The Zombie in Black and White: Racialized Gender in Early English-Language Zombie Narratives

Abstract

During the 1915-1934 U.S. occupation of Haiti, U.S. politicians and military officials insisted that their imperial project was not imperialist. To justify these claims, they relied on discourses of paternalism which suggested that American occupation was akin to a father helping an unruly child. These paternalist imperial discourses, however, were inherently unstable, as they were premised in notions of racialized gender that were performatively constituted and increasingly in flux. Yet paternalist imperialism spread beyond the confines of government and saturated popular culture. This saturation is particularly evident in early English-language zombie narratives, which imported the zombie to the United States from occupied Haiti. I examine the ways in which gender is performatively constituted across these early English-language zombie narratives, beginning with William Seabrook’s travelogue The Magic Island and following the zombie across two pieces of pulp fiction, G.W. Hutter’s “Salt Is Not for Slaves” and August Derleth and Mark Schorer’s “The House in the Magnolias,” before ending with the film White Zombie. In tracing how race and gender shaped the zombie of these narratives, I argue that gender coalesced in this period as an identity which was always already racialized.