As zombies become increasingly ubiquitous, one might ask the question posed by Edgar Wright in his 2006 film Shaun of the Dead: if a zombie outbreak were to occur in real life, would anyone even notice? John McPhail provides one answer to this question in his zombie high-school musical, Anna and the Apocalypse (2017), by parodying the morning of the zombie outbreak. Wrapped up in a musical number made possible by self-absorption and noise-canceling earbuds, the titular Anna blithely sings and dances her way to school (via a noteworthy cemetery), completely ignorant of the chaos around her, a biting satire of the tech-fueled isolation of modern teenagers. By mashing up high-school dramas, romantic comedies, movie musicals, and Christmas films with a zombie narrative, McPhail uses comedic parody to make the subgenre exciting and new once more. Taking a memorable sequence from Shaun of the Dead and expanding it into a feature-length film, Anna and the Apocalypse not only reinvents the stereotypical "zombie outbreak sequence" but also offers scathing cultural criticism about contemporary teen life and high-school communities.
Hidden in plain sight against the backdrop of popular culture, a deep ideological structure in the global imagination exists with respect to the zombie, a structure that is initially difficult to articulate and map out: racism. Starting with this main idea, this article sketches the ways that African American literary writers have utilized their zombie-filled "noirums" to symbolize the stakes of overcoming inequality. Quickly defined, a noirum is a "novum" refracted by race - the science fictional new thing and its racialized impact. In this regard, the zombie would be the new thing introduced in the storyworld, and the norium would be this new thing's influence on race in that storyworld. Even at the end of the world, when a zombie crisis ends society as we know it, when racial structures are surely destabilized with the emergence of said zombies, the outwardly broken racial structures remain firmly intact in terms of the viewing experience. Black people cannot live in streaming, film, or television contexts. Thus, this article offers a concentrated, if transitory, investigation of how various zombie screen narratives do not offer noirums, but rather, broadly speaking, colonialist Euro-American-oriented novums that embody both white fears and white desires. Finally, this article considers how Black creatives reimagine zombiehood (and, in general, undead stories) through the narrative modalities already mentioned while also unearthing new techniques when they are given creative free rein, especially in film and television.
Contemporary cultural conceptions of the future encompass two main approaches: an open future informed by multiple possibilities and a closed future that can be deterministically extrapolated from the present. The article explores the clash of the two approaches in Alex Garland's miniseries Devs (2020) and season 3 of Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan's Westworld (2020). The shows feature quantum computers that gather large data sets about human subjects to analyze them and predict the course of their lives. This translation of human behavior into quantifiable data characteristic of surveillance capitalism can be used for manipulation and control of society by predetermination and inevitably raises questions about determinism and free will, cause-and-effect relationships, and the nature of reality. However, both shows propose a way out of the world of techno-domination by introducing an unpredictable element that creates an anomaly and unlocks the potential to regain agency and rewrite one's future.
In the first season of the speculative television show Our Flag Means Death (2022-23), the main character, Edward/Blackbeard (Taika Waititi) uses a series of names to signal and disavow identity aspects relating to his positionality as a queer, mixed-race leader. I combine close readings and theoretical approaches from sf studies, queer studies, and sociolinguistics to argue that these name-changing processes reflect Edward's ambivalence about his evolving identity, as well as his embeddedness in relationships with people who seek to affirm or dehumanize him. Edward's relationships with the three men closest to him showcase a range of naming practices that reflect racialized dynamics, recasting our real-world history through a speculative lens to comment on present-day intersectional identities.
This article considers how the relationship envisioned among race, technology, and the animal within The Creator (2023) enables the film to offer radical, anti-essentialist possibilities for the posthuman as a concept within sf. It does so by analyzing how the film configures scenes of cross-species kinship within its overarching narrative of robotic civil rights. After contextualizing The Creator within a lineage of allegorized alterity that has been viewed as simultaneously liberatory and restrictive by prominent scholars of race, I demonstrate how the film utilizes moments of anthropocentric and post-anthropocentric revolutionary violence to chart a trajectory toward species cosmopolitanism as a way of theorizing posthumanism. But this trajectory is complicated by the ways in which the film reinscribes techno-Orientalism on a formal level. The result, I argue, is a triangulated picture of race, technology, and the animal that gives rise to non-binary ways of conceptualizing solidarity not simply as a written theoretical exercise but as a speculative possibility grounded in paradoxicality and plasticity.
