Hunger

This piece uses narrative forms from both Black horror and Fantastic literature to grapple with questions of haunting, grief, life in proximity to death, and uneven distributions of access and wealth within global capitalism. The blurring of the lines between the real and the surreal, typical of Fantastic literature, parallels the blurring of the lines between death caused by grief and death caused by the systemic neglect of poor, Black, marginalized folks around the world. As a piece of horror, the narrative deals with both the haunting of the main character by the loss of their sister and the haunting of the ongoing legacies of colonialism manifest as exploitative movements of wealth, resources, and people. While heavily ethnographically informed, this piece also seeks to evoke global theories of water, loss, memory, being, and ancestry. Bringing these common tropes within anthropology into interdisciplinary and transnational, conversations with Black Studies through fiction opens up different ways for anthropology to engage with zombification, both in its use as a critique of capitalist modes of production and in its use as a term for the living dead, or in this case the perpetual living on the edge of death within necropolitical systems.