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Zombies, Zomedies, Digital Fan Cultures and the Politics of Taste

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The Zombie Renaissance in Popular Culture
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Abstract

This chapter seeks to draw together insights from the earlier debates about fan cultures and the politics of taste with more recent commentaries on fan practices and digital technologies. It will first consider the suggestion that the recent proliferation of zombie cultural artefacts is a product of the post 9/11 ‘cultural consciousness’ or whether we need to look beyond the properties of particular zombie texts to the wider cultural infrastructures, particularly fan cultures and the digital ‘paratexts’ (Kackman et al., 2011, p. 2) that exist in interdependence with zombie texts. The ‘almost straight to DVD’ film Zombies of Mass Destruction (Hamedani, 2009) will be discussed as a case study and means of exploring the importance of online fan practices in zombie culture because as a self-conscious ‘zomedy’ it has provoked interesting and extreme fan reactions.

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© 2015 Paul Manning

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Manning, P. (2015). Zombies, Zomedies, Digital Fan Cultures and the Politics of Taste. In: Hubner, L., Leaning, M., Manning, P. (eds) The Zombie Renaissance in Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137276506_11

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