UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations
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UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title American Zombielore: Voodoo, Cinema, and the Undeath of Race Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1k2843dz Author Creagh, Anna Brooks Publication Date 2015 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles American Zombielore: Voodoo, Cinema, and the Undeath of Race A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Culture and Performance by Anna Brooks Creagh 2015 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION American Zombielore: Voodoo, Cinema, and the Undeath of Race by Anna Brooks Creagh Doctor of Philosophy in Culture and Performance University of California, Los Angeles, 2015 Professor Donald J. Cosentino, Co-Chair Professor Aparna Sharma, Co-Chair This dissertation undertakes a close examination of zombielore in the United States from the early nineteenth century through the 1940s. While many other scholars have engaged with the history and material of zombielore, relatively few have deeply considered the issues of race, rebellion, and revolution at work in such folklore. Born during the Haitian Revolution and brought to Southern plantations by French refugees, early zombielore reflected a fear that "Black magic" could and would be used against white Americans in the struggle for Black liberation. Ethnographic explorations of Haiti, beginning after the U.S. Civil War and continuing through the U.S. military occupation of Haiti (1915-1934), exacerbated popular fascination with the idea of an "authentic monster" and affirmed racist ideology about the dangers of racial integration. Upon their translation to film, Voodoo-zombie narratives often served to reconcile white-guilt ii over slavery with ongoing racism against African Americans. Exploring the social contingencies and historical vicissitudes that have shaped zombielore, my research is premised on archival studies of folklore and film, and includes close-text analysis of primary materials to argue that the zombie figure in American culture is not only historically racialized, but operates as a symbol of postcolonial memory. Divided into sections on Authenticity and Memory, the dissertation explores the historical development of the zombie figure through the lenses of folkloric and anthropological discourse, postcolonial Gothic literary theory, film analysis, and theories of memory. The history of zombielore illustrates how the zombie gets reanimated and rearticulated at moments of significant social upheaval and racial conflict associated with the end of slavery; with each successive transformation, the zombie accumulates additional connotations that layer upon previous ones. I argue that the American zombie has always been a palimpsest of postcolonial memory, so the idea that there's any one 'authentic monster' -- in Haiti, in Africa, or the U.S. -- ignores how the figure has been constructed not in any one of these places, but between them. Rather than taking a single disciplinary approach, my research brings together theories from Folklore and Film Studies to demonstrate what each disciplinary perspective reveals in light of the other. Unlike other zombie scholarship, this interdisciplinary approach illuminates how the figure has been employed by both dominant and oppressed groups, leading to a theorization of "undeath" as a mnemonic that works in the service of postcolonial imagination. I argue that as our society moves into an increasingly multicultural age, the zombie comes to symbolize a past that refuses to die, or to stay dead. iii The dissertation of Anna Brooks Creagh is approved. Peter Nabokov Allyson Nadia Field Aparna Sharma, Committee Co-Chair Donald J. Cosentino, Committee Co-Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2015 iv Slavery is everywhere the pet monster of the American people. - Fredrick Douglass v TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………….vii Vita………………………………………………………………………………………xii INTRODUCTION Race, Rebellion, and Revolution…………………………………………………1 PART ONE: AUTHENTICITY 1. A Revolutionary Monster…………………………………………………….54 2. An Authentic Monster…………………….…………………………………106 PART TWO: MEMORY 3. An Imaginary Monster……………………………………………………….156 4. A Postcolonial Monster………………………………………………………200 CONCLUSION The Zombie as Palimpsest………………………………………………………253 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………….297 vi Acknowledgements When I was about nine years old, my father took me to hear Wade Davis speak at Meredith College. I was fascinated by Davis's account of zombis in Haiti, and as a fan of horror films I quickly rushed to the video store to rent Wes Craven's The Serpent and the Rainbow. With no real context for what I was seeing beyond Davis's brief lecture, the movie terrified me. To allay my fears, my dad bought me a copy of Davis's book so that I could read and understand his story beyond what made it into Craven's film. The difference between these two narratives -- which were supposedly based on the same events -- shocked