Aural Atavism: The Witch’s Tale and Gothic Horror Radio
Journal of Radio and Audio Media 19, no. 1 (May 2012): 61-82.
This article offers a cultural historical interpretation of The Witch’s Tale (1931– 38), an early U.S. horror radio... more This article offers a cultural historical interpretation of The Witch’s Tale (1931– 38), an early U.S. horror radio drama, and argues that the program’s use of the Gothic genre unified its content and form. Its plays emphasized temporality to highlight the Gothic intertwining of the past and present, and offered allegories that while often rooted in the fantastic nevertheless addressed contemporary concerns—gender, Others, and socio-economic anxieties. It used sound to complement its content, evoking the supernatural and monsters, and cuing and sustaining suspense. And it tapped radio’s connotation as a supernatural medium to complement and magnify its generic horror.
'Greening' the Zombie: Caribbean Gothic, World-Ecology, and Socio-Ecological Degradation
forthcoming in Green Letters (ed. by Sharae Deckard)
The figure of the zombie is an ideal figure to think through the relations between society and nature under capitalism... more
The figure of the zombie is an ideal figure to think through the relations between society and nature under capitalism from an eco-materialist perspective. Its origins lie in the Haitian experience of slavery and the plantation economy; its subsequent travels have transformed it into the fundamental symbol of alienation under capitalism. As Steve Shaviro argues, zombies "represent the 'human face' of capitalist monstrosity. This is precisely because they are the dregs of humanity: the zombie is all that remains of 'human nature', or even simply of a human scale, in the immense and unimaginably complex network economy" (2002: 288). Building on Shaviro's claim, I want to suggest that while the zombie is indeed the ‘human face’ of capitalist monstrosity, it is also an ecological figure, encoding the rift between humans and their natural environment perpetrated by capitalism, an economic system that centrally depends on the "downgrading or devaluing of nature" (Mukherjee 2010: 66). I will argue that the zombie's phenomenal longevity and resilience to cultural dislocations is not merely due to an often racist sensationalism, but to the fact that, as Murphy argues, "the zombie is a figure of mourning that incarnates [...] the fear of the first modern industrial workers who were stripped of human dignity" (my emphasis, 2011: 48).
The zombie's continued relevance as a figure that encodes alienation is rooted in the Haitian experience of the emergence of modern capitalism, which depended on, and was propelled by, the exploitation of the colonies. Since the exploitation of both labour and lands was central to this process, the production of the alterity of "nature" and the colonial subject were intimately intertwined on an ideological level. The de-humanization of colonial subjects as chattel (as in the Code noir of 1685) or less advanced humans was inscribed into the imperialist dualism “that placed human beings outside nature and that reproduced the difference between human and non-humans as inferiority" (Mukherjee 2010: 55). Colonial subjects were thus routinely seen as closer to nature, and opposed to the supposedly rational space of civilization. Hence, in order to arrive at a decolonized conception of the subject, one must not only re-conceptualize the relation between (imperial) self and (colonial) other, but also between humans and nature-as-other. As Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley have emphasized, there exists a long history of environmental perspectives in postcolonial writing that is often sidelined in mainstream accounts of ecocriticism (2011: 9). In relation to the Gothic, it is important to note that the treatment of the figure of the zombie in many twentieth-century Caribbean novels has long pointed towards the need to re-conceptualise the relation between humans and their environment as central to the project of decolonization, anticipating the recent trend towards 'greening' the gothic as driven by ecocritics such as Tom Hillard. The latter calls for an ecocritical re-reading of "ecophobic" Gothic texts, arguing that the Gothic would provide "a useful lens for understanding the ways that many authors—regardless of when they are writing—represented fears and anxieties about the natural world" (2009: 689). What a reading of Caribbean novels highlights by contrast is that Hillard does not account for the dialectical relation of racial/human and natural alterity, as ecocritical concerns are here "added on" to the Gothic mode's well-documented entanglement in discourses on race, class and gender, but their interconnectedness and mutually constitutive relation are left unexplored.
In the first section of this paper, I turn to the Marxist environmental historian Jason W. Moore in order to theorise the zombie as a figure that due to its origins that stem from the Caribbean's forced integration into the world economy mediates and encodes the metabolic rift produced by capitalism. Building on world-systems theory, Moore seeks to transcend the “Cartesian narrative of capitalism and ‘the environment’” (2010: 391) and to view capitalism as an ecological regime, as world-ecology. His approach proves useful for an eco-materialist reading of the zombie, since Moore understands (old and new) imperialisms as socio-ecological projects and processes (2011b: 113). In contrast to "deep ecological" approaches, an ecocritical approach that draws on an understanding of capitalism as an ecological regime allows us to address the relation between human and ecological degradation, but does not necessarily require a search for literal engagements with the extra-human world. “The production of nature-society relations," as Moore reminds us, "has been every bit as much about factories as forests, stock exchanges, shopping centres, slums and suburban sprawls as soil exhaustion and species extinction” (2010: 392). Zombies have in recent years been imagined as consumers, shoppers and monsters driven by hunger, but they could never be imagined as small-scale independent farmers. This seemingly obvious observation will lead us to the heart of the meaning of the zombie.
