AAAS 282A
Zombies Go East
- Institution
- Binghamton University
- Taught
- Summer 2026
- Winter 2026–27
Description
Zombies, rooted in Haitian folklore and popularized by American cinema, have become a global phenomenon. Much scholarship treats them as metaphors for U.S. cultural anxieties: subversion of order, financial crisis, war, contagion, and, centrally, the fear of the racial “Other.” Over the past decade, however, zombie and zombie-like figures have surged across East Asian media. How do these creatures resemble or depart from their Western counterparts? Do they mobilize the same archetypal fears, or do they stage distinct cultural fears? Are “Eastern zombies” different?
To answer the above questions, we’ll trace the zombie’s evolution and transpacific crossing. In the first two weeks, we move from Haitian folklore to early U.S. films of the 1930s-40s that drew on that prototype, then to George A. Romero’s genre-defining reimagining in the 1960s-70s and the 21st-century resurgence with its many twists. In the final three weeks, we survey East Asian zombie films from the mid-2010s to the present, analyzing how they address questions of individualization, isolation, neoliberalism, social hierarchy, kinship, technology, greed, and the tension between traditional and contemporary belief systems.
Course work includes a short Zombie Journal (shared with everyone online) responding to each film and reading per each module, two short creative pieces that identify what feels “zombie” in your own everyday life or in other fields of studies, and a final comparative analysis paper on Western and Eastern zombies.