Postracial fantasies, blackness, and zombies

ABSTRACT

The essay mainly performs a structural and formal analysis of the logics and affective economies of postracial fantasies so as to eventually offer the Zombie trope as a mode of analysis figuring alternative ways of thinking race relations. The essay contends that the Zombie, when articulated with discourses and feelings of the postracial, signifies the unleashing of black bio-threat bodies upon a population; and that enjoyment of the postracial and the Zombie Apocalyptic genre obscures and resuscitates this signification. As a brief case study, the essay discusses the display, materiality, and “bloody” enjoyment of the “Zombie Obama” target mannequin by gun enthusiasts and preppers.

KEYWORDS:

• Postracial fantasies
• biopolitics
• blackness
• zombie apocalypse
• racism

Notes

1. Eric Lach, “Vendor Pulls ‘Obama’ Target from Booth at NRA Convention,” TPM Livewire, posted May 6, 2013, http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/vendor-pulls-obama-target-from-booth-at-nra-convention (accessed May 3, 2016).

2. Morgan Whitaker, “Obama the Zombie? Just a Coincidence Says the Company,” MSNBC.com, posted May 6, 2013, http://msnbc.com/politicsnation/Obama-the-zombie (accessed May 3, 2016).

3. “Zombie Industries,” Zoominfo.com July 2016.

4. Netwise Company Profiles, January 17, 2017; this business profile focused on Mississippi Auto Arms, Inc., discussing its gun and ammunition products and its relations with companies like Wise Survival Food and Zombie Industries.

5. Gregory Korte, “NRA Expo: Nine Acres of Guns, Bras, Zombies; Thousands Turn Out for Spectacle,” USA Today, May 6, 2013: 3A.

6. Dan Friedman, “Gun Target Shock,” New York Daily News, July 11, 2013: 12.

7. Korte, “NRA Expo,” 3A.

8. Luke Blackall, “The Undead Prez: Guns, The NRA has Banned a Zombie-Obama Lookalike Target from its Convention,” The Independent, May 7, 2013: 22.

9. “Zombie Industries,” Zoominfo.com (emphasis added). This statement appears in a company “description”; it also previously appeared on the company’s webpage. As of this writing, it has been deleted.

10. Caroline Fairchild, “Zombie ‘Ex’ Bleeding Target to Be Discontinued Amid Public Outcry,” The Huffington Post May 9, 2013, www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/09/zombie-ex-target (accessed January 13, 2017).

11. Casey Ryan Kelly, “The Man-pocalypse: Doomsday Preppers and the Rituals of Apocalyptic Manhood,” Text and Performance Quarterly 36 (2016): 97.

12. Helen A. Neville, Miguel Gallardo, and Derald Wing Sue, eds., The Myth of Racial Colorblindness: Manifestations, Dynamics, and Impact (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2016); see also Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016); Paul C. Taylor, On Obama (New York: Routledge, 2016); and Ian Haney Lòpez, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

13. There is entirely too much material on zombies to review, but this point is made nicely by Jennifer Rutherford, Zombies (London: Routledge, 2013); see chapter 1, “Monstration.”

14. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 231.

15. See Paul Elliott Johnson (2016): “Walter White(ness) lashes out: Breaking Bad and Male Victimage,” Critical Studies in Media Communication, doi:10.1080/15295036.2016.1238101.

16. When one takes into account the films, novels, short stories, TV shows, and kitsch items like T-shirts, jewelry, and toys, it’s really just too much; Google “zombie” and see for yourself.

17. Kevin Powell, “Will Racism Ever End, Will I Ever Stop Being a Nigger?” Utne Reader (Spring 2016), 49.

18. For examples, see Lee D. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998); Audrey Smedley, “Social Origins of the Idea of Race,” in Race in 21^st Century America, eds. Curtis Stokes, T. Melendez, and G. Rhodes-Reed (Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2001), 3–23; Ian Haney Lopez, “The Social Construction of Race,” in Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, ed. Richard Delgado (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1995), 191–203; Vernon J. Williams, Jr., “What is Race?: Franz Boas Reconsidered,” in Race, Nation, & Empire in American History, eds. James T. Campbell, Matthew Pratt Guterl, and Robert G. Lee (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 40–54; and David Bindman, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).