Moore's understanding of capitalism as world-ecology enables us to read the zombie in relation to the successive ecological regimes in capitalist development, each of which has been the result of an agricultural revolution that drove down food prices and hence production costs (2010: 389). From a materialist perspective Stephen Shapiro has observed that the gothic mode emerges in clusters at specific moments in capitalist development, that "gothic-effects" tend to emerge "as a cultural marker of a region’s initial appropriation by liberal economy" and then reappear "at each turn of the screw” in a new and altered form that responds to changes within the system (2008: 32). In accordance with his observation, there are three key phases in the zombie's ecological history: its emergence and folk-tale existence within the colonial plantation system; its appropriation by US writers and integration into the US imaginary during the early twentieth century, as the new imperial power was continuing to move outward to exploit natural resources outside its own terrain; and its increased popularity towards the end of the twentieth century as a corollary of the neoliberal phase that, as Moore puts it, has failed to generate the agro-ecological conditions for renewed growth (2010: 390).
The main concern of this paper is to contrast the employment of the figure of the zombie in imperialist texts and postcolonial Caribbean novels. This comparison serves to highlight the ecological unconscious of the zombie in imperialist texts such as W.B. Seabrook's Magic Island (1929) and the film I walked with a Zombie (Tourneur, 1943). In contrast, in twentieth-century Caribbean novels such as Erna Brodber's Myal (1988), the zombie is employed as a figure that allows for the conscious critique of the capitalist oikeios (the way in which nature and society relations are organized under capitalism). While I refer to this aesthetic as "eco-Gothic" to bring out the way in which it responds to the gothic-effects, it functions according to the logic of what Michael Löwy (2010) calls critical irrealism in that the employment of the zombie cannot be read as the eruption of a socio-ecological unconscious, but rather works as a critique of the material and ideological legacy of capitalist colonialism.
Zombies, Sugar and the Metabolic Rift
"The Negroes, therefore, from the very start lived a life that was in its essence a modern life." C.L.R. James (1938)
The original Haitian zombie is quite different from that popularised in recent years by Hollywood cinema: either a bodiless spirit or a soulless body, it is intimately linked to vodou (a complex creolized religion that has been much reviled in the imperialist imaginary). The soulless body is raised from the grave or has had its soul stolen while still alive (often through the administration of poison). It is controlled by a vodou sorcerer and becomes a "beast of burden, which his master exploits without mercy" (Métraux 1972: 282). It does not bite and may awaken through eating salt. The most important difference between Hollywood and Haitian conceptions of zombies is that Haitians do not fear zombies but may "live in fear of being zombified themselves" (Fernández Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert 2003: 129). Anthropologists trace the concept of the zombie back to African spiritual belief systems (Ackermann and Gauthier 1991), but one may here argue that there is also something radically new and historically specific to its emergence in the plantation context. As Shapiro argues, gothic monsters may “be nativist, folk traditions, but are actually new constructions that register globalizing conditions in local-seeming idioms” (32). While it clearly grows out of pre-existing belief systems, the experience of the middle passage and plantation slavery has fundamentally shaped this new figure. Further, while the zombie is characterized by its docile behaviour and evokes images of mind control, it also came to be linked to mass uprising through the popular rebel Jean Zombi, who fought next to the revolutionary leader Dessalines, "earned a reputation for brutality" and was transformed into a lwa (god or spirit) of the Petwo rite (Dayan 1998 36). This dimension of the zombie as a figure of the vengeance of the oppressed and exploited masses remains relevant in later Western filmic adaptations. In the Haitian context, the zombie - whether docile or rebellious - is a figure whose roots in the experience of brutal enslavement and exploitation are readily discernible. It bears the marks of extreme human deprivation, as well as, arguably, those of extreme ecological deprivation and of human alienation from the natural environment, now re-shaped by colonial monocultures. The exploited zombie labourer never works the fields for himself and the fruits of his labour land on foreign tables. As Moore puts it: the "degradation of nature is the degradation of the worker, and occurs only through the degradation of the worker under the law of value" (Moore 2003: 321).
