Zombies Within the Haiti Culture Essay

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Zombies in the Haiti Culture

In the last two decades, zombies have gained popularity in the Western world, becoming a metaphor for persons who lack consciousness and threaten social structures. Many other parts of the world have accepted this kind of thinking. There are, however, a few differences with regards to the treatment of the figure -- in terms of zombification and the wider inferences to bias inherent in the practice. Even though zombies have been the subject of various studies, they have not been investigated with regards to their mythological contributions. Many mythological studies have focused on Greek texts and other texts that have greatly influenced the modern Western world ideology, which is why research into Haiti's zombie myth was quite unlikely (Thomas, 2010).

The Haitian Zombies

The zombie phenomenon surfaced in Haiti in the late 1800s. Zombification practices would later find expression in discussions linked to compromised biases that emerged from slavery and imperialism. Zombies soon transcended the discourse between the individual and the collective as the post-slave narrative paid little attention to the individual compared to the naturally developed collective dynamic. The zombie figure implied that with no identification to a collective group no individuality, uniqueness or even consciousness.

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Thus, zombies were depicted as figures that wandered the globe with no figurative foundations, such as homes or resting places, which would in turn mean that they won't be able to generate consciousness. Zombies then were simply a further discussion or the post-slave narrative. This simple Haitian Zombie myth does more than just tackling imperialism; it questions the importance of the literature on subjectivity (Thomas, 2010). As a result, the Haitian myth would imply that the very idea of creating and using a common language works to produce zombies, in that, the moment we speak, we disrupt the subjectivity of the individual(s) whom we are speaking with. Accordingly, all social institutions condemn individuals to zombification: an ironical state of figurative subjectivity and death (Thomas, 2010).

Zombies in the American Culture

The notion of the zombie-slave managed by some kind of zombie-master was initiated into the American culture by the individuals coming back from Haiti after the American occupation, which began in 1925 (Krivoruchko, 2014). Romero's re-imagination of the genre to an apocalyptic siege tale instead of an icon of Haitian teachings, gave American audiences a perfect outlet of embracing survivalist dreams, which hearten back to the country's birth….....

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