History Is What Bites: Zombies, Race, and the Limits of Biopower in Colson Whitehead's Zone One. Issue 3 (2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Hurley, Jessica
• Is Part Of: Extrapolation. Volume 56:Issue 3(2015)
• Page Start: 311
• Page End: 333
• Publication Date: 2015
• Subjects: Science fiction -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Science fiction -- Bibliography -- Periodicals; Science fiction; Bibliography; Criticism, interpretation, etc; Periodicals; 809.38762
• DOI: 10.3828/extr.2015.17
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0014-5483

Abstract

Abstract : This paper argues that the zombie serves as the limit point of biopower because it introduces an ungovernable third term into the biopolitical poles of human and non-human, life and death: the ex-human, the undead. Taking race as its central biopolitical concern, the first part of the paper reads the visual tensions between whiteness and blackness in Hollywood representations of the zombie. I then turn to Colson Whitehead's 2010 novel Zone One, arguing that in this novel the zombie figures the return of a repressed history of racial trauma in a contemporary moment in which biopower operates increasingly under the sign of the "postracial."