In order to understand the zombie's travels, we need to look beyond the sensationalism and must instead recall C.L.R. James' assertion that the slaves' life was profoundly modern: they worked in a large-scale agricultural complex; the products were shipped abroad; and their food and the cloth the slaves wore were imported (1991: 392). Indeed, early modern plantation economies were "amongst the most technically and organizationally advanced in the capitalist world" (Moore 2000: 128), employing methods to guarantee efficiency and profitability that were "associated more with industry than with agriculture - at least in the sixteenth century" (Mintz 1986: 47). Many have argued that the sugar plantations were central to the emergence of modern capitalism, but Moore adds that sugar (and silver) "were ecologically central, constitutive moments of an epochal reorganization of "world ecology"" (Moore 2003: 309), enabling global divisions of labour. The introduction of sugar monocultures exhausted Caribbean soils, initiating cycles of unsustainable development. Capitalism's configuration of the nature-society dialectic - the capitalist oikeios - is founded on a metabolic rift in the relations between humans and the earth through severing the relation between the mass of the population and the land (Moore 2000). The uneven global labour division is constitutive of this rift, which was more pronounced in the Caribbean than elsewhere: the flora and fauna brought by the colonizers completely transformed and altered the Caribbean eco-system, producing a radical rupture with the ecological past. The rupture of the capitalist oikeios was therefore not only experienced first on a grand-scale in the Caribbean, but also most dramatically. In the context of the Caribbean, the "chief legacies of colonialism" and, in particular, the plantation economy, have been "the compromised deforested environments" (Paravisini-Gebert 2011: 100), the consequences of which are a loss of biodiversity, soil erosion, flooding, aridification, climate change, and related signs of environmental degradation. Sugar is one of the most detrimental forms of agriculture: it requires the clearing of lands, depletes the soils, and "destroys forests well beyond the plantation" because of its need for large quantities of firewood needed for furnaces in which the cane juice would be boiled (Miller 2007: 79). The transformation and exhaustion of the environment in the colonies was a condition for capitalist expansion (Moore 2003: 309); capitalism is fuelled by its constant drive towards natural exhaustion, which leads to further cycles of expansion and plunder. It is due to the zombie's origins, therefore, that it is a figure that registers not only the worker's alienation, but also the metabolic rift that is not exceptional to the Caribbean.
Zombies in the US imperialist imaginary
The zombie's integration into US popular film culture stems from the US occupation of Haiti between 1915 and 1934, which produced some of the most influential zombie novels and films of the twentieth century, including W.B. Seabrook's novel The Magic Island (1929), and films such as White Zombie (Halperin 1932 and I walked with a Zombie (Tourneur 1943). Within the imperialist imaginary, the zombie came to express imperialist fears of racial and class "others" and the "threat" of mass rebellion, while simultaneously functioning as "an ideologically motivated rhetorical device deployed to demonstrate and establish moral superiority of civilized colonial authority over the barbarous slave" (Ellis 2000: 208). The zombie disturbs the fantasy of the modern rational and autonomous individual for whom "nature" becomes "mere objectivity" (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002: 6) and for whom clearing the land was a mark of progress in contrast to the "wilderness" of the forests (Paravisini-Gebert 2011: 101). The gothic, in Jerold Hogle's definition, usually takes place in an "antiquated or seemingly antiquated space" in which the characters are haunted by the past (2002: 2); it is thus a mode of disruption, expressing ruptured experience of time and space. In The Magic Island, Haiti constitutes an archaic, primitive space that is alien to the "rational" white US American. The narrator's first impressions are revealing in this respect: "Only the jungle mountains remained, dark, mysterious; and from their slopes came presently far out across the water the steady boom of the voodoo drums" (1929: 4). While throughout the text, the narrator often happens upon the remnants of Haiti's colonial and revolutionary history as well as pre-capitalist agriculture, vodou and the imagined primitive origins of mankind are here linked to a primal wilderness that is "dark and mysterious" and that co-exists in the same space as the narrator's "modern" and "rational" frames of reference. The narrator's encounters with locals are rendered in distinctly primitivist and racialising terms, as in the following example: "It was as if we had known each other always [...] as if I had suckled in infancy at her dark breasts, had wandered far, and was now returning home" (1929: 28). Discourses on gender, race and an imagined wilderness intersect in the production of this primitive space governed by non-rational emotions and simultaneously attracting and repelling the narrator. The gothic here becomes the vehicle for a tale of transgression of boundaries (which are ultimately upheld and reinforced by the narrative).
The zombie is presented as archaic, pre-modern, but I want to argue that the figure sits uneasily with this temporal narrative of evolution. "[The zombie] upsets everything," observes the narrator of The Magic Island; "by ‘everything’ I meant the natural fixed laws and processes on which all modern thought and actions are based" (100). The rational, autonomous subject is momentarily destabilised by the figure of the zombie that de-naturalises the assumptions on which the fantasy of the autonomous individual (who participates freely in the market and improves wild nature) is based. While the book overall is steeped in racist-imperialist ideology and rehearses a version of the old imperial tale of a white colonizer accepted as king by the "natives", the figure of the zombie also disturbs the ideology of the text.
