Zombie Apocalypse By Elizabeth Mcalister

Superior Essays
Elizabeth McAlister argues that zombies that we know of today are used as a mirror to highlight capitalism, slavery, and the rebellion against it. She discusses the how zombies originated and its effects on Haitian religion and culture, how the marine occupation of Haiti brought the "Zonbi" to the using film industry and is relation to a barbaric racial blackness, and how we began to see how the U.S. film industry began to move from the barbaric sense to the rebellion against it. I agree with her view that the zombie is used to highlight racism, slavery, and the progression since then.
In the beginning of the article, McAlister uses current events to grab her audience attention using the presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain. The meme she uses shows McCain doing a full body grimace that was related to how a zombie would act and Obama acting cool. It is here that she gives us the slang meaning of the word by quoting Robert Farris Thompson "the concept of cool in many African-derived cultures is a metaphor for the aesthetic and moral value of remaining composed under pressure." (McAlister,458). She uses this perceived notion later in the article to help highlight her argument. She then lays down the framework of her article by giving us what she will be discussing.
To help the reader transition to the main points of her article McAlister gives a brief history of zombies. It is here she establishes her Ethos by
…show more content…
Here we began to see that we move from the mysticism from Haitian religion and the black barbarism to more of a nonracial

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