Jamie A. Thomas
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Video & perspectives on communication, intercultural learning & the impact of anthropological research.

Orientalism & Female Empowerment in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

3/18/2016

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by Fanyi Ma

Female Warriors and 'The Oriental'.

The first thing that caught my attention in ​Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was the appearance of “the oriental” in the storyline. The Bennetts send all five of their daughters to China to study the martial arts, which is very economically demanding. What’s more, there are multiple moments in the movie that portray various characters' fetishization of “oriental” cultures, including scenes where Chinese and Japanese are spoken by the Bennett sisters and their companions. 

​While it’s reasonable for one to assume that the opportunity to study martial arts is a privilege of the noble class, these women's new fighting abilities are only tolerated by the nobility as a necessary evil. Even under the threat of attacking zombies, women are still held to a particular level of decorum and manner. This complex attitude towards female warriors underscores the prominence of gender inequality in the film.
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I’ll just be honest with you—I am very disappointed by this movie. The zombie is a social concept we’ve been contesting throughout the semester, and it has so many potential ways to be embedded in Jane Austen’s novel. Being a by-product of pride and prejudice itself, the zombie can be a perfect tool for conveying themes like social class, self-identity, hatred, fear, etc.However, what I saw in the movie was just the thread of human vs. zombie simply synchronized and paired up with the plots of the original story, creating a logically flawed, overly dramatized and self-contradicting pandemonium.

Flawed Depiction of China-Western Relations.

Another detail of the film ​Pride and Prejudice and Zombies that caught my attention was the time period in which the story takes place. The early 19th century is a crucial era in the history of China-Western interaction. That’s when the falling empire of the Qing Dynasty clashed with rising Western powers.

Great Britain, along with many other European countries and westernized Asian countries, forced the historically self-sufficient agricultural empire to open its gate and pushed China into the trend of global trade. The weakened Chinese empire had no choice but giving away its land and sovereignty after several unsuccessful attempts at fighting back.

Foreign missionaries and businessmen swarmed into China to spread "civilization" and seek their fortunes. Encounters with Chinese culture were usually described as modern civilization converting the primitive, mysterious, and incompetent doctrines of the Chinese. If we keep this historical background in mind, the appreciation of what is referred to in the film as "Oriental culture" seems pretty out of place.


These two paradoxes--Orientalism and female empowerment in the early 19th century--both have the potential to escalate the original story to a deeper level of inquiry into gender and cultural privilege. However, the movie's directors don't seem to bother. Instead, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies easily focuses on  dramatic battle scenes, while leaving these two threads unresolved. 

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Close Encounters of the Skull Kind: An Ode to Public History

3/18/2016

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By Jamie A. Thomas
Human skull from the Samuel G. Morton Collection at the Penn Museum.
"Egyptian blended with the Negro form." Human skull from the Samuel G. Morton Collection at the Penn Museum.

Yo, What's With the Skulls?

For my seminar this week, I arranged a visit to the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. We've been engaging with 19th century discourses of humanity, difference, and the body, and I wanted us to get out of the classroom to interact with materials from that time period. We were lucky enough to get up close and personal with human remains amassed (problematically) by Philadelphia physician Samuel G. Morton in the mid-1800s. These labelled skulls are now part of the eponymous collection researched and conserved by the Penn Museum. 

All semester long in my seminar, Languages of Fear, Racism, and Zombies, I've been guiding students through perspectives in critical discourse analysis and a range of discursive representations of humanity and the Other. We began with the Wild Man of the European Renaissance and traced the genealogy of this idea to the contemporary framing of Bear Grylls and his Man vs. Wild television series. Next, we began to explore Darwinian paradigm as it relates to our radicalized, gendered, and classist ideas of civilization, competition, and primitivism. We discussed the life and times of Nathaniel  Isaacs, Saartje Baartman, the implications of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and the Haitian and African origins of the zombie. Our next moves will be to examine the notion of the zombie in the context of Henrietta Lacks' immortal (and undead) cells, and the language and visual discourse of Romero's Night of the Living Dead.  

