The Zombie Slave

This chapter reexamines the most iconic avatar of the zombie in the Caribbean imaginary: the zombie as symbol of the enslaved. Its defining characteristics in the popular imaginary—passivity, forced labor, threat to those wandering alone at night—typically evoke the legacy of the institutionalized slave trade within the present. This chapter studies zombies that writers represent in the colonial past as victims of the French Atlantic slave trade—specifically, how writers in the late twentieth century (Chamoiseau, Fignolé, Schwarz-Bart) portray these doubly enslaved living dead characters in the historical contexts of the Haitian Revolution, the Guadeloupean resistance against the 1802 reinstatement of slavery, and the aborted abolition of 1794 in Martinique. The works studied in this chapter reimagine the zombie, deploying unique iterations of the zombie-slave avatar to interrogate narratives of enslavement and resistance in the French Antilles. Ultimately, these writers use the zombie to interrogate the “unthinkability” (Trouillot) of enslaved resistance.