Undead Uprising: Haiti, Horror and the Zombie Complex
Join us for the book launch of Undead Uprising: Haiti, Horror and the Zombie Complex and the conversation with John Cussans and Wendy Asquith.
Undead Uprising traces the history of racist and xenophobic representations of Haiti through the chimerical optics of voodoo-terror. It asks how such depictions have contributed to the historical occlusion of Haiti as the first Black, post-colonial and slave-free republic of modern times, and their continued role in perpetuating the image of Haiti as a land mired in primitive superstition and incapable of socio-economic progress. The central figure in this story is the zombie, whose profoundly ambivalent behavioural traits – insurrectionary, apocalyptic cannibal or mind-controlled automaton – have their roots in colonial fantasies about African slaves during and after the Haitian revolution. Returning the contemporary zombie figure to its origins in the transposition of African religious traditions to the plantation economy of Saint-Domingue, Undead Uprising explores the philosophical, psychological and political debates associated with these incessant agents-without-autonomy, and their uncanny relevance for the contemporary cultural politics of race, technology, identity and agency.
John Cussans
John Cussans is an artist and writer based in London. His work explores the theoretical and practical convergences of art, religion, politics, psychology and popular culture. Since 2009 he has been involved with the Ghetto Biennale, Port-au-Prince, often working with the local video collective Tele Geto. His current project The Skullcracker Suite - inspired by the giant cannibal crane of Kwakwaka’wakw legend - investigates processes of decolonization in British Columbia since the 1960’s from perspectives drawn from speculative, inter-planetary science-fiction. He is currently the MFA course leader at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford.
Wendy Asquith
Wendy Asquith is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham. She has interdisciplinary research interests in the cultural histories of human rights and humanitarianism, postcolonial nationhood and African diasporic communities in the Atlantic World. She was an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award holder (2010-2013) with Tate for the project Haiti in Art: Creating and Curating in the Black Atlantic. She has a PhD (2015), MA (2009) and BA (2008) from the University of Liverpool's History department. She is currently preparing a book provisionally entitled Haiti at World’s Fairs: The Art of Postcolonial Politics.
Event:
Undead Uprising: Haiti, Horror and the Zombie ComplexDates:
18 Jan 2018, 6.30pm–8.30pmSupported by:

