Inspiration Map Prep

Photos Made By Pauline Darley

Modèle : Clémentine Levy 

What makes the zombie unique from other movie monsters is its unique place of origin. Whereas Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolfman all have ties to the Gothic literary tradition, the zombie stands apart in having a relatively recent (and proximal) origin. Theorists of zombie culture (such as Kyle Bishop or Jamie Russell), attribute the origin of the zombie to Haitian folklore and the hybrid religion of voodoo. But the zombie didn’t make its away into American culture until the 1920s and 30s, when sensationalist travel narratives were popular with Western readers.  It’s interesting to see how the zombie has morphed into the cannibalistic creatures we now know. While the original zombie is a powerful metaphor for fears of the non-white Other and reverse colonization, the contemporary zombie largely reflects contemporary fears of loss of individuality, the excesses of consumer capitalism, environmental degradation, the excesses of science and technology, and fears of global terrorism. (Link)

The Haitian fear is not of zombis, which is the Euro-American disposition. Rather, the anthropological record is replete with cases of Haitians taking in and caring for people they believe to be zombified relatives.The fear is instead of becoming a zombi, deprived of all free will and enslaved to a powerful, predatory master. Clearly this fear harks back in important ways to the brutal conditions of the lives of plantation slaves during the colonial period – the zombi very much expresses ex-slaves’ fears of a return to the horrors of an enslaved condition. Whereas, as we will see below, whites have construed the zombi(e) to represent in condensed form all that was vile about Haiti, black Haitians instead understood the zombi within a nexus of folk memory about the brutality of the white slave-masters and their power to destroy a slave both physically and spiritually. In this sense, the idea of the zombi is both representation and product of a particular socio-cultural-legal constellation – plantation slavery – and how the ex-slaves of the social order of revolutionary Haiti and after made sense of their history and that of their ancestors. (Link)

 (Behance Portfolio)