The way I see it, there's no studying the zombie without equally examining (1) what we think makes us human and (2) our fears of death, dying, and reanimation. What better way to enhance our study than to interact with a massive collection of human skulls? Admittedly, it was a bit creepy to be in a room surrounded by the ossified remains of hundreds of people I could never know. But, we were oriented by our immensely knowledgable guide, Penn Museum specialist, Paul Mitchell...  ​

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Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Title Delivers (A Little Too Much)

3/13/2016

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by Romeo Luevano and Gretchen Trupp 

Romeo and Gretchen's movie review comes after our field trip to see the new movie, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016), as part of our Spring 2016 seminar, Languages of Fear, Racism, and Zombies at Swarthmore College. **SPOILER ALERT**
The film is so White that we can mistake it as one of this year’s Oscar nominations. 
Key zombie character from the movie.
Winners of *most memorable zombie duo* from the movie.
From the beginning of the movie, it seemed fairly clear that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies would carry a healthy dose of all the title promised, some of it being from the producers rather than content of the book itself. The zombie virus itself came from “the colonies”, and could be transferred by a bite. Having the virus come from European colonies and then affect the greater London area seems to indicate fears that the colonizers had about their own power and who they were trying to control. For the first few hours (up to days depending on individual circumstance), the zombie would blend in with humans-- only their decaying flesh would give them away. Most of the zombies bitten while alive retained their speech capabilities and memories-- a trait not often seen in zombie movies. A big part of this seemed to be for shock and horror value, as the violence appeared to be pretty gratuitous for a PG-13 rating.

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Film Leaves Us Wanting More Flesh

3/4/2016

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by Eojin (Jin) Choi, Shuang Guan, & Tiauna Lewis

Jin, Shuang, and Tiauna's movie review is a response to a field trip to see the new movie, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016), as part of our Spring 2016 seminar, Languages of Fear, Racism, and Zombies at Swarthmore College. **SPOILER ALERT**
The Bennett sisters put their sword skills to work.
The Bennett sisters work their way through the party in full style.
Following the trend of mash-ups between history, literature, and the supernatural, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies takes the British classic by Jane Austen and adds in a zombie-fighting quest. The love story between Jane and Mr. Bingley, and between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, unfolds against a backdrop of a zombie outbreak that is rapidly taking over England. In the end, Darcy and Elizabeth overcome their initial impressions of each other and work together to minimize the spread of the outbreak.

In the movie, viewers see hundreds of zombies that constantly hunt for brains while being hunted down themselves. Historically, this stems from the Haitian belief, in which zombies came in multiple forms: They were spirits stolen by magicians, humans who willingly became zombies, or mindless servants of their zombie creator. In American society, however, the historical appeal of the zombie initially came largely from the creature's lack of autonomy. Many even considered zombies to be the ideal slaves, since they could work for long hours and survive on minimal amounts of food. This characterization of the zombie as a mindless corpse is what the American public is most familiar with today.

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Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Part 2: A Movie Review

3/2/2016

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by Alexander Jin

Alexander's movie review is a response to a field trip to see the new movie, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016), as part of our Spring 2016 seminar, Languages of Fear, Racism, and Zombies at Swarthmore College.
Seminal moment from 2016's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
Preparing for Bingley's ball: Equal parts well-placed daggers, and signature empire waist.
In essence, I found this movie to be eh. Overall, the film struggles to find the appropriate balance between the aristocratic romance presented by Jane Austen's original novel and the absurd (somewhat comedic) zombie motif. 

The film does a relatively good job in creating the alternative history setting but fell short when it attempts to provide additional information surrounding the rise of the zombies. For example, a little bit of 'pride and prejudice' may have affected the decision to convey that the zombie infection originated from overseas territories, when ironically the opposite was true. In reality, White explorers brought all sorts of diseases that ravaged indigenous populations through their expeditions. Additionally, the description of the sisters' training unnecessarily eroticizes 'The Orient' and the knowledge of faraway lands. Even if one is to disregard the fact that having specialized training in East Asia makes absolutely no socioeconomic sense, the manner in which all of the characters fight in the movie is distinctly Western.

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    Main Author

    Jamie A. Thomas is a sociocultural linguist and digital media producer. Her forthcoming book Zombies Speak Swahili is all about the undead, videogames, and why language and communication matter. She teaches at Santa Monica College.

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