Zombie trouble: Zombie texts, bare life and displaced people

Abstract

There has been a recent upsurge in texts featuring zombies. At the same time, members of western countries have become increasingly anxious about displaced peoples: asylum-seekers and other so-called illegal migrants who attempt to enter those countries. What displaced people, people without the protection of the state and zombies have in common is that both manifest the quality of what Giorgio Agamben calls 'bare life'. Moreover, zombies have the qualities of workers or slaves driven to total exhaustion. The genre of the zombie apocalypse centres on laying siege to a place that is identified as a refuge for a group of humans. In these texts it is possible to read an equation of zombies with displaced people who are 'threatening' the state. Indeed, the rhetoric used to describe these people constructs them as similar to mythical zombies. This article includes analyses of a number of zombie films including Shaun of the Dead, Fido and Undead.

Time and the other in crisis: How anthropology makes its displaced object

“…One explanation for this ongoing connection between displacement and refugeehood derives from the popularity of Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) theorisation of bare life, in which the figure of the refugee is put forward as the paradigmatic figure through which the disposability, absent rights, and politico-legal exclusion of the homo sacer is realised in contemporary society. Since this publication, the influence of Agamben on anthropological scholarship has been pervasive, and, in particular, bare life has become something of a trope in anthropological work with refugees and other kinds of marginal people (Stratton, 2011). Alison Ross (2008) even goes so far as to describe this emergent theoretical legacy as ‘the Agamben effect’.…”

Surviving a zombie apocalypse: Leadership configurations in extreme contexts

“…Zombies have thus been seen as a metaphor for the apocalypse, or simply for ‘the anxiety of the day’, which might include class, race, gender, sexuality, consumer capitalism or uncontrolled immigration (Boluk and Lenz, 2011; Stratton, 2011). Our use of fiction in this article, therefore, also reflects the standpoint of Asma (2014) who regards monsters as ‘beneficial foes’, stimulating our imagination, and prompting us to consider how we might behave in surprising, threatening and chaotic extreme contexts.…”

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

“…Slowly, one begins to realise that in each of their temporary homes -from the Farm, to the town of Woodbury, to the prison, and Alexandria -safety is always already temporary. Contra Stratton, 75 the zombies are not a signifier for displaced people; rather, the survivors are displaced. Their displacement becomes a key part of the reason why, in perhaps the signature moment of the series, Rick, the white male 'protagonist', proclaims in Episode 5:10 Them: 'This is how we survive: We tell ourselves that we are the walking dead'.…”