From Slavery to Pandemics
Students may enroll in my class on zombies expecting the cheap thrills of fake blood, gory makeup and low-budget monsters. Instead, they delve into topics such as racism, slavery, colonialism, U.S.-Caribbean relations and global pandemics.
Zombies are part of the folklore of Haiti, rising from the experience of slavery. According to legend, these people had their souls stolen through sorcery and were forced to work endlessly in sugar plantations, finding relief only in death.
In this class, students watch and read about zombie films made from the early 20th century to the present, tracing the transformation of these monsters into a global symbol used to analyze, critique and sometimes ridicule the world. By encountering a variety of zombies, from gruesome cannibals to rom-com heartthrobs, students learn to identify some major themes that zombies have been used to explore: mindless consumerism; fears of radiation; the abuses of science, medicine and the military; cyber warfare; financial collapse; racial and gender inequalities; and even human nature itself.
In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, films that treat zombiism as an illness are perhaps more relevant than ever before. The format the class took this summer of online teaching itself emerges from a fear of the global pandemic of COVID-19. Zombies often transform the living into the undead through some sort of infectious disease, whether bloodborne, airborne or spread through other means. These narratives explicitly ask how we value the lives of those who are sick — a pertinent question as we currently struggle to balance the worth of lives against the desire to “go back to normal.”
Students leave this class with a greater understanding of the zombie’s role in popular culture and a new appreciation for how even the schlockiest monsters can tell us a great deal about ourselves.
— Clare Sammells