Infected Empires: Decolonizing Zombies. Emy Manini is an independent scholar working in contemporary literature and culture of the Americas. She is based in Seattle, Washington. She earned her PhD in Spanish literature from the University of Washington in 2002. She is a coauthor of Infected Empires: Decolonizing Zombies.
They applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, Monsters vs. Patriarchy: Toxic Imagination in Global Horror Cinema, with the following results:
The Page 99 Test works well for our book. The page appears in our chapter entitled “The Coloniality of Cannibalism: Eating, Selling, and the Offerings of Racialized and Gendered Bodies.” The first lines are the conclusion of a discussion of the 2014 short film TESTEment (Dir. Gigi Saúl Guerrero,) which we examine through the lens of ritualized gender violence. We assert that this form of violence forms part of the fabric of patriarchy, evidenced by colonial, economic, and medical violence, and in its most literal form, historical and modern witch hunting. TESTEment reverses the pattern of ritual violence, portraying a matriarchal coven of witches enacting it upon a male body. Witches have been accused of cannibalism for centuries, and indeed, here the witches consume the flesh of their victim, literalizing the Eucharist with testicular sacrifice and menstrual alchemy. These witches personify the toxic imagination (as referenced in the subtitle of our book) which refers to the malignant power attributed to “evil” women to cause harm to their offspring and the male body through the workings of their imagination.Learn more about Monsters vs. Patriarchy at the Rutgers University Press website.
We continue with the film Jennifer’s Body (2009, dir. Karyn Kusama), in which a young woman who has been metaphorically raped in a satanic ritual becomes a demonic monster who feeds on young men. The capitalist interest of the men who seek to conjure fame through femicide results in those men being turned into meat, again inverting the process patriarchy has reserved for women. The movie subverts the coloniality of gender the moment men are the target of the monster they have created.
The subsection “Ethnic Food: Devouring Immigrants” begins on page 99, in which we introduce the ways in which immigrants and foreigners show up as cannibal fodder in horror cinema. In this chapter we point out that though during colonization the indigenous population were cast as cannibals in colonial European rhetoric, in contemporary cinema, it is minority groups who are converted into meat. Unfortunately this issue only has become more politically relevant, as in our society immigrants are being kidnapped and detained in concentration camps both here and abroad, tortured, and threatened with becoming alligator food.
On page 99, we introduce the concept of iconophagia, which has a double meaning: we consume images and icons which “feed” the culture, as we simultaneously become slaves to these images and icons which colonize our desires and futures: we are, in effect, eaten up by our icons. This discussion mirrors the broader themes of the book, in that horror icons that we produce and consume, while representing methods of oppression, can also be tools for liberation. The page is representative in that it showcases our use of cultural theory, historical trends, and intersectionality to analyse the ways that global horror films cast women and other minority groups as monsters–creatures that not only suffer as victims and outcasts, but can also demonstrate techniques for resistance.
The Page 99 Test: Infected Empires: Decolonizing Zombies by Patricia Saldarriaga and Emy Manini.
--Marshal Zeringue
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