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Throughout Atlantic modernity, maroon and buccaneer encounters have generated long-lasting legacies that remain largely unexplored. In this essay I trace how these encounters included various forms of mutual recognition among Saint-Domingue's black and white clandestine people. This history of mutual recognition sheds fresh light on the cultural and ideological context informing the role maroon societies were playing in fomenting slave insurrection in the events leading up to the Haitian Revolution. I also argue that it contributed to the development of Haiti's postcolonial identity, folklore, politics, and popular theater. My main sources are colonial records, place names, Vodou mythology, and Haitian intellectual and literary history. I focus on the emergence of zombie and pirate lore as it became one of the most enduring legacies of mutual maroon and buccaneer recognition in Haiti and the Atlantic world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While American zombie films are staples within the horror genre, often dismissed is the zombie's relationship to both racism and religion. Zombiism emerged from 16th century Haitian Vodou and the cultural context of slavery in Haiti. As such, zombiism, at its core, is a spiritual response to power and racial capitalism. This article argues that zombie films showcase resistance to epistemic violence and challenge the political, economic, and theological relationships that sustain white supremacy. This article analyzes four zombie films--White Zombie (1932), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), Night of the Living Dead (1968), and Get Out (2017)--through the methodological framework of liberation theology and calls heavily upon the Black liberation theology of James Cone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The circulation and consumption of the images of suffering and lifeless black bodies is a longstanding feature of US visual media. Since each archive of suffering and dead black bodies operates within specific histories, discourses, and affective relationships, this article examines a particular collection of images: the Time magazine photos of the 2010 Haiti earthquake victims. The article argues that the photos evoke the uncanny by using the Haitian zombie motif – an image of 'monstrous' black racial difference. The article traces the photos' elicitation of the uncanny in two ways: one, it highlights how the images produce self/other slippages and thus affirm the uncanny; and two, it examines the insidious and violent ways these slippages dehumanize, dismember, and dispossess those depicted to produce a 'negative familiarity' for the non-black observer, thus lending to the banality of antiblack violence. The article ends with a call for 'radical empathy' to combat this violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the relation of the figure of the zombie to the Haitian Revolution, the only successful slave revolution in the Atlantic World. While existing research often stresses the strong link between the zombie and the slave, this is not borne out by the contemporary discourse on the Haitian Revolution. Whereas horror and terror are associated with the zombie from its inception, it is only with the US occupation of Haiti (1915–1934) that US-American writers and directors invented the zombie of popular North Atlantic culture: a soulless slave without consciousness directed by a zombie master. As I argue, this amounts to a neo-colonialist act of symbolic re-enslavement of the self-emancipated Haitians. This time they are deprived not merely of their freedom as under the slave regime, but even of their consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the function of the zombie horde as a literary entity used to represent and interrogate Haitian national narratives. Three works serve as case studies: Gérard Etienne's Le nègre crucifié (1974) to examine the "predatory horde"; Frankétienne's Les affres d'un défi (1979) to analyze the "proletarian horde"; and Dany Laferrière's Pays sans chapeau (1996) to explore the "phantasmal horde." Ultimately, the figure of the zombie marks these literary uprisings as mythic discourses, revealing both their pertinence to historical "reality" and their representational limits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At one level, anthropologists remain functionalists in that they generally see acts and institutions as contributing to a greater social whole only through which they make sense. Thus, sorcery accusations have been traditionally interpreted in terms of maintaining social harmony and cohesion. In the case of Haitian zombification, the zombi seems a locally misidentified victim who is frequently mentally ill. As a hapless non-agent, the zombi cannot initiate the sorcery accusations, so how do we understand the recognition and rescue of the zombi, either in terms of social function or social action? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mr. Clarinet by British writer Nick Stone and Zombi Blues by French Canadian Stanley Péan both immerse the reader in Haiti's tragical history forcing us to acknowledge the terrible traumas caused by dictatorships' atrocities, and interrogate rationality. These works owe their unique nature to the re-configuration of their societies by both writers and the ways in which they portray the predetermined course of events of their people. A comparative analysis of the two novels will demonstrate how, despite their many differences, these writers explore the Haitian history through a common lens: an imaginary universe in which irrationality predominates mixing witchcraft and religious beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]