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Any quick survey of the landscape of contemporary American (and global) popular culture attests that the zombie is having a moment. And this moment—tied up as the zombie genre is with billions in entertainment capital, and critiquing, in its most accomplished instantiations, the racial, capitalist, and imperialist violences of the US—hardly shows sign of abating in its popular and critical appeals alike. It is thus hardly surprising that so-called zombie studies has developed into something of a cottage industry in the past decade. McFarland runs a book series, Contributions to Zombie Studies, which has published over twenty volumes since 2010, and Sarah Juliet Lauro has edited Zombie Theory: A Reader (2017) with none other than the University of Minnesota Press (in addition to her groundbreaking study, The Transatlantic Zombie: Slavery, Rebellion, and the Living Death [Rutgers University Press, 2015]). These are but a small sampling of the dozens of books and hundreds of articles written by academics on some of the cultural, historical, psychological, economic, and theological dimensions of the zombie. Though the zombie began its undeath in American popular culture as a racist appropriation of Haitian Vodou beliefs used to delegitimize Haiti's independence and ability to self-rule, its more recent and virally popular incarnation since the 1970s has been as the infectious cannibal, congregating in hordes, munching on brains, bringing on the apocalypse. What zombies mean—and, on all our minds, why they are so popular—drive the seemingly unending deluge of scholarship on zombie media. What I have chosen, then, are three books written over roughly a year that will appeal to Americanists and also demonstrate the significance of the zombie figure and its metaphors for the multiple projects of American studies.
The first of these, Zombies, Migrants, and Queers, is Camilla Fojas's sixth monograph. It extends her recent work on the racial dynamics of imperialism in the narratives of American popular culture to the "postcrisis storyform[s]" of film and television in the decade since the beginning of the 2008 Great Recession (10). Fojas's is the most wide-ranging of the three books under review, touring American popular culture well beyond zombie media; it is thus perhaps the most broadly applicable to Americanists not only because of the exceptional breadth of texts covered and the...