Necropolitics and Neoliberalism

This lecture sees Patricia Saldarriaga set out the premise that although zombies can be considered representatives of otherness, they can also be seen as a result of necropolitics: following the concept of gore capitalism — and Sayak Valencia’s reflection in her book Gore Capitalism (2016) — dead bodies have become commodities. These zombie bodies are irrefutably the forgotten victims of neoliberalism and, furthermore, the zombie can represent colonialisation, oppression and toxic global power which, in an iconoclastic act, destroys our systems to make way for a different post-apocalyptic world.

Patricia Saldarriaga is a lecturer in Luso-Hispanic Studies at Middlebury College in Vermont. She has published numerous texts on Baroque literature and visual culture, contemporary poetry and monsters in cinema. Her most recent book, in co-authorship with Emy Manini, is entitled Infected Empires: Decolonizing Zombies (2022). She is currently working on a manuscript on global cinema and female monsters.