[ecrea] New book: Not Your Average Zombie Theory

New publications from University Of Minnesota Press and University of 
Texas Press


Free postage to UK customers

http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/zombie-theory**

**



*Zombie Theory***

*A Reader***

/Edited by Sarah Juliet Lauro///

Zombies first shuffled across movie screens in 1932 in the low-budget 
Hollywood film White Zombie and were reimagined as undead flesh-eaters 
in George A. Romero’s /The Night of the Living Dead /almost four decades 
later. Today, zombies are omnipresent in global popular culture, from 
video games and top-rated cable shows in the United States to comic 
books and other visual art forms to low-budget films from Cuba and the 
Philippines. The zombie’s ability to embody a variety of cultural 
anxieties—ecological disaster, social and economic collapse, political 
extremism—has ensured its continued relevance and legibility, and has 
precipitated an unprecedented deluge of international scholarship.

Zombie studies manifested across academic disciplines in the humanities 
but also beyond, spreading into sociology, economics, computer science, 
mathematics, and even epidemiology. /Zombie Theory/ collects the best 
interdisciplinary zombie scholarship from around the world. Essays 
portray the zombie not as a singular cultural figure or myth but show 
how the undead represent larger issues: the belief in an afterlife, 
fears of contagion and technology, the effect of capitalism and 
commodification, racial exclusion and oppression, dehumanization. As 
presented here, zombies are not simple metaphors; rather, they emerge as 
a critical mode for theoretical work. With its diverse disciplinary and 
methodological approaches, /Zombie Theory/ thinks through what the 
walking undead reveal about our relationships to the world and to each 
other.

Contributors: Fred Botting, Kingston U; Samuel Byrnand, U of Canberra; 
Gerry Canavan, Marquette U; Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, George Washington U; 
Jean Comaroff, Harvard U; John Comaroff, Harvard U; Edward P. Comentale, 
Indiana U; Anna Mae Duane, U of Connecticut; Karen Embry, Portland 
Community College; Barry Keith Grant, Brock U; Edward Green, Roosevelt 
U; Lars Bang Larsen; Travis Linnemann, Eastern Kentucky U; Elizabeth 
McAlister, Wesleyan U; Shaka McGlotten, Purchase College-SUNY; David 
McNally, York U; Tayla Nyongo, Yale U; Simon Orpana, U of Alberta; 
Steven Shaviro, Wayne State U; Ola Sigurdson, U of Gothenburg; Jon 
Stratton, U of South Australia; Eugene Thacker, The New School; Sherryl 
Vint, U of California Riverside; Priscilla Wald, Duke U; Tyler Wall, 
Eastern Kentucky U; Jen Webb, U of Canberra; Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, 
Central Michigan U.

*Sarah Juliet Lauro* is assistant professor of English at the University 
of Tampa. She is author of /The Transatlantic Zombie: Slavery, 
Resistance, and Living-Death/ and coeditor of /Better Off Dead: The 
Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human/.

University Of Minnesota Press | October 2017 | 531pp | 9781517900915 | 
PB | £24.99*

20% discount with this code: CSL17ZOMB**

*Price subject to change.

  **Offer excludes the USA, South America and Australia.


http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/not-your-average-zombie




*Rehumanizing the Undead from Voodoo to Zombie Walks***

/Chera Kee///

The zombie apocalypse hasn't happened—yet—but zombies are all over 
popular culture. From movies and TV shows to video games and zombie 
walks, the undead stalk through our collective fantasies. What is it 
about zombies that exerts such a powerful fascination? In /Not Your 
Average Zombie/, Chera Kee offers an innovative answer by looking at 
zombies that don't conform to the stereotypes of mindless slaves or 
flesh-eating cannibals. Zombies who think, who speak, and who feel love 
can be sympathetic and even politically powerful, she asserts.

Kee analyzes zombies in popular culture from 1930s depictions of zombies 
in voodoo rituals to contemporary film and television, comic books, 
video games, and fan practices such as zombie walks. She discusses how 
the zombie has embodied our fears of losing the self through slavery and 
cannibalism and shows how "extra-ordinary" zombies defy that loss of 
free will by refusing to be dehumanized. By challenging their masters, 
falling in love, and leading rebellions, "extra-ordinary" zombies become 
figures of liberation and resistance. Kee also thoroughly investigates 
how representations of racial and gendered identities in zombie texts 
offer opportunities for living people to gain agency over their lives. 
/Not Your Average Zombie/ thus deepens and broadens our understanding of 
how media producers and consumers take up and use these undead figures 
to make political interventions in the world of the living.

*Chera Kee *is an associate professor of film and media studies in the 
Department of English at Wayne State University. Her essays on zombies 
have been published in the/Journal of Popular Film and Television /and 
the edited volume /Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as 
Post-Human./

University of Texas Press |  | September 2017| 236pp |  | 9781477313305 
| PB | £22.99*

20% discount with this code: CSL17ZOMB**

*Price subject to change.

  **Offer excludes the USA, Canada and South America.


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