A01=Sarah J. Lauro
African diaspora
African folklore
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
American literature
Author_Sarah J. Lauro
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Caribbean literature
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=APFN
Category=ATFN
Category=DSB
Category=HRQ
Category=JBCC1
Category=JBGB
Category=JFCA
Category=JFHF
Category=QRY
colonialism
COP=United States
cultural appropriation
cultural conquest
cultural heritage
cultural hybridity
cultural identity
cultural imperialism
cultural preservation
cultural resistance
cultural significance
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eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
film studies
Haitian culture
imperialism
Language_English
mythic combat
mythmaking
New World mythology.
PA=Available
Price_€100 and above
PS=Active
softlaunch
storytelling
transatlantic slave trade
visual arts
zombie mythology
zombie-themed events
Product details
- ISBN 9780813568843
- Weight: 567g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 15 Jul 2015
- Publisher: Rutgers University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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Our most modern monster and perhaps our most American, the zombie that is so prevalent in popular culture today has its roots in African soul capture mythologies. The Transatlantic Zombie provides a more complete history of the zombie than has ever been told, explaining how the myth’s migration to the New World was facilitated by the transatlantic slave trade, and reveals the real-world import of storytelling, reminding us of the power of myths and mythmaking, and the high stakes of appropriation and homage. Beginning with an account of a probable ancestor of the zombie found in the Kongolese and Angolan regions of seventeenth-century Africa and ending with a description of the way, in contemporary culture, new media are used to facilitate zombie-themed events, Sarah Juliet Lauro plots the zombie’s cultural significance through Caribbean literature, Haitian folklore, and American literature, film, and the visual arts. The zombie entered US consciousness through the American occupation of Haiti, the site of an eighteenth-century slave rebellion that became a war for independence, thus making the figuration of living death inseparable from its resonances with both slavery and rebellion. Lauro bridges African mythology and US mainstream culture by articulating the ethical complications of the zombie as a cultural conquest that was rebranded for the American cinema. As The Transatlantic Zombie shows, the zombie is not merely a bogeyman representing the ills of modern society, but a battleground over which a cultural war has been fought between the imperial urge to absorb exotic, threatening elements, and the originary, Afro-diasporic culture’s preservation through a strategy of mythic combat.
SARAH JULIET LAURO is an assistant professor at the University of Tampa, Florida. She is the coeditor of Better off Dead: The Evolution of Zombie as Posthuman.