One may here note the context in which the zombie is introduced in the text, namely specifically in relation to the production of sugar. In the case of Haiti, sugar production had come to an end after independence, but it was resumed on a large scale during US occupation at the beginning of the twentieth century (Lundahl 2002: 90); the American-owned Haitian-American Sugar Company (Hasco) began producing in 1918. In order make way for its business venture, it cleared lands in the Cul-de-Sac and Léogâne plains, "marking the beginning of widespread deforestation and erosion" (Miles and Charles 2004: 123). It also displaced thousands of peasants, who "had long farmed the land on these fertile plains, whether independently or for elite landowners through the demwatye (sharecropping) system"(Ramsey 2011: 173-4). The former sharecroppers who had received 60-75% of the harvest were reduced to being salaried day labourers and the company divested itself of any responsibility towards them by "subhiring through native gang bosses" (Schmidt 1995: 178). Profit was generated only eventually by under-paying the workers. When the US travel writer Seabrook spends time in Haiti a decade later, he is told a story about a work gang of zombies working at Hasco in 1918 by his "rational friend" Polynice:
"At this very moment, in the moonlight, there are zombies working on this island, less than two hours' ride from my own habitation. [...] If you will ride with me tomorrow night, yes, I will show you dead men working in the cane fields. Close even to the cities, there are sometimes zombies. Perhaps you have already heard of those that were at Hasco..."
"What about Hasco?" I interrupted him, for in the whole of Haiti, Hasco is perhaps the last name anybody would think of connecting with either sorcery or superstition. The word is American-commercial-synthetic, like Nabisco, Delco, Socony. It stands for the Haitian-American sugar Company - an immense factory plant, dominated by a huge chimney, with clanging machinery, steam whistles, freight cars. It is like a chunk of Hoboken. It lies in the eastern suburbs of Port-au-Prince, and beyond it stretch the cane fields of the Cul-de-Sac. Hasco makes rum when the sugar market is off, pays low wages, twenty or thirty cents a day, and gives steady work. It is modern big business, and it sounds it, looks it, smells it. (Seabrook 1929: 94-95)
The zombies in this description are not primitive, but inextricably tied to the symbol of modernity, "modern big business" represented by Hasco, which the narrator here seeks to tie firmly to the "modern" world known to the American reader. Thus, in Polynice’s tale of zombies, the unevenly differentiated landscape of labour and ecology produced by capitalism takes centre stage, as he emphasizes the incongruity of the cane fields in juxtaposition with the gleaming symbol of industrial modernity, Hasco. This dwarves the workers and robs them of any illusion of autonomy or individuality. In contrast to the primitive sugar mill driven solely by zombie-power that is represented in White Zombie (1932), the emphasis here lies on the large size and excessive noise of "modern big business." The emphasis on size is significant in this context, as many foreign operations in Haiti failed precisely because one of the major impediments to the development of modern plantations was the "long-standing division of land into minuscule plots held by peasant freeholders" (Schmidt, 1995: 179). Hasco was based in the Cul-de-Sac plain, where large blocs of land could be leased (Gerald F Murray, quoted by Ramsey, 2011: 333). In fact, for the most part, the high hopes for economic exploitation by US business ventures failed to materialize, as Haiti only offered cheap labour but lacked natural resources (Schmidt 1995: 171). Thus, even within Seabrook’s text, the emergence of the zombie defies imperialist associations with the archaic and primitive, and is revealed as a product of US-led capitalism.
Despite the fact that most of Seabrook's information seems to have been collected in the bar of his hotel and was used as part of a sensationalist and titillating travel account (Palmié 2002: 65), the text’s account of the zombie labour gang retains a powerful social critique of the "proletarianization of the displaced Haitian peasant" (Ramsey 2011: 174), seemingly a local re-working of the zombie figure at another "turn of the screw," as US agri-business invades Haiti. The zombies powerfully speak to the experience of these labourers forced into the capitalist "free" market: "As Joseph lined them up for registration, they still stared, vacant-eyed like cattle, and made no reply when asked to give their names. [...] They were frightened, he said, by the din and the smoke of the great factory" (Seabrook 1929: 95). The zombie, then, is not a pre-modern figure. As Palmié argues, "far from representing a mistaken interpolation of archaic fantasy into the script of agroindustrial labor relations," the image of the zombie in this context springs from "a reality deeply riven with a sense of moral crisis unleashed by a predatory modernity" (2002: 66). Robbed of the possibility of a more direct access to the land through share-crop farming, they are now exploited workers on a monoculture plantation run for profit rather than guaranteeing self-sufficiency and long-term sustenance, which is here experienced as a loss of a sense of reality. Even though US writers were interested in the zombie as a figure that helped to produce Haitians as "others", its socio-ecological unconscious is rooted in the experience of degradation (of workers and environments) that is most pronounced under colonialist regimes but characteristic of capitalism at large. Within Haiti, the figure of the zombie contains a critique of US agri-business's penetration of the Haitian economy. Displaced into the US context of the Depression era and mass unemployment, the alienated, consciousless figure also found a ready audience and arguably acquired a meaning that went beyond the merely sensationalist-racist dimension.
