Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

History Is What Bites

2015; Liverpool University Press; Volume: 56; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3828/extr.2015.17

2047-7708

Jessica Hurley,

Modern American Literature Studies

This paper argues that the zombie serves as the limit point of biopower because it introduces an ungovernable third term into the biopolitical poles of human and non-human, life and death: the ex-human, the undead. Taking race as its central biopolitical concern, the first part of the paper reads the visual tensions between whiteness and blackness in Hollywood representations of the zombie. I then turn to Colson Whitehead's 2010 novel Zone One, arguing that in this novel the zombie figures the return of a repressed history of racial trauma in a contemporary moment in which biopower operates increasingly under the sign of the "postracial."