Zombie studies continues to see the addition of new academic analyses as a part of the broader area of horror studies. One of the most recent and valuable additions is Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human, edited by Deborah Christie and Sarah Juliet Lauro (Fordham University Press, 2011). From the back cover:

The zombie is ubiquitous in popular culture: from comic books to video games, to internet applications and homemade films, zombies are all around us. Investigating the zombie from an interdisciplinary perspective,with an emphasis on deep analytical engagement with diverse kinds of texts, Better Off Dead addresses some of the more unlikely venues where zombies are found while providing the reader with a classic overview of the zombie’s folkloric and cinematic history.

What has the zombie metaphor meant in the past? Why does it continue to be so prevalent in our culture? Where others have looked at the zombie as an allegory for humanity’s inner machinations or claimed the zombie as capitalist critique, this collection seeks to provide an archaeology of the zombie—tracing its lineage from Haiti, mapping its various cultural transformations, and suggesting the post-humanist direction in which the zombie is ultimately heading. Approaching the zombie from many different points of view, the contributors look across history and across media. Though they represent various theoretical perspectives, the whole makes a cohesive argument: The zombie has not just evolved within narratives; it has evolved in a way that transforms narrative. This collection announces a new post-zombie, even before the boundaries of this rich and mysterious myth have been completely charted.

Below, one of the editors, Sarah Juliet Lauro of the University of California, Davis, discusses aspects of this volume.

TheoFantastique: Sarah, thank you for a great read in Better Off Dead, and for coming here to discuss the book. To begin, can you define post-human for readers who may not be familiar with the term, and how did this come to be the approach of the volume?

Sarah Juliet Lauro: For me, most succinctly, post-humanism is a field of study which seeks to get past the binaries and ideals that we inherited from Enlightenment Humanism. Importantly for the zombie, post-humanism tries to trouble concepts like borders and question our opposition of terms like subject/object, male/female, and, increasingly, human/non-human.

TheoFantastique: What interpretive and analytical possibilities were opened up with a consideration of zombies as post-human?

Sarah Juliet Lauro: The zombie has a lot of potential to serve as a kind of icon for various concepts of Post-humanism. For example, the zombie is neither living nor dead, it is “the living dead,” as Romero’s movies make clear. As such, it is a kind of hybrid, not unlike the cyborg, that defies various binary categories. Because the zombie is both living and not living, it specifically communicates with the subject/object binary and raises fascinating ontological questions. My co-author Karen Embry and I discuss this at more length in our “A Zombie Manifesto” (boundary 2, Spring 2008). For the purposes of this collection, though, our invocation of post-humanism was meant to just raise the specter of these ideas, and it was also a bit tongue-in-cheek: even those unfamiliar with post-humanist theory, can see that the zombie is a post-human figure, (that is, literally no longer human), and thus, can get a bit of the gist.

TheoFantastique: In the first chapter there is a mention of an item by way of definition of the zombie. They are described in their various manifestations as having the characteristic of “the absence of some metaphysical quality of their essential selves.” Can you elaborate on what this means, and why it is important for an expanded consideration of the zombie?

Sarah Juliet Lauro: This is Kevin Boon’s essay, and I think that this definition is really central to understanding the whole collection. Since the zombie has evolved so far from its original appearance in Caribbean folklore, in order to be able to talk about all these beings — from the innocuous, Voodoo-controlled, sleepwalking zombies of early films to the fast, viral, cannibalistic zombies of video-games, to even the talking zombies of some, especially comedic representations (like the animated series Ugly Americans) — as zombies, we need a common denominator. For Boon, as for Peter Dendle, what all zombies have in common is the fact that they have been altered, and almost always in Dendle’s approximation, “depersonalized;” they are no longer their original selves.

TheoFantastique: In another chapter their is the intriguing idea that zombies represent a “critique of empire.” I find it interesting that the early Christian movement did something similar, but over time has lost its edge and in some ways has been drawn into empire. Is there the possibility that zombies too will lose their counter-culture ability to critique empire?

Sarah Juliet Lauro: Yes! This is exactly what I think is happening right now, perhaps not in terms of a critique of empire per se, but specifically in terms of a critique of capitalism. If you look at the zombie mob phenomenon that I discuss in my own chapter in the collection, what we’ve increasingly seen is a movement that began as community-based “play,” wherein people turned up in public dressed as zombies for no apparent reason, increasingly being co-opted by corporate sponsors and local businesses. As we see with with the pivot from zombie walks to zombie pub-crawls, for instance, what began as an entirely playful practice divorced from financial gain is increasingly turned into an opportunity for some people to make money. Thus, the critique of capitalism that was visible in the early days of the zombie mob (2003-2005) is being absorbed by capitalism itself. To me, this is a very depressing turn of events.

