca, 2018); Europe’s biopolitical response to refugee arrivals (Aradau and Tazzioli, 2020; Fishel and Wilcox, 2017; Sigona, 2018; Vaughan-Williams, 2015); and the Mexico-United States history of border policing (Andreas, 2011; Boyce and Chambers, 2021; Castañeda and Melo, 2019). These authors have aligned with a broader interpretation of what checkpoints signify and how their operational logic warps urban and social traits.…”

Section: Spatialising the Checkpoint Dispositivementioning

confidence: 99%

Checkpoint urbanism: Violent infrastructures and border stigmas in the Juárez border region

Martén¹,

Boano

2021

Urban Studies

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As Popitz (2017) argues, violence is one component of the great economy of world history, an option permanently open to human activity. In Ciudad Juárez, right at the border between the United States and Mexico, this notion explains the fundamental incongruity that characterises the region: a booming industrial productive model operating in parallel with an international crime and violence hotspot that is also a coveted criminal passageway. This paper will argue that official and criminal checkpoints designed for border-crossing, have had a transformative spatial role when considered across the dimensions of infrastructure and stigma, triggering a material/symbolic tension. We argue that their location and accessibility determine the exposure of nearby communities to economic growth but also violent entrepreneurship – the illegal crossing of goods and people still remains a constant characteristic of the region, not only as part of a criminal enterprise but as a viable livelihood. The ways in which the region of Juárez develops and grows also determines how trafficking and illegal practices are established; rules and regulations that provide territorial parameters for what is open and transparent are equally referential to what is clandestine and devious. The tensions brought by the border’s geopolitical value have amplified the value of infrastructure and its practical ownership. The international border operates as a line that is barrier, social divider, landmark, policy-bridge, filtering mechanism and trafficking obstacle. Under this permanent state of tension, the checkpoints provide a physical structure to the transit flows and a sovereign interruption. Across this urbanism, the checkpoint surroundings acquire a magnetic significance, due to the resulting transit dynamics and the surveillance deterrents at the core of their function. Furthermore, their dual nature – official and criminal – has branded the region as a criminal outpost, stigmatising the people inhabiting it, and perpetuating the idea that Juárez is defined by its violent infrastructures.

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Section: Spatialising the Checkpoint Dispositivementioning

confidence: 99%

Checkpoint urbanism: Violent infrastructures and border stigmas in the Juárez border region

Martén¹,

Boano

2021

Urban Studies

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“…7 For the zombie's history in the Haitian Revolution, see Dayan (1996). For extensive surveys of its contemporary cultural importance, see Lauro (2015Lauro ( , 2017; Fishel and Wilcox (2017); Dillon (2019). 8 For other examples, in Max Brooks's World War Z the origins of its zombiecreating virus are in China (the book) and in India (the movie), while the popularity of recent South Korean zombie media Train to Busan, Kingdom, Peninsula, and #Alive point to the displacement of the zombie horde to Asia itself and a threat to its newly emergent middle class, modeling itself on Western possessive individualism.…”

Section: Living Yellow Life Otherwisementioning

confidence: 99%

Bio-orientalism and the Yellow Peril of Yellow Life

Lester

2021

Catalyst

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While recent literature on Asiatic racial form has drawn attention to the ways that techno-orientalism represents Asian life as mechanically non-human, the COVID-19 pandemic and other developments under the Anthropocene draw renewed attention to the construction of Asian peoples as a source of biological and contagious threat to the West. In this article I argue that a unique discourse of bio-orientalism contributes to the depiction of Asians as a "Yellow Life" that is an existential threat to Western forms of life. Western life posits that this Yellow Life must be resisted and ultimately eliminate for the flourishing of all non-Asian life. Through an attention to biological depictions of Asian life in yellow peril literature, I chart how bio-orientalism imagines Yellow Life as ontologically different from Western life forms and as innately animate through both its macroscopic growth and microscopic threat of contagion. Rather than embracing an Asian Americanist response that would also seek to disavow Yellow Life, in a reading of Bryan Thao Worra's poetry I speculate upon embracing Yellow Life as another mode in which Asian American studies imagines otherwise forms of life that challenge and move beyond contemporary Western-centric and humanist responses to anti-Asian racism.

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“…For instance, the highly popular genre of zombie films and even IR texts 81 appropriate these creatures, representatives of Black and Brown bodies and rebellion against slavery, while envisioning their elimination as a means of ensuring survival. 82 Similarly, influential American settler science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein's The Day After Tomorrow locates threats to whiteness in the bodies of 'Pan-Asians' who have colonized white places and must be violently eradicated. 83 White readers might argue that these forms of science fiction are just that: fictive fantasies.…”

Section: Unidirectional Timementioning

confidence: 99%

Worlding beyond ‘the’ ‘end’ of ‘the world’: white apocalyptic visions and BIPOC futurisms

Mitchell

Chaudhury

2020

International Relations

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We often hear that the ‘end of the world’ is approaching – but whose world, exactly, is expected to end? Over the last several decades, a popular and influential literature has emerged, in international relations (IR), social sciences, and in popular culture, on subjects such as ‘human extinction’, ‘global catastrophic risks’, and eco-apocalypse. Written by scientists, political scientists, and journalists for wide public audiences,1 this genre diagnoses what it considers the most serious global threats and offers strategies to protect the future of ‘humanity’. This article will critically engage this genre to two ends: first, we aim to show that the present apocalyptic narratives embed a series of problematic assumptions which reveal that they are motivated not by a general concern with futures but rather with the task of securing white futures. Second, we seek to highlight how visions drawn from Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) futurisms reimagine more just and vibrant futures.

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Politics of the Living Dead: Race and Exceptionalism in the Apocalypse

Cited by 16 publications

References 9 publications

Checkpoint urbanism: Violent infrastructures and border stigmas in the Juárez border region

Checkpoint urbanism: Violent infrastructures and border stigmas in the Juárez border region

Bio-orientalism and the Yellow Peril of Yellow Life

Worlding beyond ‘the’ ‘end’ of ‘the world’: white apocalyptic visions and BIPOC futurisms

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