me. Although I didn't think about zombies again for many years, I believe this is where my fascination with zombilore, cultural anthropology, and horror film began. I actually started researching zombielore in 2007, the same year I lost my father to cancer. Upon joining the Folklore M.A. program at the University of California Berkeley I had no concrete plans for my thesis project, but the experience of watching my father die had made me obsessed with death, and specifically different cultural relationships to death. As an undergraduate I had studied abroad in Ghana, so I naturally gravitated towards West African Vodun and the Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions emanating from it. While I'd been passively interested in the zombie figure as a cultural phenomenon, I never considered it seriously as a potential thesis topic until Valdimar Hafstein encouraged me to look at The Serpent and the Rainbow vis-a-vis intangible cultural heritage. Though terrified of being pigeon-holed as “zombie-girl,” I committed myself to the project largely because Valdimar convinced me this was a viable and even important area of inquiry. As I continued to research and write about zombielore in Haiti and the U.S., Charles Briggs helped me broaden the scope of my inquiry and provided invaluable support and guidance throughout the development of my thesis. To him I owe an enormous debt of gratitude, not only for his suggestions and recommendations, but also for his unwavering support for a theoretical argument about zombies, a topic which in 2008 was dismissed by many faculty members as uninteresting or vii unworthy of study. I am also thankful for the guidance and encouragement of my other committee members at UC Berkeley. Darieck Scott's seminar, “Masculine/Abject: The Black Male Figure, Subjection and Power” was hugely influential during my early research stages, while Marina Levina -- another “zombie girl” -- provided an invaluable perspective on contemporary zombies and showed me that there is a place in academia for interdisciplinary scholars like me. Most of all, Katharine Galloway Young's mentorship as well as her courses on narrative theory have profoundly influenced my work over the years. At UCLA I have been fortunate to have not one but two committee chairs who have shaped and strengthened this research project over the past five years. I was initially attracted to UCLA's Culture and Performance program in part because of the opportunity to work with Donald Cosentino, one of the leading experts on Vodou and Haitian folklore. However, I also wanted to continue the work in film studies that I had begun at UC Berkeley. Aparna Sharma championed my interdisciplinary perspective on folklore and film from early on, and I'm thankful to have been awarded two Graduate Research Mentorship opportunities to work closely with her. While studying formalist and contemporary film theory with Aparna, I also had the opportunity to work with Don as his TA for "African Oral Traditions" and to take his graduate seminars on "Trickster Figures" and "Black Atlantic Ritual Arts: Vodou and Santeria." Working in such disparate fields simultaneously ignited my thinking about the relationship between folklore and film. While Don mentored me on what it meant to be a folklorist in an academic world more comfortable with disciplines like literature and anthropology, Aparna pushed me to think more deeply about film as an art form whose mode of storytelling far exceeds the narrative or plot. Although Don initially told me that he could not be my dissertation chair because he was retiring, he eventually agreed to co-chair my committee because he believed in my project. That endorsement energized me, and I have been grateful for every meeting I've had with him since. When Don retired, Aparna took on the extra burden of coordinating committee feedback and advocating for me and my research in departmental meetings, and I am very viii grateful to her for that. Throughout my five years in the program, both of my chairs were always willing to chat with me, offing conceptual guidance and feedback on different parts of my dissertation. I will always fondly remember sipping tea with Aparna while we seriously discussed the minutia of Classical Hollywood zombie films, and Don's uncanny ability to make me laugh even while tearing apart one of my arguments. In very different ways, Don and Aparna made this project what it is today. My other dissertation committee members, Allyson Nadia Field and Peter Nabokov, have also influenced my thinking and shaped the trajectory of my research. I first worked with Ally in an interdisciplinary graduate seminar called, "Gone With the Wind: Remixed." She challenged me to think more deeply and critically not only about the life of a film beyond the screen, but about the Marxist, Feminist, and Critical Race discourses that intersect in film studies and must layer on top of one another in the analysis of any film. Her own work in African American film studies has been inspiring, and she taught me much about what it means to do archival research in film studies.