The Postracial, Postcapitalist Zombie

The final chapter of the book discusses the question of race in contemporary zombie fiction. Departing from the observation that many zombie fiction texts insist that the zombie apocalypse will do away with race as a marker of difference, it reads two recent texts against this oft-used trope. Arguing against much recent criticism, it posits that Zone One is best read not as concerned with the history of racial oppression, but as concerned with the way capitalism constructs race as a category useful to it. It concludes by reading Díaz’s “Monstro” as a tale most instructive at the metalevel, for what it tells us about the zombie’s contemporary relation to Haiti on the pervasiveness of racial categories even outside a White-Black dichotomy. It also serves as a point for departure to the Coda, an investigation of the larger valences of zombie fiction.

Sadie and Allison in the Apocalypse

This chapter discusses the argument that zombie fictions are in a privileged position to discuss progressive visions of gender politics. Following the book’s larger argument that zombies open spaces of possibility, rather than symbolically represent a particular politics, it briefly reads a number of zombie fictions for their depiction of women’s roles and relates them to literary form. It posits the possibility of something like a “genrécriture feminine” that limits writers in the ways they can depict women in the zombie apocalypse, a possibility explored by contrasting the initial set of texts with an exploration of two novels, Madeleine Roux’s Allison Hewitt is Trapped and Sadie Walker is Stranded. Ultimately, the chapter concludes, while zombie fiction offers possibilities to explore progressive gender positions, few texts actually make use of this possibility.

The Walking Dead and the Never-Ending Zombie Story

This chapter reads The Walking Dead through its creator Robert Kirkman’s contention that it is the “zombie movie that never ends.” Drawing on Eran Dorfman’s notion of the everyday in modern life and Frank Kermode’s parsing of the need for literary endings, it argues that The Walking Dead’s narrative endlessness and questing for the restitution of the everyday is best understood as symptomatic of a contemporary moment in which there is room for doubt what the everyday actually is. The chapter suggests that The Walking Dead reflects the way life is lived in the absence of a sense of narrative endings.

Pariah and Dying to Live

This chapter argues that zombie fictions enable us to reflect upon the meaning and possibility, and especially the conditions of possibility, for community. Read through Zygmunt Bauman and Jean-Luc Nancy, community becomes central to two novels less frequently read by critics, Bob Fingerman’s Pariah and Kim Paffenroth’s Dying to Live, novels which also share a thematic concern with humans who are not in danger from zombie attack. The two novels ultimately present nearly opposite versions of how community may be reconstituted in the wake of a zombie apocalypse, and so are instructive of our contemporary concern with the possibility of community.

Coda

The coda explores what the book takes to be the most expansive question about contemporary zombie fiction, its meaning for literature at large. It departs from the question of whether we will be able to read literature again without the zombie, and takes zombie fiction, in its many manifestations but especially in its appearance in ostensibly “literary” fiction, as a crucial part of the contemporary generic turn, and as a harbinger of the future of fiction. More than that, however, it suggests that the processes at work in zombie fiction prefigure a larger shift in the literary field, one which ultimately depends on the zombie’s capacity to broadly signal possibility, rather than symbolic meaning.

“So Many Unmentionables About”

This chapter discusses Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and its prequels. It suggests that critical disdain of mashup fiction to the contrary, the three novels deserve close attention to the things they do, and to foreground their work as parody. In engaging their original text’s complicated relation to race, class, and gender issues, they act directly on Jane Austen’s fiction; but at the same time, they also foreground the limits of the contemporary engagement with Austen. What the novels do is reflect simultaneously on the historical Austen text, the reception of Austen, and the contemporary moment’s systemic exclusions and violences.

Max Brooks’s World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

This chapter suggests that Max Brooks’sgroundbreakingWorld War Z is best understood as both an indictment of neoconservative politics ca. 2005 as well as a catalogue of the anxieties of the early 21st century, and provides an idealized liberal-social democratic solution. But it is also a depiction of the limits of this liberal imagination of utopia, suggesting, if inadvertently, the way in which liberalism itself constrains conceptions of what a better world might look. Opening the study, the chapter lays out the way the zombie is a figure of possibility that, however, needs to be read against the actual ways in which these possibilities find expression.