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Balaji, Murali, ed. Thinking Dead: What the Zombie Apocalypse Means. Lanham: Lexington Books: 2013. 248 pp. Hardback. ISBN 978-0-7391-8382-3. $90.
The collection Thinking Dead: What the Zombie Apocalypse Means revolves around contemporary Western culture's "Obsession with the Undead and its Implications" (ix). Fifteen chapters, organized in three parts ("Zombies as the Other and Ourselves," "The Zombie Apocalypse and Social, Technological, and Psychological Space," and "Eating the Undead: Consumption and Cultural Industries"), explore a wide array of topics from apocalyptic narratives to gendered, economic, and consumerist incarnations of the undead. The zombie texts under discussion range from popular series (The Walking Dead) to films (Zombieland, Warm Bodies) and video games (Resident Evil), including a few less well-known zombie texts (Zombie Strippers, Otto, The Note of Ghoul). There is, however, a clear focus on audio-visual media with only a few chapters discussing literary returns of the undead.
Balaji's introduction, "The Zombie Epidemic," argues in concert with other popular readings of the undead (e.g., Kyle Bishop's seminal American Zombie Gothic, with which several of the contributions engage) that zombie narratives have "reached critical mass" (ix), and that the zombie's ubiquity suggests wider-reaching "social and psychological ramifications ... particularly as they relate to our fear of Others, insecurities over self-reflection and the deep-seated paranoia over the possibility of an apocalyptic event" (ix). While the volume showcases the "expanse of what it means to think about the (un) dead in media studies" (xi), it does not (and probably cannot) offer a synthesizing reading of the zombie as a general cultural concept, as the sheer breadth of possible readings is both an asset and a problem for any discussion of the undead in contemporary culture. The zombie, in its most frequent incarnations, neither thinks nor speaks. It is an empty signifier that can be charged with various meanings and therefore read in a variety of cultural contexts. It is, as Fred Botting argues, "affect-less," an "amalgam of in-human antitheses" (188). This cultural adaptability of the undead to various contexts is reflected by the contributions to Thinking Dead and is specifically addressed by Ryan Lizardi's chapter seven, "The Zombie Media Monster's Evolution to Empty Undead Signifier." Here, Lizardi traces this phenomenon back to the uncertainty of the zombie's Haitian origin, which "led...