and co-editor (with M. Júdice, I. Araújo-Branco, and R. Marques) of Sor Juana e Portugal. Emy Manini is an independent scholar based in Seattle, Washington.
They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Infected Empires: Decolonizing Zombies, and reported the following:
Page 99 of our book is a fractional but representative snapshot of the entirety of our book. We discuss the Peruvian film The Year of the Apocalypse (El año del apocalipsis) and a plot point in which a group of young adult survivors of a zombie outbreak decide to sacrifice the children and elderly people they have been tasked with protecting when they are under attack. They do this in order to give themselves, the supposedly stronger, healthier, and abler demographic, a better chance of survival. From our page: “For this generation, the future is the present moment, and only by eliminating the children (of the future) and the elderly (of the past) will they be able to survive… They decide that, due to their respective ages, the elderly and the children are disabled, and so they poison them to control their present moment.” We refer to the “strange temporalities” proposed by J. Halberstam, in which the emergency of the AIDS era brought focus to the present moment instead of a long future life and the idea of futurity itself. The young adults in the film are rejecting a queer and crip temporality that goes beyond the idea of ableist and heteronormative narratives about the future. We liken this mindset to the way young, “healthier,” lives were valued over “disposable” elderly, poor, and immunocompromised subjects during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our page 99 ends by introducing the notion of an inclusive futurity, which we later go on to propose must consider the union of queer temporality and crip time to include intersectionalities of gender, disability, race, and class.Learn more about Infected Empires at the Rutgers University Press website.
We believe this page is a good example of how we analyze global zombie narratives presented in films from around the world to examine what they tell us about how we understand the world we live in, how we came to this historical moment, and how we can navigate our anxieties about an apocalyptic future that are expressed by these films. Of course, it is only one example in a book that contains hundreds, and so it is not a complete view of our broader project. However, the example of page 99 is a good indicator of our methods and interests.
We study the zombie as a transnational cinematic phenomenon. We begin with an in-depth study of the ontology of the zombie and the decolonization of the soul, something that we trace back to classical philosophy. We go on to make connections between the zombie myth born in colonialism and the epistemic violence that enforces the continuation of coloniality of thought that props up the structure of the modern nation-state. We also consider the ways in which capital maintains coloniality over bodies and lives, even unto death. Therefore, we look at zombies as subjects of gore capitalism (as proposed by Sayak Valencia), as dead bodies and commodities that resist their economic exploitation through necroactivism. We study the zombie in its current expressions of difference and otherness, across categories of race, nationality, gender, class, dis/ability, and sexuality, in terms of how zombie narratives reflect real-world events. For example, we question categories of ability (especially under the weight of the global COVID emergency) and look at zombies as expressions of anxieties during Trump era immigration policies. It is our assertion that zombie films illustrate the consequences of oppressive societal systems including capitalism, globalization, as well as environmental, immigration and health policies. These films use horror to emphasize the traces of affects in humanity which allow for the visualization and understanding of historical apocalyptic moments and the means of moving past them towards the sort of futurity proposed on our page 99. In this way, the page delivers a dismembered slice of the fuller corpus of our book!
--Marshal Zeringue
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