Landscapes of Loss: The Semantics of Empty Spaces in Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Fiction (original) (raw)
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Displacing the Dead – Remapping of Post- apocalyptic Geographies
The Errant Labor of the Humanities: Festschrift Presented to Stipe Grgas, Ed. Sven Cvek, Borislav Knežević and Jelena Šesnić. Zagreb: FF press
To question space within gothic or horror narratives means attempting to understand the concept of the " failure of the map, " a notion very closely related to the production of gothic narratives. Based on the premise that the " gothic map " can never be fully understood or grasped, gothic narratives invariably manage to manipulate and play upon the reader's or viewer's attempts to locate the narrator, protagonist, or to a certain extent themselves within the space at hand. Additional complications arise from the transitional moment between space and place. Following Yi Fu Tuan's notion of this transition based on the process of inscribing meaning into space, thus opening the doors to literally countless forms of places, the gothic manages to constantly offer new narratives, or at least old narratives, encapsulated in alternative (and often innovative) spaces/places. The problem arising from this interpretative fluidity is the inability to properly trace (at least from an academic point of view) the contours of these mostly fantastic and always dark places. A possible alternative to these perpetually changing spaces can perhaps be found in various zombie narratives, where space, still bound by the " absence of rules, " does not offer a conclusive solution to the constantly reinvented gothic map but, being so strongly rooted in our contemporaneity, allows for a more contextualized and therefore relevant theoretical reading of space. Such understanding of space surpasses the potential storyline-bound initial questions of setting and its relevance, and moves forward towards problematizing the politics of zombie spatiality. Accordingly, this analysis aims to observe three different space paradigms that appear in zombie narratives, with particular focus placed on one specific narrative—Robert Kirkman's comic book series The Walking Dead, as well as the later TV series developed by Frank Darabont. Although the television series only initially coincides with the storyline present in the comic book, the analysis will consider both as part of a unified narrative universe. The purpose of such a potentially unorthodox analytical approach therefore will not be to provide a detailed reading of a particular narrative, but will instead propose and delineate different theoretical space paradigms that characterize, in this case Kirkman's, zombie narrative. 1 1 Regardless of the involvement of Frank Darabont, together with other writers and contributors, Robert Kirkman continuously oversaw and directly contributed to the production and development of both the comic book and the television series. Such an approach to the creative process assured a strong initial adherence to the source materials, as well as the appropriate adaptation of the new storylines to the originally set post-apocalyptic world.
Post-apocalypse now: Landscape and environmental values in The Road and The Walking Dead
Geographia Polonica, 2014
May landscape description be considered an eco-critical metaphor? This paper proposes a text analysis of two post-apocalyptic narratives, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, as novel and movie, and the zombie drama The Walking Dead, as graphic novel and television series. Neither narrative provides an explanation for its apocalypse, or a direct warning as regards human environmental misbehaviour. But both the barren landscape described in the former work, and the renaturalizing one presented in the latter second may convey an environmental meaning, albeit in a different way. To evaluate the way in which contemporary audiences negotiate this, further research would be necessary.
2014
May landscape description be considered an eco-critical metaphor? This paper proposes a text analysis of two post-apocalyptic narratives, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, as novel and movie, and the zombie drama The Walking Dead, as graphic novel and television series. Neither narrative provides an explanation for its apocalypse, or a direct warning as regards human environmental misbehaviour. But both the barren landscape described in the former work, and the renaturalizing one presented in the latter second may convey an environmental meaning, albeit in a different way. To evaluate the way in which contemporary audiences negotiate this, further research would be necessary.
“The Walking Dead: Late Liberalism and Masculine Subjection in Apocalypse Fictions”
Journal of American Studies, 2015
From The Road to The Walking Dead, contemporary apocalyptic fictions narrativize the conjunction of two central "crises": late liberal capitalism and twenty-first-century masculinity. This conjunction underlines the insights of a variety of scholars and cultural critics who analyze the "crisis" of contemporary masculinity, often specifically white masculinity, as a product of recent economic and social transformations, including the perceived disempowering of white male authority in a neoliberal era of affective labor, joblessness and multiculturalism. But the apocalypse, especially as a television series, is a rather peculiar narrative vehicle for the articulation of a transformative future foror a nostalgic return tomasculine agency and authority. Focussing on questions of subjection and agency in the late liberal/neoliberal moment, I suggest that zombie apocalypse stages a debate on the status of masculine agency that has roots extending deep into the foundations of liberal modernity and the gendered selfhood it producesroots that are ironically exposed by the popular cultural referent that dominates The Walking Dead: the frontier myth. The frontier and the apocalypse both draw from Hobbesian prognostications of a state of nature as relentless competition and a war of "all against all" that are foundational to modern liberal political theory and questions of sovereignty, self-interest, and collective governance. But they also index a narrative antidote to the erasure of political agency as traditionally enshrined in liberal democratic norms and traditions. Like the western, the zombie apocalypse speculates about possible ways in which masculine agency in liberal modernity might be reimagined and/or reinvigorated. In the place of a tired, automated neo-"official man", the apocalypse in The Walking Dead promises an opportunity to "finally start living"reminding us that white masculinity figures precisely the Enlightenment liberal subject-citizen and the authoritative, if highly fictional, agency which has been notoriously crushed within regimes of late capitalist biopower. And yet, even as the zombie apocalypse engages foundational myths of liberal modernity, it elaborates them in surprisingly nihilistic set pieces and an apparently doomed, serial narrative loop (there is no end to the zombie apocalypse and life in it is remarkably unpleasant). The eruption of haptic elements in the television showespecially in the visual and aural technologies that allow representations of bodies, suffering, dismemberment, mutability, disgustfurther counters the apparent trajectory of apocalyptic allegory and opens it to alternative logics and directions. The narrative options of the zombie apocalypse thus seem to be moving "back" to a brutal settler colonial logic or "forward" to an alternative, perhaps more ethical, "zombie logic," but without humans. This essay is interested in what these two trajectories have to say to each other and what that dialogue, and dialectic, indicate about contemporary economic re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. doi:./S governance as it is experienced and translated affectively into popular narrative and cultural product. That is, to what extent is the racist and economic logic of settler colonialism already infected by the specter of another logic of abjection and otherness, one that is figured both by the zombies and by the nonnarrative function of spectacles of embodied male suffering? And what does that slippage between logics and directions tell us about the internal workings of settler colonialism and economic liberalism that have always been lodged within mythic fantasies of the frontier?
