Jamie A. Thomas
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#languagestory blog

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

Not a Virus, But a Regime: 5 Reasons Why Zombies Speak Swahili in GET OUT

3/21/2017

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by Jamie A. Thomas
*Get Out* movie promo image.
Anyone who knows me knows I'm fairly obsessed with zombies, where they come from, why they persist, and how their inability to speak as we do masterfully articulates their sudden and involuntary departure from humanity. We all have our obsessions, right?

So when I went to see Get Out in theaters recently, with its central narrative of race-based body-and-brain-snatching, I couldn't resist reading zombies into it. Between writer and director Jordan Peele's chilling interpretation of the living dead, and his move to open and close the film with a hushed chorus sung in Swahili, I was stunned. All throughout the film my mind was completely blown by its twisting plot line, but even more so because of my expertise in Swahili, and continued research and teaching on discourses of zombies and survival horror across the African Diaspora.

As Get Out unfolds, Peele's Black male protagonist pays homage to the groundbreaking narratives of Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967). However, Get Out goes beyond these earlier films to offer additionally complex critiques on gender and interracial relationships, and the merit of competing discourses of survival when zombies are afoot. Get Out also harbors an important commentary on the power of communication, and above all else, the extreme costs of a failure to listen. 

With a promise to keep spoilers to a minimum, here are 5 reasons why the horrors of Get Out are a particularly apt vehicle for exploring discourses of exploitation, betrayal, and survival in today's America...


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#MoralityRaceBody Video: How Do We Define the Other?

5/28/2016

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What is Human? How do we define the Other?

These were questions addressed in our experimental roundtable discussion on April 28, 2016 at Swarthmore College. The event provided an amazing first opportunity to bring together scholars in the Philadelphia area to discuss intersecting themes of morality, race, and the body. The conversation attracted an audience interested in moral emotion, the brain, human classification, urban redevelopment, Vodun, zombies, and the afterlife.

​Part 2 of our discussion (~20 mins, video available below), particularly concerns historical and contemporary imaginings of the body and afterlife through religious and other lenses. We ask: Which bodies, brains, and emotions are considered righteous and human? Who gets to have an afterlife? What happens to the body in the afterlife?

Part 2 of Morality, Race, and the Body: An Interdisciplinary Conversation from Jamie Thomas on Vimeo.


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Zombies = Race, Gender, Politics, and Beyoncé

5/23/2016

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Lemonade. 

So, on the last day of class this semester, I brought snacks to celebrate with my students. Some chocolate cake, spicy Doritos, and I always like a little bit of lemonade. I figure it couldn't hurt. I set it all on the table at the front of the room, along with a display of books we'd sampled in our syllabus, and some new ones I wanted to encourage students to pick up. 

When it came time to pass around the snacks, my students asked me if had brought the lemonade on purpose. "Uh, no, not really, I just like it." And they were surprised, because all they could think about was Beyoncé's new release. They asked if they could play the album while we circulated thank-you cards to write. "Sure, why not?" 
Alex and Eojin present their TimelineJS of *Engendering Zombie Fiction*, their segment of our exhibit now available online.
Alex and Eojin present their TimelineJS of *Engendering Zombie Fiction*, their segment of our exhibit now available online.
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Samples from our course syllabus: From *The Walking Dead* to *European Thought in the Eighteenth Century*.
Samples from our course syllabus: From *The Walking Dead* to *European Thought in the Eighteenth Century*.
The single Hold Up begins playing across our projector screen, and I begin thinking about how themes in the song relate to key aspects of our seminar on Languages of Fear, Racism, and Zombies. This semester, we had spent time interrogating the reasons for our fears of writing, of others, and of being controlled by "The Man." So some of the words coming out of Beyoncé's mouth were not so far off from conversations we'd had throughout the semester about the concomitant role of discourse in controlling bodies and perpetuating fear of the Other. But my students were already aware of this. After all, two had incorporated discussion of Beyoncé into their final project as part of [ZOMBIES REIMAGINED], our collaborative digital exhibit. This blog post introduces our exhibit and explains how we pulled it all together.​

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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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    Main Author

    Jamie A. Thomas is a linguistic anthropologist and digital media producer. Her forthcoming book Zombies Speak Swahili is all about the undead, videogames, and viral Black language. She is Dean of Social Sciences at Cypress College and teaches at CSU Dominguez Hills.

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