Past Event

A talk by Mark Anderson (Professor, Department of History – Latin American and Carribean Studies)

Where did all those zombies suddenly come from after 9/11, you may have wondered. One answer may be unearthed from the question. That is to say, in a sense, they came from 9/11 insofar as it is a commonplace that horror throws up a society’s deeper fears against itself. Of course, there exist a myriad number of ways to understand the walking dead—it’s late stage capitalism devouring us/or itself, it’s consumerism eating away at our free will, it’s thinly disguised racism, it’s loathing and fear of refugees/Muslims, it’s a generic fear of the Other triggered by the events of 9/11, and so on. My particular interest in this talk is how zombie narratives speak to the Western. Both genres respond to real-world catastrophizing. But the Western predictably contains the imagined savage. Zombie flicks, on the other hand, pose the question, hey, what happens if the barbarians actually break through the gates?