Bringing out the undead: Reinventing the zombie in contemporary fiction of the Francophone Caribbean

Before George Romero\u27s 1968 Night of the Living Dead transformed the living dead into ghouls with a drive to consume human flesh, zombies haunted the folklore of the Caribbean. Predominantly depicted as soulless, subservient corpses in Haiti, in Martinique and Guadeloupe, zombies are evil spirits who change shape to ensnare solitary wanderers; both forms reflect the myth\u27s emergence during the period of the institutionalized slave trade. As an emblem of “authentic” Caribbean culture, the zombie plays a significant role in Antillean fiction from 1960 to the present. This study builds upon research on the walking dead published in recent decades predominantly by scholars of visual culture and anthropology, addressing a niche that begs greater critical attention: the zombie as a textual and cinematic product of the French-speaking Antilles. The central question of my dissertation is how this symbol of death is used to embody literary, cultural and political rebirth in the Caribbean context, establishing a body of works—primarily novels but including short stories and film—in which reimagining the zombie is a central concern. A long introductory chapter categorizes the numerous guises assumed by the legendary figure across centuries and continents. Subsequent chapters examine the entity\u27s fictional reiteration in French-language texts regionally tied to the Caribbean, occasionally through readings of single texts, most often studying sets of works clustered around the key thematic threads unearthed by my initial typology: the horde as a means of interrogating the proliferation of national narratives and the limits of collective identity; the zombie as a blank figure of ontological, and creative, metamorphosis; revenants and the return of lost histories; and the walking dead as a product of, and means of reviving, popular culture. These close analyses of the zombie\u27s conventions and meta-narrative functions are informed by the fields of postcolonial theory, Caribbean and cultural studies, neo-Marxist theory and psychoanalysis. Ultimately, I argue that the enduring fascination with the zombie stems from its dual function as literal revenant and shape-shifter, and as a figure of historical revenance with ever-evolving mythic contours