The zombie first emerged out of the plantations of Haiti in the eighteenth century. The zombie reflected the life of the slave, a fate worse than death in which even death did not free them from slavery, and emerged as an amalgam of African, European, and indigenous cultures. Zombies are uniquely modern monsters that appear during capitalism’s rapid expansion and endures, from the colonial period to the neoliberal present. Paraphrasing the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, the zombie represents the imaginary relationship of slaves to their real conditions of existence. Myths of the zombie tell an encoded story of capitalism’s real attempt to overcome the limits of life, and even death, in the process of extracting surplus value from bodies in new ways. This project develops a theory of “undead labor,” defined as the value extracted from life beyond its natural limits, through the story of the zombie as a shadow of modern capitalism. Taking the zombie as its central object, this book finds, at the heart of capital, a desire to push past the natural boundaries of life and to overcome all limitation and even death, creating a condition of “undeadness,” which promises a new kind of body with a limitless potential for the extraction of value. Through a series of case studies on labor, slavery, analogy, vitality, and realism, this project tracks the history of the zombie as a history of racial capital rooted in undeadness and excessive life and undertakes a genealogy of the zombie that contributes to discourses of racialized labor and its ongoing place in twenty-first century economies. I argue that the zombie remains prevalent in popular culture because it is symptomatic of corresponding shifts in political economy and that exploring the history of the zombie also provides insight into key facets of race, labor, and value in the history of the present.
David Bering-Porter is Assistant Professor of Culture and Media and is core faculty in the Code as a Liberal Arts program at the Eugene Lang College of the Liberal Arts at The New School. Areas of research include film and media studies, digital culture, and the intersections of media, science, and technology. His current book project is a study of undead labor and the ways that race, labor, and value come together in the mediated body of the zombie and his articles have appeared in the journals such as Culture Machine, Critical Inquiry, Flow, MIRAJ, Post 45, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
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Image by Alexander King, from The Magic Island by William Seabrook, 1929