The Anthropocene and the Undead

This book explores the interconnectedness of the cultural zeitgeists around the anthropocene and the undead showing how the latter reveals increasing cultural anxieties over who and what constitutes humanity in the twenty-first century and whether it has a place in any possible post-Anthropocene futures.

The Anthropocene and the Undead describes how our experience of an increasingly erratic environment and the idea of the undead are more closely linked than the obvious zombie horde signaling the end of the world. In fact, as described here, much of how we understand the anthropocene both conceptually and in practice involves undead entities from the past that will not die, undead traumas that rise up and consume the world, and undead temporalities that can never end. Fifteen original essays by cultural and anthropological experts such as Kyle William Bishop, Nils Bubandt, Johan Höglund, and Steffen Hantke, among others, study the nature of humanity’s ongoing complicated relationship to the environment via the concept of the undead. In doing so, The Anthropocene and the Undead sheds invaluable light on adjacent concepts such as the Capitalocene, Necrocene, Disanthropocene, Post-anthropocene, and the Symbiocene to trace real and imagined trajectories of our more-than-human selves into undead and undying futures.

Introduction

Simon Bacon

Part I: Undead Identity in the Anthropocene

Chapter 1: (Un)Death of the Father: Self-Sacrificing Paternity in Modern Zombie Narratives

Kyle William Bishop

Chapter 2: Undeath, Theatricality, and the EcoGothic in DC Moore’s Common (2017)

Gheorghe Williams

Chapter 3: Maggie in the Necrocene

Johan Höglund

Part II: Undead Spaces and “Zones” of the Anthropocene

Chapter 4: The Uncanny Valley of the Anthropocene: Short Stories About the Undead Under the Brightest of Lights

Nils Bubandt

Chapter 5: Mutants and Tourists: Horror Film, Sacrifice Zones, and Chernobyl Diaries (2012)

Steffen Hantke

Chapter 6: A Panic on the 4th of July: Municipal Malfeasance, Mutation and Monstrosity in Barry Levinson’s The Bay (2012)

Rebecca Stone Gordon

Part III: The Anthropocene and the End of “Time”

Chapter 7: “Dying All the Time”: The Future as the Extended Present and the Zombification of History in the Anthropocene

Elana Gomel

Chapter 8: Avenging the Anthropocene: Returning the Dead to Life while Destroying the Planet in The Avengers Films

Kevin J. Wetmore Jr.

Chapter 9: “To Remember Forever to Forget”: Into Eternity and the Anti-Anthropocene

Kristopher Woofter and Mikaela Bobiy

Part IV: The Disantnropocene: Is Not All About Us

Chapter 10: “You’re Next!”: The Enemy Within and the End of the Anthropocene as Seen in Adaptions Of “Who Goes There?” And The Body Snatchers

Andrew Wilson

Chapter 11: Non-Consensual Eco-sex: A Guided Meditation to the Permeable Membrane

Sarah Lewison

Chapter 12: Back from the Dead: Tailings Ponds in the Albertan Oil Sands Mining Operations

Aaron Bradshaw

Part V: The Post-Anthropocene, the Symbiocene and Undead Futures

Chapter 13: Post-Anthropocenic Undying Futures: The Ecocritical Dystopian Posthuman in Lai’s The Tiger Flu and Bacigalupi’s “The People of Sand and Slag”

Conrad Scott

Chapter 14: “Cause tonight is the night/When two become one”: Stranger Things, Parasitism, Assimilation and the Abject

Daisy Butcher

Chapter 15: After the End: The Postanthropocene Future of Endzeit

Lars Schmeink