With a central emphasis on kinship metaphysics, this chapter surveys indigenous views and iterations of the zombie apocalypse and postapocalypse. After a framing of zombies in terms of a settler-colonial Anthropocene and an outline of protozombie monsters in traditional Native American storytelling, more-than-human vicissitudes of zombie (post)apocalypse in works by Stephen Graham Jones and Richard Van Camp are analyzed. It is found that Native American zombie stories can be as dark as any other regarding the devastating impacts of the plague, yet Native writers do not go all the way down the rabbit hole of nihilism. That is a luxury of settler privilege, perhaps the despair of colonialism itself. Instead, with no guarantees, but relying on supple temporality between ancestors and descendants, both human and nonhuman, Native American writers go down the rabbit hole (with actual rabbits and other more-than-human kin) of improvisational hope within the Great Mystery.

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Turtle Island of the (Un)Dead: Indigenous American Kinscapes in the Zombie Fiction of Stephen Graham Jones and Richard Van Camp

  • Daniel Otto Jack Petersen

摘要

With a central emphasis on kinship metaphysics, this chapter surveys indigenous views and iterations of the zombie apocalypse and postapocalypse. After a framing of zombies in terms of a settler-colonial Anthropocene and an outline of protozombie monsters in traditional Native American storytelling, more-than-human vicissitudes of zombie (post)apocalypse in works by Stephen Graham Jones and Richard Van Camp are analyzed. It is found that Native American zombie stories can be as dark as any other regarding the devastating impacts of the plague, yet Native writers do not go all the way down the rabbit hole of nihilism. That is a luxury of settler privilege, perhaps the despair of colonialism itself. Instead, with no guarantees, but relying on supple temporality between ancestors and descendants, both human and nonhuman, Native American writers go down the rabbit hole (with actual rabbits and other more-than-human kin) of improvisational hope within the Great Mystery.