In the two famous US zombie films mentioned above - White Zombie and I walked with a Zombie - the integral connection between the Caribbean cane fields, the sugar industry, exploitation and the zombie is made visually explicit. The former depicts in detail a primitive old sugar mill that seems ill-suited to the modern plantation, implicitly relegating exploitation to the colonial past. In the latter, there is a strong visual emphasis on the link between the production of natural environments in the Caribbean and zombification. In a well-known sequence in which the Canadian nurse Betsy leads the zombified plantation owner's wife Jessica to a vodou houmfort, transgressing racialised cultural boundaries in the hopes of finding a cure, the visual emphasis lies on the cane fields that the two women must cross. The two women do not talk and the soundtrack is dominated by the wind, the rustling of the canes, and more ominous diegetic sounds such as the off-screen blowing of a conch shell, and the beating of a vodou drum that increases in volume. The camera emphasizes the cane stalks and the shadows they produce as the canes move disquietingly against the moonlit sky, creating a decidedly gothic mood, which is further enhanced as the camera suddenly cuts to a number of different shots of signs that mark their entry into a primitive world (this includes a shot of a skull placed on the ground; a hanged goat; and finally, the zombie sentinel Carrefour). Throughout, Tourneur's camera style "subordinates human figures to the decor and to patterns of light" (Fujiwara 1998: 87), which is enhanced by the billowing white clothing of the two actors that stands out against the dark shadows and against the dark figure of Carrefour (Paravisini-Gebert 1997: 44). There are several shots of the two female characters through the cane fields, suggesting a loss of clear vision on the one hand, as well as creating a metaphorical imprisonment. This sets in motion the symbolism of light/dark in relation to the notion of reason. Further, it highlights the association of the enlightened subject with the power to see in contrast to the colonial subject's habitual position as object of the imperial gaze (Emery 2007: 2).
However, the scene does not only encapsulate imperialist fears of rebellion and contagion; the natural environment here forms part of the threatening atmosphere. This is not, however, the imagined "nature" or "wilderness" evoked by Seabrook and associated with the non-American other. Rather, it is here the cane fields - primary example of cultivated nature, of human-produced environments - that turn into a threat. Given cane production's above-described unsustainability, this scene may be read as the return of the ecological repressed. What is further interesting to note is that while both films invest their narrative energies in the zombification of a white female character who, in the masculinist logic of patriarchal imperialism, symbolises the site of contagion or possible transgression of the racialised binaries, in both films, the main conflict is not between colonial other and imperial self as is sometimes argued, but between the French and American bankers (White Zombie) and between a white British West Indian plantation and sugar mill owner and his American half-brother (I walked with a Zombie). Read alongside Shapiro's argument that the Gothic mode may be read as “a representational response by one core society to fears of losing place to another during times of capitalist phase transition in the world-system” (Shapiro 2008: 35), one might here suggest that these films stage, in displaced form, the struggle for control over exploitable regions at a time when the US was emerging as a major new imperial power.
Eco-gothic Aesthetics in Caribbean Magical Realist Fiction
"The history of colonisation is the process of man's general zombification. It is also the quest for a revitalising salt capable of restoring to man the use of his imagination and his culture."
René Dépestre
Caribbean writing has from an early stage in its history "explored the relationship between colonialism and the environment" (Paravisini-Gebert 2011: 100). Landscape, re-made by colonialism, becomes "a monument" in Caribbean writing, as Glissant has put it, adding that the "language of the landscape" becomes a "shaping force" (1989: 11; 145). In other words, the extra-human environment is not perceived as static and separate from human society. Instead, it is represented as shaped by, and shaping, human history. Given that historically, the form of the novel has contributed to shaping modern conceptions of the nature-society dualism, many Caribbean writers' efforts to decolonise the form of the novel and its conception of character rest on a rejection of this underlying dualism in favour of an understanding of human-nature relations as dialectic. The ecological unconscious that is inherent in all zombie figures is thus consciously addressed in relation to human forms of alterity. In other words, the link between imperial-patriarchal othering and the exploitation of nature is made explicit through the aesthetic use of the zombie. As examples, one might here cite Wilson Harris's Palace of the Peacock (1960), Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Frankétienne's Dézafi (1975), Simone Schwarz-Bart's Ti Jean L'Horizon (1979), Erna Brodber's Myal (1988) and more recently, Malas hierbas (2010) by Pedro Cabiya. Zombified characters throw into doubt one of the key cornerstones of traditional realist novelistic writing, since they are not typical characters; they are not "individuals" in that they lack its principal characteristics. In these novels, they throw into doubt the very concept of the autonomous, self-determining individual dominating over his others and the natural realm.
