The Past That Will Not Die: Trauma, Race, and Zombie Empire in Horror Comics of the 1950s

Abstract

The zombie has a long history in American culture. Fear of voodoo and zombies as forces to be used against white rulers by oppressed black people date back to slavery, with a clear flashpoint around the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) when the island and its people won their independence from the French. This marks the zombie as a traumatic, racialized body. Haiti again played a prominent part in the American cultural consciousness following its military occupation by the US from 1915–1934. A key example of this is White Zombie (1932), widely regarded as the foundational text for zombie cinema. In horror comics of the 1950s, zombies and Haiti frequently reappear, drawing on and repositioning these traumatic histories in new domestic and geopolitical contexts. The imperialism evident in American interventions in the Caribbean and South and Central America, including the occupation of Haiti, is positioned against the growth of economic, cultural, and ideological empire in the early Cold War. Domestic contexts contribute to racialized readings and the perceived threat of the burgeoning Civil Rights movement to existing racial, social, and economic hierarchies. Lastly, the zombie can be read in terms of the traumatic deaths of soldiers in the Second World War and the Korean War, with both conflicts offering exoticised settings and the threat of the ‘native’ Other. The zombie therefore offers a space through which multiple past and present traumas, as well as anxieties about future practice and its impact on the US, can be explored.