The Politics of Genre Fiction: Colson Whitehead's Zone One (original) (raw)

History Is What Bites: Race, Zombies, and the Limits of Biopower in Colson Whitehead's Zone One

Extrapolation, 2015

This paper argues that the zombie serves as the limit point of biopower because it introduces an ungovernable third term into the biopolitical poles of human and non-human, life and death: the ex-human, the undead. Taking race as its central biopolitical concern, the first part of the paper reads the visual tensions between whiteness and blackness in Hollywood representations of the zombie. I then turn to Colson Whitehead’s 2010 novel Zone One, arguing that in this novel the zombie figures the return of a repressed history of racial trauma in a contemporary moment in which biopower operates increasingly under the sign of the “post racial.” For complete pdf, please go to http://online.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/pdf/10.3828/extr.2015.17

A Zombie Novel With Brains: Bringing Genre to Life in the Classroom

This essay explores the classroom application of genre theory to Zone One, Colson Whitehead’s recent zombie novel. I argue that the lens of genre gives students a chance to reflect both on how novels make arguments and on how they can develop their own original arguments about a literary work. Working within a “low genre,” Zone One, from its explicitly taxonomic title on, continually makes a problem of genre and ties the sorting of literary works to larger institutions of classification. The novel’s generic self-awareness models an attentive form of reading that students can employ in thinking about both the text and their own writing situations. I conclude by presenting an adaptation assignment that provides the opportunity for further examination of the deep generic codes that structure modern life, including those that shape the English classroom.

The genrefication of contemporary American fiction

Textual Practice, 2018

In recent years, various critics have noted how contemporary American writers are turning to popular genre forms in their work. However, few have adequately addressed how this turn affects the story of literary history. Through close readings of Jennifer Egan's metafictional gothic novel, The Keep, and Colson Whitehead's post-apocalyptic zombie horror novel, Zone One, this article argues that this recent trend reflects a longer process I am calling genrefication. I begin by analysing how The Keep updates the gothic to speak to contemporary concerns, specifically digital communications technology. Egan's text also thematises how the formal limits of genres enable affective experiences for the reader. It then turns to Whitehead's contrasting depiction of genre, one which complicates Egan's ideas somewhat. Drawing on the work of John Fiske, I contend that Zone One shows how popular forms develop in relation to power structures, and how the recent turn to genre can be seen as what Fiske calls a 'micropolitics' of resistance. Through readings of these two texts, I argue that genrefication not only accounts for the recent turn to popular genres but also serves as a productive framework to discuss the gradual encroachment of genre into literary criticism.

Theories and Zombies: On the Didactic Potential of Genre Turn Literature

Notes on the didactic potential of teaching contemporary fiction produced in the so-called turn to genre in the contexts of teacher's education and narrative competence. Article published in the Open Edition of ''Hypotheses: The Blog of the Heidelberg School of Education" Link: http://hse.hypotheses.org/221#more-221

Zombie Love: Chewing on the Entrails of Genre

Werewolf.co.nz

A speculative examination of some manifestations of contemporary Horror through the lens of the Zombie; this article considers the relationship between Zombie Apocalypses, Zombies as agents (or not), and wider aspects of genre and theory including comic books and graphic novels, Science Fiction, and Fantasy. It surveys multimedia interest in zombies, mash-up novels, alternate universes, and the meetings of zombies with a range of other tropes in diverse narratives. Full article online; please follow the link to read more.

Critical geosophies: A pyschotopological reading of Rice's vampires and Romero's zombies

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

Anne Rice and George Romero are two of the foremost transformative authors of vampire and zombie fiction in the United States. This reading of their work applies a psychotopological lens to the first two novels of Rice's Vampire Chronicles and the first three films of Romero's Living Dead series. It differs from numerous preceding analyses of monster fiction mostly in the theoretical apparatus it articulates to link the psychic fear vampires and zombies evoke with the topologies of space and power they evince. This intervention invokes a negative understanding of dialectical materialism to analyze human-monster thresholds as political sites. It builds this theorization primarily from the works of Slavoj Z ˇ ižek, Sara Ahmed, Julia Kristeva, Kojin Karatani, and to a lesser extent Joan Copjec. The result is a psychotopological analysis that challenges understandings of the monster as either timeless allegories for the systemic order or as endlessly interpretive contingencies. It also reads the topological forms of Rice's vampires and Romero's zombies in relation to each other. Understanding psychic space and topologies of power as integral to each other helps read the vampire and the zombie as myths which endure because of the fears of class exploitation and social collectivism they stoke.

Shuffling Narratives: Apocalypticism, Postmodernity, and Zombies

2019

During the last decades, zombies and the horror tropes that surround them have become a staple of American popular culture, making them a familiar presence in movies, TV series, graphic novels, and video games. From their Caribbean folklore origins, the undead have evolved into potent metaphors for social issues and cultural anxieties. On the surface, much of these creatures’ appeal can be understood as the modern-day embodiment of age-old apocalyptic belief systems, alongside which morally meaningful identities can be identified within a value order that is increasingly perceived as disorienting and nihilistic. The resurgence of apocalyptic narratives and desires becomes visible in phenomena such as millennialism and catastrophe culture that embrace zombies as instruments to purge a seemingly unhinged social order. Perplexingly, zombies at the same time point towards the opposite of this longing for narrative stability and new beginnings. In academic discourses, they have long-since turned into avatars of the postmodern inclination to dissolve dichotomous ideologies and semantic superstructures. Here, the undead have been metaphorically conjured to lay bare a plethora of issue ranging from intertextuality and irony to revisions of race and otherness or the subversion of traditional narrative strategies. This article emphasizes the rarely recognized tension between apocalyptic desires to construct meaning and resurrect narrative stability through monstrous bodies on the one hand, and so-called postmodern interpretations that utilize the same figure to deconstruct existing convictions. Shining a spotlight on this supposed opposition, the article proposes that zombies amalgamate apocalyptic and postmodern mindsets by assuming the role as pop-cultural mediators that bridge the gap between increasingly polarized epistemologies in American society.