Available From UC Press

Postracial Fantasies and Zombies

On the Racist Apocalyptic Politics Devouring the World

Eric King Watts

This book understands the postracial as a genre—like the zombie apocalypse—that signals a disturbance in society that is felt as terrifying and exciting. The postracial is repetitive and reproduces blackened biothreat bodies, rituals of securitization, and fantasies of the reclamation of white masculine sovereignty. Eric King Watts examines key moments when Blackness became an object of knowledge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, preparing the "scientific" and philosophical ground for interpreting zombie lore. The book treats the "Greater Caribbean" as a transformative space in which an antiblack infrastructure arose and interrogates the US's militarized domination of Haiti that was the context in which the zombie emerged. Watts traces variations of the form and function of the zombie to contemplate how it matters to our contemporary struggles with racism and pandemic policies.

Eric King Watts is Associate Professor of Communication at Wake Forest University and has published widely on racism and Blackness, including his previous book, Hearing the Hurt: Rhetoric, Aesthetics, and Politics of the New Negro Movement.

"With characteristic wit and intellectual rigor, Watts brings us to a new consideration of the postracial through the proliferation of zombie forms across a multitude of genres. Seeing the zombie as a transhistorical entity, he interrogates our predictable understandings of its genesis and asks us to rethink such grounding in the context of thoroughgoing modes of anti-Blackness. By returning us to the undead and their relationship to Blackness, Watts creates an astounding interdisciplinary critique of a popular cultural form."—Sharon P. Holland, author of an other: a black feminist consideration of animal life

"Presents an original view of the zombie apocalypse by adding a focus on pandemic politics through the lens of postracism. The book speaks directly to the current political antagonisms and subjectivities unfolding around race and collectivity by interrogating how reactionary forces within contemporary US politics have surfaced against the promises and possibilities of a postracial society."—Patrick D. Murphy, author of The Media Commons: Globalization and Environmental Discourses

"Postracial Fantasies and Zombies examines the zombie apocalypse as a rhetorical form that espouses racist fantasies of white masculine sovereignty. Eric King Watts traces the genre of the zombie from its racist colonial origins to its postracial resurgence to highlight the ways racist fantasy materializes into a commonsense rhetoric of white survival."—Ersula Ore, author of Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity

"A provocative and intriguing perspective on the current fragmented political culture and an insightful analysis of anti-Blackness as circulated through the persistent figure of the zombie in American popular culture.”—Kendall R. Phillips, author of A Place of Darkness: The Rhetoric of Horror in Early American Cinema

230 pp.6 x 9

9780520403772$95.00|£80.00Hardcover

Aug 2024