postracial fantasies and zombies: on the racist apocalyptic politics devouring the world volume 5

This book understands the postracial as a genre--like the zombie apocalypse--that signals a disturbance in society that is felt as terrifying and exciting. The postracial is repetitive and reproduces blackened biothreat bodies, rituals of securitization, and fantasies of the reclamation of white masculine sovereignty. Eric King Watts examines key moments when Blackness became an object of knowledge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, preparing the ＂scientific＂ and philosophical ground for interpreting zombie lore. The book treats the ＂Greater Caribbean＂ as a transformative space in which an antiblack infrastructure arose and interrogates the US’s militarized domination of Haiti that was the context in which the zombie emerged. Watts traces variations of the form and function of the zombie to contemplate how it matters to our contemporary struggles with racism and pandemic policies.

Eric King Watts is Associate Professor of Communication at Wake Forest University and has published widely on racism and Blackness, including his previous book, Hearing the Hurt: Rhetoric, Aesthetics, and Politics of the New Negro Movement.