Within these texts, the gothic mode is often subsumed by, or is employed alongside, magical realism, which is, like the gothic, a style of disruption growing out of capitalist unevenness subjectively experienced as ruptures in time. Despite its only passing mention of zombies, it is here useful to turn to Alejo Carpentier's Haitian novel, The Kingdom of This World (1957 [originally published in 1949]), which sheds light on this transition from gothic to magical realist. Influenced by Seabrook's The Magic Island, it is a threshold text that sits uncomfortably and challengingly between a primitivist-gothic perspective on Haiti (marked by exoticism and ecophobia), and one that would seek to decolonise and reinterpret historical and fictional representation of a key episode in world history, the Haitian Revolution. At moments, the narrative tone is distinctly gothic, as for instance in the chapter that narrates the poisoning campaign led by the maroon and houngan (a vodou priest) Makandal from the ecophobic perspective of the colonists: "The poison crawled across the Plaine du Nord, invading pastures and stables. Nobody knew how it found its way into the grass and the alfalfa, got mixed in with the bales of hay, climbed into the mangers. [...] Soon, to the general horror, it became known that the poison had got into the houses. [...] The sinister hammering of coffins could be heard at all hours" (33; 34). The threat perceived by the colonists is both 'natural' and human, as Makandal's superior knowledge of the plants and fungi of the island causes the death of those animals naturalized in the Caribbean, as well as of the colonists themselves. It is also from the perspective of the colonists that zombies are evoked when the threat of Makandal has been averted: "Others stated that the houngan had got away on a schooner, and was operating in a region in Jacmel, where many men who had died tilled the land as long as they were kept from tasting salt" (40-1). The zombies in this narrative form part of an exoticised realm inhabited by Makandal. However, the gothic mode's association with the colonist's perspective is not consistent within the novel: the description of the houngan Boukman's famous vodou ceremony that, over three decades later, led to the outbreak of the revolution relies heavily on imperialist historiography (Antoine Dalmas' Histoire de la révolution de Saint-Domingue (1814)), producing a scene that would not be out of place within an imperialist gothic novel. Indeed, as Paravisini-Gebert argues, Carpentier is "not unwilling to fetishise certain aspects" of the vodou faith (2004: 118).
Simultaneously, however, the reader is at times offered a communal Afro-Caribbean perspective that has its roots in Afro-Caribbean religious traditions (in which the extra-human world is infused with spirit), and suggests a different relation to the extra-human environment. Confronted with Makandal's disappearance, "they all knew that the green lizard, the night moth, the strange dog, the incredible gannet, were nothing but disguises. As he had the power to take the shape of hoofed animal, bird, fish, or insect, Makandal continually visited the plantations of the Plaine to watch over his faithful and find out if they still had faith in his return" (41). Makandal's cyclical metamorphoses symbolize a more dynamic relation with the environment, which contrasts with the emphasis in the second half of the novel on the ecological legacy of the plantation system (the result of European colonialism) and of the wreckage left in the wake of the Revolution (Paravisini-Gebert 2005: 189). Overall, the narrative upholds racialised binaries and represents Afro-Caribbeans as more virile and culturally closer to extra-human nature in contrast to the effeminate Europeans whose culture is seen as decadent and lifeless, and thus still demonstrates a close affiliation to primitivism. However, while it is in many ways unable to extricate itself from imperialist discourses on race and gender, as the above quote suggests it also gestures towards a different way of conceptualizing the relation between extra-human environment and humans, as the dualistic distinction between society and "nature" is momentarily overcome.
In Erna Brodber's more recent novel Myal set in Jamaica, the zombie is a product of spirit-theft and becomes the central symbol and symptom of the impact of colonialist capitalism on individuals and the nature-society dialectic. Myal does not have a protagonist in the traditional sense, but rather constructs a more polycentric narrative through doubling and narrative strands that mirror each other. Zombified Ella functions as the "site where the many forms of spirit thievery converge [...]: the violence of colonization, the neo-colonial violence of the United States and her American husband Selwyn Langley, the racial and sexual domination of her marriage" and her marginalisation by her peers because of her lighter skin colour (Puri 2004: 149). Ecological violence is emphasized throughout the novel: as a school girl, Ella uncritically recites two famous poems by the pro-imperial author Rudyard Kipling, "Big Steamers" (1911) and "The White Man's Burden" (1899). Extracts of the two poems are offered at the beginning of chapter two: the first celebrates the globalised food trade ("We [the steamers] are going to fetch you your bread and your butter/Your beef, pork, and mutton, apples and cheese" (1988: 5)), the second refers to the "new caught sullen peoples/ half devil and half child" who are the "white man's" metaphoric burden (1988: 6). Together, they thus link the expansion of the metabolic rift through capitalist globalization with the othering of imperial subjects, joining the outward drive of capitalist expansion with the production of an uneven global labour distribution. Colonialist education transformed Ella into a zombie alienated from local reality and an unthinking voice of imperialist propaganda. The adult Ella experiences another version of symbolic violence as her husband transforms her childhood memories into an exoticist coon show, through which Brodber is able to highlight the relation between racial and natural alterity as produced in neo-colonial discourse. The Grove town of Selwyn's play, we are told with irony, "had to be the most fruitful place in the whole world and one which respected no season" (1988: 83); it offers an image of an exoticised and commodified nature produced for tourists’ taste, functioning merely as the backdrop for the blond heroine with flowing hair. The disrupted relation to the extra-human world thus forms part of this zombification, which also becomes clear in Reverend Simpson's description of "duppies, zombies, living dead capable only of receiving orders" as people robbed of “their knowledge of their original and natural world" (1988: 107).
