The Political Necrography of the Living Dead: Theory, Criticism, and Zombies

Recent globalizing trends have rekindled the interest in zombies. Apart from appearing in a barrage of blockbuster Hollywood films, the living dead can be found crawling out of a plethora of literary and scholarly forms, ranging from warfare manuals, psychological reviews and survival guides to self-help books and rewritings of Jane Austen’s novels. This article seeks to explain the rising popularity of the zombie by discussing its increasing relevance to a variety of political themes. More particularly, the article presents the zombie as a post-humanist entity that challenges the concept of “the human” as an individual and as a community by questioning the sustainability of societies in general. The article concludes by reviewing how Israel has been represented in zombie-themed tales and by asking whether the zombie’s increasing popularity has eroded its ability to offer an incisive social critique as a political metaphor.