Black zombies

Hidden in plain sight against the backdrop of popular culture, a deep ideological structure in the global imagination exists with respect to the zombie, a structure that is initially difficult to articulate and map out: racism. Starting with this main idea, this article sketches the ways that African American literary writers have utilized their zombie-filled “noirums” to symbolize the stakes of overcoming inequality. Quickly defined, a noirum is a “novum” refracted by race – the science fictional new thing and its racialized impact. In this regard, the zombie would be the new thing introduced in the storyworld, and the norium would be this new thing’s influence on race in that storyworld. Even at the end of the world, when a zombie crisis ends society as we know it, when racial structures are surely destabilized with the emergence of said zombies, the outwardly broken racial structures remain firmly intact in terms of the viewing experience. Black people cannot live in streaming, film, or television contexts. Thus, this article offers a concentrated, if transitory, investigation of how various zombie screen narratives do not offer noirums, but rather, broadly speaking, colonialist Euro-American-oriented novums that embody both white fears and white desires. Finally, this article considers how Black creatives reimagine zombiehood (and, in general, undead stories) through the narrative modalities already mentioned while also unearthing new techniques when they are given creative free rein, especially in film and television.