Zombie and Me: Labor and Meaning for the Undead Postmodern Subject

Abstract

The zombie figure, emerging out of the colonial legacy of the Caribbean became decontextualized in the wake of the 1915 US occupation of Haiti. Decontextualized and adapted by Western authors, playwrights, and filmmakers, the zombie figure continued to represent a feared fate, but now for the postmodern laborer caught in the capitalist cycle of production and consumption. Simultaneously, economic shifts in the post-World War II years produced a correlation between the ability to consume commodities and social status via the American Dream, thus trapping the postmodern subject in capitalist social relations. Through the postmodern break with the metanarrative of progress that commodifies culture, all time becomes labor time. The postmodern subject becomes the zombie-subject, caught in the endless cycle of laboring to earn wages that they can use to procure and consume commodities, thus creating social status. This thesis explores how the zombie figure becomes the postmodern subject through the movies I am Legend and Warm Bodies, and how the apocalypse creates the conditions necessary for the rethinking of the postmodern subject and postmodern society through Stalker and Fallout 4, through a critical lens that is informed by Marx, Jameson, and Deleuze and Guattari. It ends with the conclusion that, while the postmodern subject is caught in the trap of capitalist social relations via Oedipus, its tendency towards crises produces in it the means necessary for self-contained revolution.