Zombies: A Cultural History by Roger Luckhurst

Author:Roger Luckhurst [Luckhurst, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Published: 2016-08-31T23:00:00+00:00

Nazi zombies, Dead Snow (Død snø, 2009).

The initial colonial context for the emergence of the zombie far from disappeared after 1945. Indeed, one of the crucial consequences of the shift in world power that became evident after the Yalta Conference in February 1945, when Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill met to discuss the future of Europe, was the American demand for the dismantling of the protected markets of the British Empire. Britain, economically broken by the war and saddled with steep debt repayments to the American banks, began to release itself from the costs of colonial occupation and administration and to divest itself of its empire. The year 1945 inaugurated an era of decolonization, although it was a disavowed, elongated and often violent process for many European empires. This was an absolutely immediate post-war problem: on 8 May 1945, the day the Nazi regime surrendered in Europe, French gendarmerie fired on a crowd of Algerians celebrating the end of the war and holding up anti-colonial banners in Sétif, killing an estimated 6,000 people over the next few days.

As we have already seen in the Introduction, nationalist and post-colonial theorists have repeatedly figured the dead hand of empire and its woeful legacies as a form of zombification. Under fascist Vichy rule in the French colony of Martinique and then later during the Algerian War, Frantz Fanon evoked the zombie in his writings on colonial subjection in The Wretched of the Earth (1961). He had learned this from his teacher in Martinique, the radical intellectual and poet Aimé Césaire. In his Discourse on Colonialism (1950), Césaire influentially argued that the murderous logic of Nazism had been actively trialled in Europe’s colonies for decades, and that the atrocities perpetrated in the European camps just reim-ported these tactics from the edges of empire. The English had invented and named the ‘concentration camp’ during the Boer War (1899–1902) and the Germans had deliberately and systematically murdered the Herero and Nama in southwest Africa (1904–7). For this barbarism to recur in Europe was a logical consequence of the dehumanization of the perpetrators. Césaire called this ‘the boomerang effect’ (although in his commentary on Césaire, Michael Rothberg prefers the more literal translation of un choc en retour, ‘the shock that comes back’).20 This was also the thesis of Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), where she proposed that imperialism’s ‘machine of death’, which possesses territories, materials and peoples through destruction, was the test-bed for the liquidations in Germany and the Soviet Union. Arendt also understood the war and the camps as ‘the much-feared boomerang effect upon the mother countries’.21

For Césaire, colonization was a process that degraded the colonizers too, turning them into objects or dead things. ‘It is not the head of civilization that begins to rot first’, he said: ‘It is the heart.’ To further the analogy, Césaire envisaged the European bourgeoisie, who had driven imperialism and then embraced fascism, as the walking dead. In staccato, poetic sentences, Césaire saw them as ‘A sign that feels itself mortal.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.