The Sugar-Zombie, Race and Cash-Crop Monocultures

Chapter two turns to the 1930s, which saw a proliferation of zombies and zombie effects across a number of different locations and genres. Viewing the crisis of the 1930s, heralded by the Wall Street Crash, from the perspective of today is instructive, since today’s economic and environmental crisis has its roots in the former. Reading comparatively, I examine the sugar-zombie alongside zombie-esque figures that map the exhaustion of former commodity frontiers. Gendering, racialisation and proletarianisation are environment-making processes, unfolding through the web of life. The zombie, as a highly racialised and gendered figure, makes manifest these entanglements and helps us to shed light on what one might term the 'ecological unconscious' of modernity.