On Get Out and the Problem of Racialized Aliveness

ABSTRACT

In this short article, I explore Jordan Peele’s 2017 film Get Out as a compelling illustration of racialization as an attack on human “aliveness.” I argue that Peele’s film, a new kind of zombie narrative, urges psychosocial transformation not only through the radically inventive acts of its creatively resurrected protagonist, Chris, but also through its own subversive collaboration with the spectator.

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Rebecca Barnett

Rebecca Barnett is a student at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is currently researching the effect of trauma on Black identity in twentieth-century African-American literature.