Zombie
PRONUNCIATION: zom-bee
ETYMOLOGY: Of West African origin; compare Kongo nzambi “god,” zumbi “fetish.” Originally the name of a snake god, later meaning “reanimated corpse” in voodoo cult. Perhaps also deriving from Louisiana creole meaning “phantom,” “ghost,” from Spanish “sombra” (shade, ghost).
The body of a dead person given the semblance of life, but mute and will-less, a supernatural force, usually for some evil purpose.
The zombie is a gendered figure of the living dead, controlled by others and signaling violent histories of human bodies of African descent in colonialism and slavery, occupation and dictatorship, plus histories of such bodies in capitalist labor, with the zombie horde suggesting mindless masses rising up across all categories of identity and all areas of the world, especially in texts from the mid-twentieth century on. That which zombifies human bodies, infection or magic, threatens the inviolate humanity/animality of such bodies, producing a posthuman, even cyborg being never far, as an animate, anthropophagous corpse, from the abject.