TheoFantastique: I was pleased to see a chapter that discusses horror radio, and the presence of zombies in radio dramas. How is this facet of the zombie neglected in academic studies?

Sarah Juliet Lauro: Well, I do know of at least one other zombie collection that has a piece on zombies in radio, but I agree that it is an under mined field and I was very happy to count Richard Hand’s essay among our offerings. My guess is that the lack of attention to horror radio is probably due to access to the archives, but that, in an era where libraries and repositories are working consistently to put things online, we may soon see a boom in attention to early radio drama.

TheoFantastique: How has the breakdown of society’s defining institutions, including belief in the sacred, contributed to the zombie in regards to our cultural attitudes about death? More specifically, as one of your author’s writes, “death is no longer a transition but an outcome.” Or as yet another of your author’s writes, “if death no longer has value – sacred or otherwise – how are we to consider the value of life?” These questions would seem to be at the forefront of contemporary zombie narratives in our post-9/11 environment, illustrated most recently by The Walking Dead.

Sarah Juliet Lauro: Personally, I don’t think that the zombie’s prevalence signals anything like a true devaluing of death; On the contrary, to me the zombie’s popularity shows that even when a culture such as ours has tried to efface death — and I think here of the lack of ritual and festivals around death, of the seeming inoculation to death that we gain by watching the 24-hour cable news cycle, where tragic loss of life is quickly paved over and interrupted by advertisements, or more specifically of the Bush administration’s embargo on showing images of the coffins of returning casualties of the Iraq war — the repressed returns, in the form of the walking dead. As humans, I think we have a real need to work out our feelings surrounding death, and that this can take the form, even, of popular culture’s attention to a figure such as the zombie. Then zombies stalk our movie-screens and college kids play “Zombies vs. Humans” tag on college campuses, I think this enables the viewer and participant a kind of catharsis around our culture’s active diminishment of death.

TheoFantastique: At one point an author states that, “In an increasingly disembodied – virtual generation, the zombie is becoming increasingly biological.” Of course a part of this is also an increasing visceral depiction, which also plays out in crime dramas which focus great attention on the corpse. How is the virtual generation, and perhaps past emphasis on the soul to the neglect of the body, influencing corporeal depictions of the zombie for the millennial generation?

Sarah Juliet Lauro: Well, Peter Dendle’s chapter in the book is one of my favorites (if I’m allowed to have favorites); I think that this see-saw effect that we seem to detect in zombie films is probably visible in horror more generally; there was a great article on Slate.com recently about the way sound effects in horror and thriller films have become more accurate and more disgusting. In the zombie genre, depictions of the body seem to get more visceral, more in touch with corporeal reality and thus, representative of the body as something that falls apart falls apart with age, that becomes wounded, that is threatened by disease and destruction; this is neatly mapped onto our increasing virtuality. We spend so much time online, developing who we are via “tweets” and “likes” that it is possible to forget temporarily that our consciousness is embodied. The zombie is the ultimate reminder that we all live in bodies and that we are vulnerable. This idea is very in line with the post-human theories articulated by N. Katherine Hayles, Anne Balsamo, and others.

TheoFantastique: In your chapter contribution to the book you discuss zombie walks as a form of performance art. How have participants drawn upon this form of art, and what types of messages are they communicating?

Sarah Juliet Lauro: The central thing that the zombie mob and certain types of performance art that I profile in my chapter have in common is the interruption of the everyday, the occupation of public space, and the collaborative nature of the performance. Some performance art may assault you in a comfortable space, like a subway car or a shopping mall, and by means of the performance, force you to re-examine the way you normally inhabit this space, and the role that it plays in your life. Often, bystanders are invited to join in, and because such performances are ephemeral, the viewers lucky enough to be a first-generation audience become, participants; they form the backdrop of the performance, if nothing else. Calling attention to the everyday by means of the performance’s contrast, and the occupation of certain spaces have a lot of potential to critique our society, especially where — as in the commuter’s subway ride, or the shopper’s mall — the performance intervenes in a space associated with work and consumerism.

TheoFantastique: Sarah, thank you again for a fine contribution to the academic study of horror, and the zombie in particular.

Sarah Juliet Lauro: Thank you for inviting me to discuss the collection with you!