The Haitian zombie motif: against the banality of antiblack violence

Abstract

The circulation and consumption of the images of suffering and lifeless black bodies is a longstanding feature of US visual media. Since each archive of suffering and dead black bodies operates within specific histories, discourses, and affective relationships, this article examines a particular collection of images: the Time magazine photos of the 2010 Haiti earthquake victims. The article argues that the photos evoke the uncanny by using the Haitian zombie motif – an image of ‘monstrous’ black racial difference. The article traces the photos’ elicitation of the uncanny in two ways: one, it highlights how the images produce self/other slippages and thus affirm the uncanny; and two, it examines the insidious and violent ways these slippages dehumanize, dismember, and dispossess those depicted to produce a ‘negative familiarity’ for the non-black observer, thus lending to the banality of antiblack violence. The article ends with a call for ‘radical empathy’ to combat this violence.