What might zombies have
to do with the implosion of neoliberal capitalism at the end of the
twentieth century? What might they have to do with post-colonial,
post-revolutionary nationalism? With labour history? With the
"crisis" of the modernist nation-state? Why are
these spectral, floating signifiers making an appearance in epic,
epidemic proportions in several parts of Africa just now? And why
have immigrants-those wanderers in pursuit of work, whose proper
place is always elsewhere-become pariah citizens of 'a global order
in which, paradoxically, old borders are said
everywhere to be dissolving? What, indeed, do any of these things,
which bear the distinct taint of exoticism, tell us about the
hard-edged material, cultural, epistemic realities of our times?
Indeed, why pose such apparently perverse questions at all when our
social world abounds with practical problems of immediate,
unremitting gravitas?
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