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While American zombie films are staples within the horror genre, often dismissed is the zombie's relationship to both racism and religion. Zombiism emerged from 16th century Haitian Vodou and the cultural context of slavery in Haiti. As such, zombiism, at its core, is a spiritual response to power and racial capitalism. This article argues that zombie films showcase resistance to epistemic violence and challenge the political, economic, and theological relationships that sustain white supremacy. This article analyzes four zombie films--White Zombie (1932), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), Night of the Living Dead (1968), and Get Out (2017)--through the methodological framework of liberation theology and calls heavily upon the Black liberation theology of James Cone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores how the classic narrative of Haitian zombification is refashioned within a postcolonial Haitian-Dominican context as a passing narrative in Pedro Cabiya's 2011 science fantasy novel Malas hierbas. In its depiction of a nameless zombie scientist who pretends to be a living being and successfully assimilates into the community of the living without detection, Cabiya's text not only departs from the traditional zombie archetype. It also unfolds as a philosophical exploration of what it means to be alive when one is born into a political ontology that has always already defined and marked some as dead. Interrogating the disjuncture between the vital signs of life codified in Western scientific discourse and the zombie's simulation of life, the essay argues that Malas hierbas adapts the trope of racial passing to show how the meaning of life moves from ontology of existence to a category of identity, like race, legal personhood, and citizenship. Situating the novel in its Haitian and Dominican contexts, where race constitutes markers of national identity and juridical status, the essay connects the zombie's passing life to contemporary representations of Haitians as impostors who must play dead, on both sides of Hispaniola, as a means of survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the relation of the figure of the zombie to the Haitian Revolution, the only successful slave revolution in the Atlantic World. While existing research often stresses the strong link between the zombie and the slave, this is not borne out by the contemporary discourse on the Haitian Revolution. Whereas horror and terror are associated with the zombie from its inception, it is only with the US occupation of Haiti (1915–1934) that US-American writers and directors invented the zombie of popular North Atlantic culture: a soulless slave without consciousness directed by a zombie master. As I argue, this amounts to a neo-colonialist act of symbolic re-enslavement of the self-emancipated Haitians. This time they are deprived not merely of their freedom as under the slave regime, but even of their consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the function of the zombie horde as a literary entity used to represent and interrogate Haitian national narratives. Three works serve as case studies: Gérard Etienne's Le nègre crucifié (1974) to examine the "predatory horde"; Frankétienne's Les affres d'un défi (1979) to analyze the "proletarian horde"; and Dany Laferrière's Pays sans chapeau (1996) to explore the "phantasmal horde." Ultimately, the figure of the zombie marks these literary uprisings as mythic discourses, revealing both their pertinence to historical "reality" and their representational limits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At one level, anthropologists remain functionalists in that they generally see acts and institutions as contributing to a greater social whole only through which they make sense. Thus, sorcery accusations have been traditionally interpreted in terms of maintaining social harmony and cohesion. In the case of Haitian zombification, the zombi seems a locally misidentified victim who is frequently mentally ill. As a hapless non-agent, the zombi cannot initiate the sorcery accusations, so how do we understand the recognition and rescue of the zombi, either in terms of social function or social action? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Presents literary criticism is presented which discusses the theme of the zombie as a metaphor for the replacement of personal subjectivity. The author draws on the writings of author Zora Neal Hurston, anthropologist Alfred Metraux, and anthropologist Wade Davis and discusses the cultural and historical meaning of the zombie in Haitian myths. The mythical meaning of the Haitian zombie, the theme of resurrection from the dead, and aspects of Vodou doctrine are discussed.