19. Joshua Glasgow, A Theory of Race (New York: Routledge, 2009).

20. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000), 11–53.

21. Cornel West, Race Matters (New York: Vintage Books, 1994).

22. I am not claiming that these efforts involve the attempt to unravel racial logics entirely, only that they are generally invested in the triumph of the content of one’s character as a common denominator. For a nice overview, see David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (New York: Blackwell, 2002).

23. Jared Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

24. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 35.

25. Michael Eric Dyson, The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), 66 (original emphasis).

26. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015), 7 (emphasis added).

27. WJT Mitchell, Seeing Through Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 20. This work has created some controversy because some psychoanalytic scholars protest that Mitchell too neatly aligns racism with the Lacanian register of the Real; see Scott Loren and Jorg Metelmann, “What’s the Matter: Race as Res,” Journal of Visual Culture 10 (2011): 397–409.

28. Mitchell, Seeing Through Race, 19.

29. Roopali Mukherjee, “Antiracism Limited: A Pre-history of Post-race,” Cultural Studies 30 (2016): 47–77.

30. Nikky Finney, “The Battle of and for the Black Face Boy,” from Oxford American (Fall 2015) in Utne Reader (Spring 2016): 33.

31. James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Anchor Books, 1993), 298–301.

32. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 60–75.

33. Ibid., 75.

34. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976 (New York: Picador, 1997), 240–41.

35. Ibid., 253.

36. Ibid., 243.

37. Foucault wrote extensively (some might say excessively) on these matters across dozens of works, notably the three volume History of Sexuality, Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979 (New York: Picador, 2004).

38. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 244 (emphasis added).

39. Ibid., 248.

40. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978 (New York: Picador, 2007), 42.

41. Ibid., 12.

42. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 64.

43. Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (New York: Viking, 2016), 10–14.

44. See Mimi Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (New York: Routledge, 2003); Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998); Eric King Watts, “‘The Incessant Moan’: Reanimating Zombie Voices,” Carroll C. Arnold Distinguished Lecture, National Communication Association Conference, Washington, DC, November 22, 2013.

45. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 253–54. Foucault argues that biopower has a responsibility to protect the life of the general population, but has the essential capacity to manufacture a total destruction of life itself.

46. Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes, 43–82.

47. David R. Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic Books, 2005).

48. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 253.

49. For a nice discussion of the unstable and fluid limits to such freedom, see William E. Wiethoff, The Insolent Slave (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2002).

50. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 255.

51. Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

52. Mark Smith, How Race is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

53. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 254.

54. Ibid., 255.

55. Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (Washington DC: Civitas/Counterpoint, 1998).

56. Black aesthetics have mined these resources, transforming them into revitalizing energies and works of art; some of these attempts have involved conceiving of blackness as “an avant-garde thing” radiating “voices and forces.” For examples, see Bernadette Marie Calafell, Monstrosity, Performance, and Race in Contemporary Culture (New York: Peter Lang, 2015); Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 32–33, 39; and Zora Neale Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings ed. Cheryl A. Wall (New York: Library of America, 1995, c1934), 830–46.

57. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 20.

58. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 254.

59. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 34.

60. Frank B. Wilderson, III, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

61. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 42–4.

62. Jacque Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (New York: Continuum Books, 2010), 45–61.

63. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 44.

64. Bindman, Ape to Apollo, 16.

65. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 244.

66. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 69 (emphasis added).

67. Edward P. Comentale and Aaron Jaffe, eds., The Year’s Work at the Zombie Research Center (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014), 50 (emphasis added).

68. Mitchell, Seeing Through Race, 30.

69. See also Wendy Hui Hyong Chun, “Race and/as Technology; or, How to Do Things to Race,” Camera Obscura 24 (2009): 7–21.

