![]() ![]() is usually strongly linked with social groups that are feared or considered threats by White, middle-class Americans, ranging from immigrants, to people of color, and “modern, strong women.” Zombies and Vodou as Primitive Religionįrom the first American encounter with zombies in the early 1900s, zombies have been viewed as exotic and mythical beings by Abrahamic religious communities within American culture. 2 The social and cultural representation of the zombie in the U.S. 1 However, since its first appearance in American pop culture in the 1932 movie White Zombie, “zombie” (note the difference in spelling with the original Haitian zonbi) has been depicted as a “reanimated, mindless, soulless corpse taken from its grave to serve the master who had awakened it”. Originated in Haitian Vodou, zonbi can refer to several different beings, from a stolen soul to a spirit receptacle. ![]() What exactly is a zombie? The story of the zombie originally arises from Haitians, who are already severely disenfranchised by the nineteenth century, but are revolting for their freedom by the time Americans come to know about the zombie and craft their own versions of the story. ![]() In our analysis, we connect the zombie of American popular culture to incursions on historical and contemporary systems of social control through the dimensions of religion, race, and gender. Americans appropriated the zombie from Haitian religious culture in the nineteenth century, and transformed it into a story that details a mindless mass of dehumanized beings infecting established social order. We also provide background on the history of the zombie myth, and contextualize our analysis using real world examples to discuss the Hollywood representation of Vodou, the 2016 Presidential Election, and the New Woman. In this essay, we use Critical Discourse Analysis, a methodological approach that centers upon relations of power and inequality in language, to unpack the notion of American zombies. The popularity of American-centric zombie culture can be linked to fears of the Other and social anxieties over the breakdown of existing power structures. ![]()
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