The Year’s Work at the Zombie Research Center ed. by Edward P. Comentale, Aaron Jaffe (review)

Edward P. Comentale and Aaron Jaffe, eds, The Year’s Work at the Zombie Research Center. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2014. 544 pp. US$26.00 (pbk).The title of this collection and the editorial approach, dividing chapters into 14 sober disciplinary fields (‘Zombie Psychology’, ‘Zombie Physiology’, ‘Zombie Linguistics’ etc.), is presumably a joke resting on the disjunction of form and content. The title echoes those eminent, and eminently dull, library tomes like Year’s Work in English Studies that dutifully survey material published in the field, monumental acts of synthesis that mark out a certain disciplinary territory year on year. In this case, the dull title and chapter subjects are meant to play off against the primal energies of the lowly trash culture of the zombie in all its manifold, gory delights. One might be tempted – as nearly all the chapter authors are in this collection – to fold the metaphor of the zombie back on the project itself: this is a hollowed-out, dead-but-living-on, zombified version of the Year’s Work scholarship model. It wants the official legitimation of this academic form, perhaps, whilst also keeping hold of the unofficial, trash cultural status of the zombie – to be almost-but-not-quite too cool for school. Indiana University Press buys into this too, resisting the normal proportions of the academic essay collection, producing a square-paged, boxy book, richly illustrated, and with zombie silhouettes staggering across the title pages and through sometimes very densely argued academic prose. The result is hybrid and sort of undead, not always to great effect.The Year’s Work model inevitably focuses on contemporary critical trends, surfing the zeitgeist, and this is a collection that, apart from the interesting final chapter on the rise of the Zombie cocktail in the 1930s, equates the zombie almost entirely with the post-Romero American instantiation of the figure since Night of the Living Dead (Romero US 1968). Mostly, though, the contributors rarely think back beyond the last decade’s glut of zombie films plus lots of references to The Walking Dead. The introduction regards the Spanish film [REC] (Balaguero and Plaza Spain/Japan 2007) as already a ‘zombie classic’ (7) and circles consistently back to the exhausted generic self-referentiality of Zombieland (Fleischer US 2009) in the same terms. Occasionally, someone might step further back and refer to ‘the postcolonial Haiti of White Zombie’ (Halperin US 1932) (65), revealing a rather startling ignorance about the basic facts of the American colonial occupation of the country (which ended in 1934). The legacy of the colonial occupation of Haiti remains absolutely central to the contemporary American version of the zombie, its insistent unconscious fixation in a neocolonial age, but beyond a few gestural comments in the collection none of the contributors seems interested in pursuing this genealogy. They may think this kind of history has been done, that it is not this year’s work. Fair enough, but for me this was not a good sign that the programme of the Zombie Research Center would acquire much density or depth in its studies.The book wants to resist the simple assertion that zombies are allegorical of this or that, the introduction suggesting that the zombie continually chomps through metaphor and ‘wreaks havoc on signification’ (14). One sees this argument, about the zombie’s collapse of the figural into the literal, over and over again. Nearly always, however, the writers in this collection end up concluding that zombies are, after all, allegorical figures of this or that. The contemporary theories evoked are fairly predictable: it doesn’t take long for loosely post-Marxist readings of the zombie apocalypse as capitalist crisis to appear, or biopolitical and/or thanatopolitical readings of the undead via Foucault and Agamben, or the inevitable invocation of Kristeva’s theory of abjection. The chapter ‘Zombie Media’ even resuscitates Baudrillard and McLuhan to read Romero’s Diary of the Dead (US 2007), even if the author himself seems rather embarrassed to be digging up such ancient corpses and putting them back to work.