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From Margin to Contagion

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Zombification has preoccupied U.S. cultural imagination through such films as I Walked With a Zombie (1943) to current trending TV series, Walking Dead. The anxieties surrounding contagion, the passing of the zombie virus to a shrinking uninfected populace, have always been raced and connected to colonial tensions and relations. In I Walked With a Zombie, which is centered upon a white Canadian nurse’s entry into Saint Sebastian, the specter of the transatlantic slave trade haunts North American and Caribbean relations, the anxieties of which are manifested through the film’s portrayal of culturally specific practices to African diaspora in the Caribbean such as voodoo rituals and zombies. At each turn, the film reminds the viewer of the strangeness of voodoo and zombies, where the film’s trailer promises of “all the weird black magic that the white man seldom sees." Racism and xenophobia, in this case, dramatizes public sentiments of fear, anxiety, and suspicion about blackness through the monster and supernatural figure of the zombie.


Mike Mariani’s “The Tragic, Forgotten History of Zombies” argues that popular consciousness about zombies erases a very important history of its origins in Haiti and the violence of French colonialism in the territory that still has lingering impacts today. The zombie figure was fashioned by Haitian slaves in response to a loss of bodily autonomy in slavery, and used to warn that those who committed suicide would not be permitted lan guinée, an afterlife where they would be free.
 
While the social and political weight of zombification, its charged racial and colonial formation, has been historically co-opted or taken up by media forms to be erased, the haunted traces of its presence is still pertinent to speculative imagination today. Another way of framing zombification, which refuses erasure of its historical foundations and culturally specific memory, could be through direct engagement with the affects born through the zombie figure. Rather than center zombies in white fear of blackness, we can charge ourselves with locating zombies as part of black desire to live and thrive in freedom while reconciling the pervasive bind of slavery.

Given the earlier discussion of the literary canon and the work of speculative writers of color, this project refers to zombies to modify the concept of “moving from margin to center” to “moving from margin to contagion” in our positions as writers and readers of speculative literature. Less concerned with centrality, this project imagines a critical and creative writing pedagogy that prompts students to understand the intersections of race and speculative literature through contagion—the relentlessness of history against erasure, the ways monsters transform throughout cultural shifts and time, and our complicity in producing and disseminating this knowledge.
 
Contagion reinforces the idea that speculative literature does not operate in a racial and cultural vacuum, nor does it reassure that canonization of few works of literature by writers of color as a viable means of true liberation. It forces us to engage with the intractability of racialized harms, deepens our engagement with the work’s particular portrayals of trauma, and demands us to come up with new language to talk about race and speculative futures.

 

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  1. Writing Prompt: From Margin to Contagion Muriel Leung
  2. Introduction Muriel Leung

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  1. Writing Prompt: From Margin to Contagion Muriel Leung

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