70. Mitchell, Seeing Through Race, 31.

71. Kyle W. Bishop, American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2010); Daniel W. Drezner, Theories of International Politics and Zombies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

72. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), 17.

73. Christian Lundberg, Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2012).

74. “The Talking Dead with Chris Hardwick,” AMC 10pm ET; essay referencing a show airing 15 March, 2015 where “Noah” suffered a gruesome death at the hands and teeth of “walkers,” while “Glenn” was forced to watch helplessly—like the viewer.

75. Rutherford, Zombies, 26.

76. Josh Gunn, “Maranatha,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 98 (November 2012): 368.

77. Christian Lundberg, “Enjoying God’s Death: The Passion of the Christ and the Practices of an Evangelical Public,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95 (November 2009): 387–411; Gunn, “Maranatha.”

78. Calem Matheson, “‘What does Obama Want of Me?’: Anxiety and Jade Helm 15,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 102 (May 2016): 133–49.

79. Ibid., 138.

80. Christopher Nolan, Inception, Warner Bros., 2010.

81. Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Vintage Books, 1998); and Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993).

82. Rutherford, Zombies, 30.

83. Mitchell, Seeing Through Race, 63–90.

84. Rutherford, Zombies, 46.

85. As the country mourned the violent deaths of five police officers killed by a deranged sniper at a peaceful protest against police killings in Louisiana and Minnesota, former Illinois congressman Joe Walsh tweeted: “This is now war. Watch out Obama. Watch out black lives matter punks. Real America is coming after you.” See Meera Jagannathan, “Ex-congressman Joe Walsh Continues to Defend Threatening Dallas Tweet,” http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/joe-walsh-continues-defend-threatening-obama-tweet-article-1.2705542 (accessed July 9, 2016).

86. Carole Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 138–60; Arthur Goldwag, The New Hate: A History of Fear and Loathing on the Populist Right (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012); Philip Lamy, Millennium Rage: Survivalists, White Supremacists, and the Doomsday Prophecy (New York: Plenum Press, 1996).

87. Gordon Coonfield, “Perfect Strangers: The Zombie Imaginary and the Logic of Representation,” in Thinking Dead: What the Zombie Apocalypse Means, ed. Murali Balaji (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 13.

88. Zombie Industries webpage, https://zombieindustries.com/collections/bleeding-zombie-targets/products/zombie-target-rocky-package-sale (accessed July 13, 2016).

89. Zombie Industries webpage, https://zombieindustries.com/collections/bleeding-zombie-targets/products/zombie-target-rocky-package-sale (accessed May 4, 2016). As of this writing, the statement no longer appears on the website; also, as of this writing, Zombie Industries only markets five zombie target mannequins that explode when shot.

90. See for example Karen Dillon, “Kansas Militia Prepares for Zombie Apocalypse—Seriously,” McClatchyDC posted January 4, 2013, http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article24742603.html (accessed July 9, 2016).

91. Dyson, The Black Presidency, 67.

92. Moten, In the Break, 35.

93. Josh Gunn, “On Speech and Public Release,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 13 (Summer 2010): 176, 178.

94. David Liss, “What Maisie Knew,” in The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology, ed. Christopher Golden (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010), 10.

95. Ibid., 22.

96. Ibid., 14, 24 (emphasis added).

97. Marcia England, “Breached Bodies and Home Invasions: Horrific Representations of the Feminized Body and Home,” Gender, Place and Culture 13 (August 2006): 353–63.

98. Moten, In the Break, 31, 33.

99. Zombie Industries webpage. And it isn’t true that mannequins are fictional—they have a “Terrorist” dummy that is Osama Bin Laden.

100. Lach, “Vendor Pulls ‘Obama’ Target.”

101. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 32–40.

102. Zombie Industries webpage, reviews.

103. The Walking Dead, Season 4, episode 1, “30 Days Without an Accident,” October 2013.