Undead Uprising: Haiti, Horror and the Zombie Complex

Undead Uprising: Haiti, Horror and the Zombie Complex traces the history of xenophobic representations of Haiti and Vodou through the chimerical optics of ‘voodoo-terror’. It asks how sensationalist depictions of Vodou in popular culture and mass media have obscured the historical, political and social realities of Haiti – the first slave-free republic of modern times – and how they continue to perpetuate an idea of Haiti as a land mired in primitive superstition and incapable of socio-economic progress. Returning the contemporary zombie figure to its origins in the plantation economy of Saint-Domingue, the religion of the African slaves who worked there and colonial fears about slave rebellions, Undead Uprising explores the philosophical, psychological and political debates associated with these incessant 'agents-without-autonomy', and argues for their continued relevance for contemporary cultural politics.