A Post-Apocalyptic Return to the Frontier: The Walking Dead as Post-Western
Critical Studies in Television, 2018
This article argues that The Walking Dead is a post-Western, a genre that extracts classical Hollywood Western themes and iconography, and resituates them in a dystopian, postapocalyptic setting. The program features characters forced to reconquer the frontier amid the disintegration of modern society, who must battle undead walkers and other human survivors. As a post-Western, the program inverts the ideological optimism of the classical Hollywood Western. In doing so, it highlights the linkages between the seemingly unconnected narrative universes of the Western and the postapocalyptic tale.
Building Dreams from Nightmares: Structuration and Sustainability in The Walking Dead
Revenant Journal, 2024
In post-apocalyptic media, much of the characters’ suffering persists from their nostalgia for the old world. On the other hand, Christopher Todd Anderson suggests perhaps this post-apocalyptic world is better, revealing the corrupt, defunct old world (2012: 267). In the world of The Walking Dead (TWD), there are no longer any meta-systems for humans. As a result, the survivors’ actions toward establishing and maintaining a sustainable community constitute the essence of their system, which is consistent with British sociologist Anthony Giddens’s initial formulation of structuration and others’ ideas of sustainability in post-apocalyptic environments. This article examines the post apocalypse structuration and sustainability in TWD to demonstrate that expelling nostalgia and utilising technology, resources and creativity are key to imagining a more sustainable future. Rather than dwelling on the past and what was lost, characters need to figure out the roles they play in the new world, rules to be agreed upon and ways to utilise what resources they have. Only by doing this can they build new dreams from the nightmare they are living in and look towards the future – reflecting our own current world issues and how we need to focus on the solutions that sustainability offers for the collective good.
The Walking Dead: The Anthropocene as a Ruined Earth
Much has been made of the claim that humanity has ascended to the status of a terrestrial force and inaugurated a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. While attention has been paid to the contestable nature of the epoch and its disputed histories, insufficient attention has been paid to the significance of the Anthropocene for political praxis. Contrary to much Anthropocenic discourse that articulates a renewed sense of mastery over nature through assertions of humanity's complete subsumption of the environment, recent work in both science and technology studies and human geography suggests an alternate reading of the Anthropocene as an epoch without mastery, one where humanity exists in a permanent state of vulnerability. The political significance of this state of vulnerability is explored through a reading of popular TV show The Walking Dead, a post-collapse narrative of a world in ruins and overrun by zombies. On a ruined earth, political praxis is orientated not towards a return of the earth to its previous productive state, but rather as an unending labour of survival and salvage. Survival is not a life reduced to bare life, but rather a state of tension between a life reduced to necessity, and the refusal to separate the question of how to live from the work of securing life itself. Left unresolved, this tension animates the politics of the Anthropocene, suggesting that in place of the teleology of progress social life is organised within it through unceasing care and repair time.
Post-Apocalyptic Geographies and Structural Appropriation
Journal of Transnational American Studies, 2019
This chapter stages a critique of “post-apocalypticism” through a sustained analysis of environmental precarity and its temporal, post-human implications. We argue that the centering of US Americans in post-apocalyptic fiction frequently enacts what we term structural appropriation—a process in which the world-threatening structural violence that has already been experienced by colonized and postcolonial populations is projected on to predominantly white characters and readers. To better understand the colonial and post-colonial experiences of environmental apocalypse that are occluded by structural appropriation, we compare the temporal and spatial dimensions of US, postcolonial, and Indigenous post-apocalyptic narratives.
Narrativizing Trauma in the Apocalypse: Christianity and Burial in AMC’s The Walking Dead
[sic] - a journal of literature, culture and literary translation, 2022
This paper examines the role of narrativization as a form of improvised trauma treatment in the first six seasons of AMC’s The Walking Dead. The Walking Dead explores a modern America that has been decimated by a traumatic event. This event, a zombie apocalypse, results in the permanent loss of infrastructure and social services. What remains in this unpredictable landscape for survivors is a reliance on Christian narratives, expressed through pious characters and burial rituals that strive to provide meaning and purpose in the new world. Survivors perform burial rituals to preserve a connection to the pre-apocalyptic world and to narrativize trauma, both personal and collective. This paper contends that The Walking Dead uses the context of cultural trauma not to reflect on or critique nationalist agendas and ideologies but to identify the past as a robust repository for the future.