![]() While the zombie may appear as the very epitome of American cultural production and influence, a mindless movie monster born of a vapid stream of Hollywood B-horror, the zombie has a rich transnational history and an eloquent figurative resonance that have fed into its current ubiquity as cultural sign. What I plan to show in this chapter is that the zombie is also a surprisingly complex sign for transnational movement and multidirectional cultural flow. An ever increasing number of films, books, and scholarly works dealing with the undead have appeared in the last decade, making the zombie the very incarnation of American popular culture on a global scale (cf. ![]() The article references numerous cases of Latin American literary and cultural production both to highlight the discursive ties between the Latin Americanist zombie and people of African and indigenous descent and to signal strategies that these works propose for challenging Western (white) supremacy in the region.įew popular cultural trends rival the current zombie rage. When viewed through this framework, even the zombie apocalypse comes to signify an optimistic revolt of the oppressed against corrupt, imperial entities. The article asserts a shared camaraderie between Latin American people of color and the zombie’s of the region’s cultural production by emphasizing both entities’ association (fair or not) with cannibalism in the Western imaginary. While both of these canonical Latin Americanist thinkers theorized literary and cultural cannibalism as a resistant act that could challenge the hegemony of Western cosmologies and aesthetics, very little scholarship has thought to reconcile-or even juxtapose-these men’s thought. This study uses zombie theory to flesh out common themes between Oswald de Andrade’s The Cannibalist Manifesto and Roberto Fernández Retamar’s Calibán.
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