The Dead Do Not Rest: Zombie Fiction, Cultural Trauma, and the Politics of Memory in Latin America and the Caribbean

Abstract

This dissertation proposes a new framework for reading the zombie in contemporary Latin American cultural production. While the figure has been extensively theorized within Anglo-American horror studies, where it tends to function as a sign of apocalyptic rupture, the texts examined here resist that interpretive frame. In Latin America, where political violence operates not as an exceptional event but as a sustained structural condition, the zombie registers what persists when institutions fail to fail, and what survives when the apocalypse arrives and becomes another condition under which power continues to operate. To account for this difference, I develop two diagnostic typologies and redeploy a third with a Latin American specificity, each anchoring one of the dissertation’s chapters. Chapter One examines the Institutional Zombie, a figure absorbed into structures of labor, enforcement, and consumption, where zombification functions as a technology of persistence rather than a sign of collapse. Chapter Two turns to the Extra-Ordinary Zombie, revising Chera Kee’s category through Latin American contexts of dictatorship, imperial intervention, and racialized exclusion. Chapter Three takes up the Testimonial Zombie, the figure that returns from violent erasure to bear witness against necropolitical regimes of disappearance. The theoretical apparatus draws on Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, Rob Nixon’s slow violence, Lauren Berlant’s cruel optimism, Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism, and Jacques Derrida’s hauntology. The project makes three interventions. It argues that the dominant Anglo-American paradigm rests on assumptions about stability and rupture that do not hold where crisis is the norm rather than the exception. It recovers the zombie’s Afro-Caribbean origins as politically essential rather than just historical. Furthermore, it argues that horror operates in these works as representational necessity: when state violence is structured around the absence of bodies, the zombie’s material insistence on return offers formal resources that realism cannot supply. The zombie of Latin American cultural production is not a borrowed monster but a returning one, carrying with it the memory of the plantation, the dictatorship, the disappearance, the femicide, the narco-grave. The dead, in these texts, do not rest.