Simpson's understanding of zombification sheds light on the first chapter, which offers a description of a myal ritual to cure Ella, in which the narrative voice shifts between extra-human and human perspectives as the landscape is infused with spirituality. The "traditional healer Mass Cyrus absorbs [Ella's] pain and redistributes it outward in the form of 'bitter vibrations' to all the living things in his grove, who then transform it into positive energy" (Kortenaar 2011: 148). This transformation and transmission of energies is also distinctly violent as the "trembling" of the grove becomes a lightening storm that destroys animal and human lives outside of the grove (1988: 4), metaphorically evoking the labour unrests of 1919, "a year that marked the beginning of wide-spread disturbances" (Puri 2004: 163). Within the realm of the novel, this eventually leads to Ella's de-zombification, as she turns into a teacher who transmits subversive reading practices to her students. In Myal as in many other postcolonial Caribbean texts, de-zombification lies within the realm of possibility and requires a conscious engagement with the legacy of colonialist capitalism, including its conceptions of extra-human nature. Significantly, the zombie is not a positive figure in itself, but it is a tool for analysis. It is not enough for the zombies to merely disturb the system; they yearn to become dezombified. This contrasts with the postmodernist-posthumanist perspective offered by Lauro and Embry's "A Zombie Manifesto" (2008), in which the "zombii" demonstrates the meaning of posthuman as a figure that disturbs and disrupts but whose “subject position is nullified” (2008: 95). The vision of a posthuman subject that implicitly underlies Myal is very different: it valorises a reconfigured subject that is conceived relationally, not a consciousless agent that disturbs the system; it celebrates not the swarm mechanism, but a reconstituted sense of community that manifests itself through the relational construction of characters and plot.
To conclude, reducing the zombie to sensationalism - even in its imperialist incarnations - does not do justice to this figure. The zombie is a Haitian invention testifying to, and containing within it, the memory of the first experience of industrial exploitation, magnified by the extremely brutal and dehumanizing context of slavery that reduced humans to chattel, as well as the experience of the ecological dimension of modernity, intensified by the plantations. While the zombie was deracinated from its original context and emptied of its spiritual dimension, while it has changed dramatically over time and through its displacements (from disembodied soul, to soulless, slow-moving body, to revolutionary fighter, to cannibalistic, fast-moving and ever-hungry monster in Hollywood cinema of neoliberal times), it continues to be a figure that encodes the degradation of workers and land under capitalism. Phantasmagoric tales and films emerge and become popular as they function as critical indicator of the increasing capitalization of human life. The ecological unconscious of the form of the zombie tale - the zombie's basic alienation from his environment, including human beings - continues to erupt and disturb. It is not coincidental that in George Romero's films, what causes the dead to walk is a man-made human ecological disaster and that the perhaps most iconic scene is that of hordes of zombies senselessly walking across fields. Zombies could never be farmers, gardeners or planters, professions that would have to be founded on a long-term relation to the land. By the late twentieth century, zombie movies had increased immensely in popularity, and the zombie had become a mindless hunter driven by hunger. This paper argued that Caribbean novelists have shown for some time that the zombie is a key figure for thinking about aesthetics in relation to world-ecology, since it encoded radical transformations and subsequent degradations or exhaustions of extra-human environments and human labour. Further, it is a key figure through which the legacy of colonialist capitalism is addressed and the capitalist oikeios critiqued. The zombie is, after all, not only a figure of disenfranchisement but also of mass rebellion and political unrest. Within Haiti and Haitian literature, the twentieth-century zombie continues to offer "a fitting vehicle for intellectuals interested in affirming their commitment to Haiti's popular culture as well as an ideal metaphor through which to condemn Haiti's social and political ills" (Glover 2011: 58). While Kaimana Glover is right to claim that the zombie is "first and foremost an expression of Haitianness" (59), the experience encapsulated by the figure of the zombie has wider ramifications, transforming it into a symbol that, from the start, has had global significance.
Kerstin Oloff is a Lecturer in Latin American Studies at the University of Durham, where she teaches classes on the cultures of the Hispanic Caribbean and, more broadly, Latin American literary and visual art. Before working to Durham, she has taught classes at the Universities of Toronto and Warwick. She is the co-editor of Perspectives on the 'other America': Comparative Approaches to Caribbean and Latin American culture (Rodopi, 2009). She has published articles on Caribbean, Central American and Mexican literature. Her research interests lie in the novel form and the articulation of selfhood; the gothic mode and the figure of the zombie; postcolonial studies; ecocriticism/eco-materialism; feminism and gender studies; and world literature. She is currently working on completing her first monograph, provisionally entitled Refashioning the Self: Modernity, the Individual and the Caribbean Novel.
