The Walking Dead: HIV/AIDS and the Changing Face of Zombies in Literature DOC

Title	The Walking Dead: HIV/AIDS and the Changing Face of Zombies in Literature
Author	Kirsten Imani Kasai
Pages	8
File Size	49 KB
File Type	DOC
Total Downloads	159
Total Views	263

Summary

Kasai 1 The Walking Dead: HIV/AIDS and the Changing Face of Zombies in Literature Kirsten Imani Kasai “’Tis called the evil…Strangely visited people, All swol’n and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye The mere despair of surgery…” – Macbeth, Act 4, Scene 3. 167, 171-3, William Shakespeare An Amazon.com sea...

Description

Kasai The Walking Dead: HIV/AIDS and the Changing Face of Zombies in Literature Kirsten Imani Kasai "'Tis called the evil…Strangely visited people, All swol'n and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye The mere despair of surgery…" – Macbeth, Act 4, Scene 3. 167, 171-3, William Shakespeare An Amazon.com search for the term "zombie" yields more than 8,000 results; even literary notable Joyce Carol Oates has gotten in on the game (Zombie: A Novel, 2009) and Jane Austen's Romantic classics have turned bloody in re-imagined genre mash-ups1 . Why have zombies become such trendy, pop culture money-makers over the past decade? I believe that the zombie popularity explosion is a response to the hysteria and fear that swept America in the late 1980s and early '90s during the burgeoning AIDS crisis. Initially, an HIV diagnosis was a death sentence. Ostracized from a society that fears infection, they live in a limbo-land of fear, suspicion and physical decline, having essentially become the walking dead. In this essay, I'll examine the shifting trend of zombie literature in the wake of the AIDS epidemic. I'll explore historical connections between pandemics and literature, the changing image of zombies and how the original Haitian image of a voodoo-charmed, undead servant morphed into the current preconception of a zombie: typically, a white male with visible decay and sores2 , who infects others through violent, blood-borne transmission to render them the "living dead." Monsters embody the fears of an era. They give a face to real and imagined threats and corporealize a viral enemy into one that can be quarantined, cured or have it its head blown off. The current wave of writers and filmmakers are the first generation to have come of age in the 1 Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance—Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem! by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith; Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dreadfully Ever After by Steve Hockensmith. 2 Contemporary zombies possess the visibly damaged and diseased flesh and skeletal appearance representative of Karposi's sarcoma and the weight loss and wasting of full-blown/late-stage AIDS. 1...