Zombie as Trope'Zombies are cool', said a graduate student at a recent seminar. 'Zombies are vile', said a film studies lecturer. 'Zombies are whitey's way of expressing the terror of alterity', said a presenter at a recent conference.All true, perhaps. There are many points of attraction in the zombie character, and in a period when zombies seem to be permeating popular culture and emerging in scholarly literature, there are perhaps as many ways of approaching and evaluating zombies as there are people who approach and evaluate. Those 'people' include novelists, movie-makers, cultural theorists, adolescents, philosophers, and the mass of fans, each of whom has a solid idea about what constitutes a zombie, what constitutes a seminal zombie text, and why it is worth researching zombies. Because the idea of zombie travels so widely, and across so many fields, it has become a very familiar character, one that participates in narratives of the body, of life and death, of good and evil; one that gestures to alterity, racism, species-ism, the inescapable, the immutable. Thus it takes us to 'the other side' -alienation, death, and what is worse than death: the state of being undead.But what is this thing called zombie? Although they are, of course, a fantasy, we know enormous amounts about them -their tastes, appearance, biology,
