Roger Luckhurst on The Cultural History of Zombies @TheProfRog @ReaktionBooks @

ICYMI:

Roger Luckhurst, Birkbeck College, University of London, Zombies: A Cultural History (Reaktion Books, dist. University of Chicago, 2016).


Here is a description of the book's contents.

Add a gurgling moan with the sound of dragging feet and a smell of decay and what do you get? Better not find out. The zombie has roamed with dead-eyed menace from its beginnings in obscure folklore and superstition to global status today, the star of films such as 28 Days Later, World War Z, and the outrageously successful comic book, TV series, and video game—The Walking Dead. In this brain-gripping history, Roger Luckhurst traces the permutations of the zombie through our culture and imaginations, examining the undead’s ability to remain defiantly alive.

Luckhurst follows a trail that leads from the nineteenth-century Caribbean, through American pulp fiction of the 1920s, to the middle of the twentieth century, when zombies swarmed comic books and movie screens. From there he follows the zombie around the world, tracing the vectors of its infectious global spread from France to Australia, Brazil to Japan. Stitching together materials from anthropology, folklore, travel writings, colonial histories, popular literature and cinema, medical history, and cultural theory, Zombies is the definitive short introduction to these restless pulp monsters. 

Law, Zombies, and Legal Education

Thomas E. Simmons, University of South Dakota School of Law, has published What Zombies Can Teach Law Students: Popular Text Inclusion in Law and Literature at 66 Mercer Law Review 729 (2015). Here is the abstract.

Although law and literature studies scholars have typically restricted themselves to the study of great (or at least greater) works of traditional literature, the inclusion of lesser texts has distinct advantages to recommend it. Comic books and television series can be subjected to a law and literature approach and zombie texts are particularly rich narratives for the exploration of legal tensions, competing values, and institutions. The Walking Dead as a television and comic book series provides a finely textured setting within which property law, euthanasia, civil commitments, contrasting decision-making paradigms and the value of procedural formalities are assessed and illuminated. This article suggests several opportunities which utilize zombie texts to advance an understanding of the law within the law school curricula including but not limited to law and literature courses.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Is Zombification Illegal?

Well, it depends. Of course, you knew I was going to say that. Here's more, courtesy of my good friend Lyonette Louis-Jacques. More law and zombie-ness here from the Law Library of Congress.

Hat tip to Susan Gualtier of the LSU Law Center Library for sending me the links.

For more about law and zombies and whatever, see

Michael L. Smith, Prosecuting the Undead: Federal Criminal Law in a World of Zombies, 61 UCLA L. Rev. Disc. 44 (2013).

and

John Schwartz, Estate Planning for Zombies, New York Times, July 7, 2012

Brains Eating Themselves

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a good article today at its website on the links among zombie studies, navel gazing, and well, the inevitable. Link here.

Law and Literature and Constitutions and Zombies: Where Does the "Oh, My" Come In?

William Baude, University of Chicago Law School, has published Zombie Federalism. Here is the abstract.

The most natural question to ask about zombies and constitutional law is whether zombies are persons within the meaning of the Constitution. But that question turns out to be remarkably difficult. The word "person" appears repeatedly throughout the Constitution, but without any clues about whether it extends to zombies.

What’s the best constitutional solution to this problem? Zombie Federalism. The Constitution does not resolve the question of zombie personhood, so we should understand it to leave that question to state law.

Download the paper at the link.

Have you now developed a taste for zombies? Indulge it by feasting on these articles.

Adam Chodorow, Arizona State University College of Law, Death and Taxes and Zombies, 98 Iowa Law Review 1207 (2013).

The U.S. stands on the precipice of a financial disaster, and Congress has done nothing but bicker. Of course, I refer to the coming day when the undead walk the earth, feasting on the living. A zombie apocalypse will create an urgent need for significant government revenues to protect the living, while at the same time rendering a large portion of the taxpaying public dead or undead. The government’s failure to anticipate or plan for this eventuality could cripple its ability to respond effectively, putting us all at risk.

This article fills a glaring gap in the academic literature by examining how the estate and income tax laws apply to the undead. Beginning with the critical question of whether the undead should be considered dead for estate tax purposes, the article continues on to address income tax issues the undead are likely to face. In addition to zombies, the article also considers how estate and income tax laws should apply to vampires and ghosts. Given the difficulties identified herein of applying existing tax law to the undead, new legislation may be warranted. However, any new legislation is certain to raise its own set of problems. The point here is not to identify the appropriate approach. Rather, it is to goad Congress and the IRS into action before it is too late.

Mark Graham, Oxford Internet Institute, Taylor Shelton, University of Kentucky, and Matthew Zook, University of Kentucky, Mapping Zombies: A Guide for Digital Pre-Apocalyptic Analysis and Post-Apocalyptic Survival, in Zombies in the Academy: Living Death in Higher Education (A. Whelan, R. Walker, and C. Moore, eds.; University of Chicago Press., 2013).

Zombies exist, though perhaps not in an entirely literal sense. But the existence, even the outright prevalence, of zombies in the collective social imaginary gives them a ‘realness,’ even though a zombie apocalypse has yet to happen. The zombie trope exists as a means through which society can playfully, if somewhat grimly and gruesomely, discover the intricacies of humanity’s relationship with nature and the socially constructed world that emerges from it.

In this chapter, we present an analysis of the prevalence of zombies and zombie-related terminology within the geographically grounded parts of cyberspace, known as the geoweb (see also Haklay et al. 2008 and Graham 2010). Just as zombies provide a means to explore, imagine and reconstruct the world around us, so too do the socio-technical practices of the geoweb provide a means for better understanding human society (Shelton et al. forthcoming; Graham and Zook 2011; Zook et al. 2010; Zook and Graham 2007). In short, looking for and mapping geo-coded references to zombies on the web provides insight on the memes, mechanisms and the macabre of the modern world. Using a series of maps that visualize the virtual geographies of zombies, this chapter seeks to comprehend the ways in which both zombies and the geoweb are simultaneously reflective of and employed in producing new understandings of our world.

Download all publications from SSRN at the links.