CAPAS RESEARCH PROJECT - Sarah Lauro Thanatopia: Undead at the End of the World
I propose to write a short academic book along the lines of those published by the University of Minnesota’s Forerunners series, around 25,000 words. This volume will be structured as a diptych anchored by two recent films by acclaimed filmmaker Jim Jarmusch: Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), a story of centuries-old vampires amidst the capitalist ruins of Detroit, once the vibrant “Motor City” where U.S. car manufacturing was based—devastated by the outsourcing of jobs overseas and foreign manufacture—and the campy film The Dead Don’t Die (2019), a zombie narrative deeply tied to ecological concerns.
This is a book organized by pairings: the vampire and the zombie; capitalism and the impending climate disaster; biopolitics and necropolitics. First, it will clarify the history of these monsters as significatory systems that comment upon slavery, colonialism, and capitalist exploitation—both of humanity and of the environment—work that will draw heavily from my previous expertise on the zombie figure, slavery, and colonialism, in metaphors that one finds alike in European Gothic tales, in Karl Marx’s philosophical writings, and in seventeenth-century West African folk beliefs. Next, it will look at the more recent application of these monstrous figures (vampires, zombies) specifically to narratives of climate change to draw out a sense that these disparate undead figures, in the end, do similar work in our frightening historical moment: like an immortal vampire, we have outlived our planet; like a walking corpse, with the ecological “tipping point” already behind us, we may be dead already.