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Modern Gothic fabrications in the antiquarian style: Kent, Langley and Walpole
Published in Gothic Legacies: Four Centuries of Tradition and Innovation in Art and Architecture, Cambridge Scholars' Press, 2012.
In 1872 Charles Eastlake, the antiquarian Gothic revivalist, observed that
'Gothic architecture has had its... more
In 1872 Charles Eastlake, the antiquarian Gothic revivalist, observed that
'Gothic architecture has had its vicissitudes in this country. There was a time when its principles were universally recognised; there was a time when they were neglected or forgotten. But in the days of its lowest degradation, it may be questioned whether it would not have been better that the cause should have remained unexposed than have been sustained by such a champion as Batty Langley'.
Batty Langley, garden designer and theorist, derived a system of Gothic architecture based on classical principles. This early phase of the Gothic Revival has been termed, variously, as Rococo-Gothic, Gothick, and (in this chapter) Modern Gothic. Kenneth Clark argues that ‘there seems [to be a]…good reason for believing that Rococo Gothic, if viewed historically rather than for its own sake, has a considerable place in the revival’.2 In the later twentieth century, however, Michael McCarthy reinvigorated Eastlake’s evaluation of the style by determining that it is a ‘nonsense category’.3 This chapter will show that the Modern Gothic style is anything but nonsense and, despite appearances, forms the backbone to the proto-antiquarian aesthetic in the Strawberry Hill circle.
Towards a Prehistory of the Gothic Mode in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand Writing
by Edmund King
Journal of New Zealand Literature 28, no. 2 (2010): 35-57
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Hollow Spaces of Psyche: Gothic Trance-Formation From Joy Division To Diary of Dreams
by Atte Oksanen
Oksanen, Atte (2007) Hollow Spaces of Psyche: Gothic Trance-Formation from Joy Division to Diary of Dreams. In Isabella van Elferen (ed.) Nostalgia or Perversion? Gothic Rewriting from the 18th Century until the Present Day (pp. 124-136). Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Hardy Bernal, K. A. (2011). The Lolita Complex: A Japanese Fashion Subculture and its Paradoxes. Auckland: AUT University.
Master of Philosophy (MPhil) Thesis, 30 May 2011
My thesis investigates complex issues implied by and connected with the Japanese movement known generally as Gothic... more My thesis investigates complex issues implied by and connected with the Japanese movement known generally as Gothic & Lolita (G&L), focussing specifically on the Lolita fashion-based subculture and psychological motivations behind it. It discusses the transmigration of the movement’s ideas from Eastern to Western to Eastern societies, including differing cultural interpretations of “Lolita” and their implications in terms of the Lolita phenomenon, while examining ideologies in context with conflicting connotations and paradoxes that arise from a label that combines perceptions about “Lolita” with the “Gothic”. It also addresses the “Lolita Complex”, a term that stems from the narrative of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and is applied to a syndrome affecting older men and their attraction to young girls, and explores its associations with the Lolita subculture. The Lolita Complex, as the title of this thesis, also refers to the problematic complexities connected with and inferred by the movement. This thesis is multi-disciplinary. Although the emphasis is related to Fashion (or Design) History and Theory, my research also spans the fields of Subcultural Theory, Gothic Studies, Gender Studies, Asian Studies and Anthropology. It leans, though, more to the “theoretical” side, while my methodological approach relates closely to Analytic or Psychoanalytic Art History, based on my education and training as an Art and Design theorist. As such, this study is an analysis of the Japanese Lolita subculture. It is my theory or my reading of this cultural phenomenon, supported by evidence to state the overriding argument that the Lolita movement is symbolic of and represents a generation of young women who refuse to enter adulthood and “grow up”.
'The Vampire with a Thousand Faces: towards a physiognomy of the undead'
Paper presented at 'Vampires: Myths of the Past and the Future', international conference at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London, 2-4 November 2011.
De pintura tardogòtica catalana: algunes novetats al voltant del Mestre de Cervera i el Mestre de Gualba
in Miscel·lània Cerverina, 20, 2010, p. 83-127
This study provides some innovations on the work of the Master of Cervera, a painter active in the provinces of Lleida... more This study provides some innovations on the work of the Master of Cervera, a painter active in the provinces of Lleida and Tarragona at the end of the 15th century and beginning of the following century, who some have identified as Pere Girard from Valencia. We also disclose several previously unpublished works which have recently appeared in the art and antiques market which have been attributed to the aforementioned painter. On the other hand, the figure of the Master of Gualba, a painter active in the first half of the 16th century, is also analysed, who, due to his style, seems to have been a possible student of the Master of Cervera.
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Seen by: Book review: Alison Rudd's Postcolonial Gothic Fictions from the Caribbean, Canada, Australia and New Zealand
by Sarah Post
Published on the Gothic Imagination website
L'esthétique gothique. Essai de compréhension de la société postsoviétique
Le Banquet, n°26 (2009/1) - histoire / Russie
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