Chapter 1 - Fear

Summary

This chapter traces the history of the zombie back to its Vodun cradle of Dahomey (the Republic of Benin) in Díaz’s sci-fi eco-parable “Monstro” (New Yorker 2012). A story about an epidemic that spreads on the Haitian-Dominican borderland and gives birth to a racialized zombie, I read the discourse of difference in Díaz’s story through the lens of the African archive. The French 1763 Relation du Royaume de Judas en Guinée, (in les Archives Nationales d’outre mer, Aix-en-Provence, France) and oral proverbs preserved at memorial sites in Ouidah, Benin recovered during fieldwork shed light on the ways the zombie became distorted, in Africa, before becoming a symbol of fear in the American imaginary. Ultimately, I argue that if the zombie became distorted when written into the colonial archive, reading Díaz’s story alongside African archival epistemologies—both oral and written—rewrites a Latin-African history. By revisiting African archives about Vodun, along with White colonial fears of slave rebellion in the Americas and neoliberal labor exploitation, I show how Díaz’s story mimics the archival discourse about Vodun and its practice to redraw a Latinx-African axis and unsettle the common conception of the zombie to deroot its eurocentric signification.