Kerstin Oloff
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781781382950
- eISBN:
- 9781781384022
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781382950.003.0004
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Latin American Studies
In this chapter, Kerstin Oloff posits the zombie as a figure that registers the logic of capitalism-as-world-ecology. She examines the work of two contemporary writers – Puerto Rican Ana Lydia Vega ...
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In this chapter, Kerstin Oloff posits the zombie as a figure that registers the logic of capitalism-as-world-ecology. She examines the work of two contemporary writers – Puerto Rican Ana Lydia Vega and Cuban-Puerto Rican Mayra Montero – who have engaged with the Gothic from a perspective that is both overtly feminist and consciously ecological. Vega’s ‘Miss Florence’s Trunk’ (1991) and Montero’s You, Darkness(1995) are texts that critically and consciously probe the fault-lines of capitalist modernity, addressing issues of ecology, race and gender within a world context. In both texts, the zombie is merged with, or considered alongside, another classic Gothic figure: the madwoman. Oloff argues that it is through their engagement with the European Gothic and early US zombie films that the texts confront their readers with the Gothic’s gendered and racialized ecological unconscious.Less
In this chapter, Kerstin Oloff posits the zombie as a figure that registers the logic of capitalism-as-world-ecology. She examines the work of two contemporary writers – Puerto Rican Ana Lydia Vega and Cuban-Puerto Rican Mayra Montero – who have engaged with the Gothic from a perspective that is both overtly feminist and consciously ecological. Vega’s ‘Miss Florence’s Trunk’ (1991) and Montero’s You, Darkness(1995) are texts that critically and consciously probe the fault-lines of capitalist modernity, addressing issues of ecology, race and gender within a world context. In both texts, the zombie is merged with, or considered alongside, another classic Gothic figure: the madwoman. Oloff argues that it is through their engagement with the European Gothic and early US zombie films that the texts confront their readers with the Gothic’s gendered and racialized ecological unconscious.
