Marc Forster’s World War Z (2013) provides an example of this, as it refers to a sense of global environmental crisis in its credit sequence, while visualizing the break-down of borders and the subsequent ‘migration’ of bodies (zombies) in the main film. In the zombie outbreak narrative, the critique of capitalist exploitation of humans and the natural environment is centered on the figure of the zombie who combines fears of environmental catastrophe and global migration. Recently, the zombie genre has incorporated the outbreak narrative, combining it with the apocalyptic.
Outbreak scenarios negotiate fears of a lack of control over the human and non-human environment and over increasingly instable borders in an age of globalization. The essay finally exits the post-millennial canon to consider how Matheson’s I Am Legend provides the only successful option for attaining posthumanity and post-history by providing a third possibility which eliminates both humanity and the cultural anxiety embodied by the zombie. Ultimately, however, these experiments fail to succeed and repeat human failures whilst returning to previous and problematic systems whilst aiming to achieve a messianic post-history, the narratives get stuck in the perpetual crisis of apocalypse. In their attempt to consider new ways of being, these narratives explore forms of evolution and revolution through a range of socio-political experiments, whilst attempting to imagine an ascendance to post-humanity through proto-societies based upon unification, collectivism, and the abandonment of outmoded familial and social systems. The study will range over key examples of post-millennial zombie narratives: including World War Z, The Walking Dead, and Shaun of the Dead. In their examination of society and selfhood, zombie narratives engage with possible solutions to modern issues such as cultural zombification through post-industrial labour and digital technologies. The empty signification of the zombie makes it a very malleable metaphor for cultural anxieties and socio-political issues. The purpose of this study is to examine some of the reasons behind this, to what ends, and how successful they are in achieving these ends. Zombie narratives have seen a huge resurgence in both production and popularity in the twenty-first century. Through its careful distribution of racializing terms, Zone One, I suggest, embodies a "viral" intertextuality keyed to processes of racial formation occurring beneath the discourse of "postraciality" and within the hidden technical registers of the networked global economy. Mobilizing a low-tech, small-scale computational approach to Zone One’s distribution of explicit and implicit racial signifiers, I argue that attention to the novel’s patterns of form and language reveals a racial grammar lurking beneath its chiefly unmarked lexicon. the novel's latent race-conscious ideological program). its zombie plot and predominantly race-free lexicon) and what the majority of the novel’s critics have intuited to be its literary-allegorical core (i.e.
Inspired by recent computationally assisted close readings undertaken by critics including Ryan Cordell, Paul Fleming, Michael Gavin, Matthew Jockers, Andrew Piper, Hoyt Long, Richard So, and Ted Underwood, this essay devises an account of Colson Whitehead’s genre-bending zombie thriller Zone One (2011) based on visualizations of the text’s lexical patterns, arguing that such an approach yields explanatory purchase on the relation between Zone One’s genre-fiction surface (i.e.
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