“Postracial Fantasies and Zombies: On the Racist Apocalyptic Politics Devouring the World”

Postracial Fantasies and Zombies examines the ghostly and horrifying figure of the zombie across several historical contexts to examine how it functions as a mode of regenerating a fantasy involving its surveillance, containment, and destruction. Watts asserts that the zombie is a biotrope that gets repetitively deployed and enjoyed as a blackened biothreat body provoking rituals of securitization and weaponization. Beginning in the wake of the Haitian Revolution and nineteenth century pseudo-science, the book charts a course through the zombie’s appearance in early twentieth century films through the post-civil rights and Vietnam eras to show how the zombie becomes a fixture in our twenty-first century postracial moment. Watts contends that each iteration of the genre produces the zombie as a hate object as a part of a fantasy involving the reclamation of white masculine sovereignty.

Eric King Watts is an associate professor of rhetorical studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research explores the manner in which public voice is invented, performed, consumed, and suppressed. In particular, Watts examines the diverse phenomena of African American public voice and its relation to the representation of the Black body, the meanings of Blackness, the shape of civic culture and community; voice and voicelessness are understood as being impacted by the rhetorical agency of the subject, the terms of one’s publicity, and the power relations that make up one’s various identities.