Apocalyptica

Editor’s Note on Posthuman Survival

Jenny Stümer — 2024-09-12

(Un)veiling Extinction

Robert Folger — 2024-09-12

Undead Return

Lawrence May — 2024-09-12

This article examines the origins of the videogame zombie by tracing their appearances in the Japanese videogames Phantom Fighter (Marionette 1988), Sweet Home (Capcom 1989) and Biohazard (Capcom 1996). The nascent versions of interactive zombies in these games offer a distinctively Japanese variation to the mediated figure of the undead. Their monsters draw upon and contribute to traditions of Japanese folklore teeming with yōkai (supernatural demons, monsters and ghouls). Through analysis of Phantom Fighter, Sweet Home and Biohazard, I demonstrate how Japan’s prototypical videogame zombies build upon their yōkai roots to reflect a public consciousness that is grappling with the jarring reanimation of long-unresolved trauma: the tragedies, crimes, and anguish of the Pacific War and its devastating conclusion. The figure of the zombie—trading in abject and uncanny forms of monstrosity, and upending sense and meaning through its impossible terrors—appears to be a natural product of this moment of rupture in Japan’s post-war history. The appearance of the zombie in these videogames invites players into the mediation and negotiation of popular cultural memorial anxieties.

‘Death or Rebirth’

Lea Espinoza Garrido — 2024-09-12

This contribution offers a critical analysis of Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead (2021) and its representation of apocalyptic borderscapes and topographies of exception. It examines how the film portrays the ethical dimensions of survival and death in the context of a zombie apocalypse, in which the border functions as a site of exclusion where subjects are not only excluded from a specific territory or the sphere of the law but also, more importantly, from the sphere of the living. The author analyzes the narrative, aesthetic, and cinematic strategies that Army of the Dead employs to shed light on this necropolitical dimension of the border and the ways in which this dimension is intertwined with the imaginary of survival in and of the apocalypse. In particular, the author argues that the plural and particular apocalypse(s) in the film not only expose patterns of seeming exceptionalism that mask the everydayness of biopolitical exclusion and the topographies of exception they produce but also make visible the territorial dimension of the border as a recurring instrument of bio- and necro-political control that regulates and structures survival.

Foul Waters

Drago Momcilovic — 2024-09-12

The contemporary American zombie apocalypse narrative engages aspects of the elemental world, and fluid elements in particular, in ways that reshape our views of both the pre-apocalyptic worlds of zombie terror and the post-apocalyptic worlds that emerge from the ruins. Two such shows, the AMC television series The Walking Dead (2010-2022) and its first major spinoff, Fear the Walking Dead (2015-2023), circulate polyvalent images of three particular fluid substrates—blood, water, and oil—that structure the violent collapse and agonizing rebirth of the contemporary world. I argue that these fluids reshape the zombie apocalypse narrative as an elemental apocalypse that exposes certain forms of ongoing social and ecological violence. They mobilise the material realities and rigid forms that constitute our sense of a shared society and planet and transform them into a set of softened, malleable structures that make us more attentive to the uncertainties, ambiguities, and uncomfortable complicities that characterise the shows’ allegorisations of global catastrophe. Contemporary zombie apocalypse narratives like The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead re-establish the centrality of the fluid elements that have long structured the zombie mythos and its intersecting histories of violence toward human subjects and the nonhuman environment.

Orga is not Mecha

Teresa Heffernan — 2024-09-12

This paper traces the fictional roots of recent claims by those in the AI industry that superintelligent machines pose an existential risk. This irrational anxiety, given that fiction is not science, that grants AI agency is not only a distraction from real concerns, but a psychological displacement, an unconscious defense that substitutes a new object, autonomous machines, in place of one that cannot be acknowledged: responsibility for the environmental and societal damage caused by a resource-intensive industry that persists, despite the climate catastrophe, with a mechanistic worldview, one that treats nature, including humans, as a lucrative commodity. Initially seduced by the story of AI evolution, Stanley Kubrick consulted computer scientists when he was making 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was released a year before the moon landing. In the problematic cycle of fiction directing science, the film’s depiction of AI has, in turn, shaped research in the field. Yet, if at first Kubrick embraced the scientists’ vision of evolving, intelligent, immortal machines, by the time he was working on A.I. Artificial Intelligence in the 1980s, the field was entering one of its many winters and environmental concerns had dampened faith in technological progress. Kubrick again consulted AI scientists, but this time he returned the field to its fictional roots and presented AI as a dark fairy tale about a corporation that persists with the myth that it can turn ’mecha’ into ‘orga’ despite the climate crisis.

The Coming Apocalypse

Alessandro Sbordoni — 2024-09-12

Affordances of Apocalyptic Environmentalism

Florian Mussgnug — 2024-09-12

Reviewing Anaïs Maurer’s The Ocean On Fire: Pacific Stories from Nuclear Survivors and Climate Activists (2024)

Aanchal Saraf — 2024-09-12

Introduction

Robert Folger — 2024-09-12

Imagining the End of Times

Adolfo F. Mantilla Osornio — 2024-09-12

Nepantla, Between Mesoamerican Time and Colonial Space

Patricia Murrieta-Flores — 2024-09-12

Subaltern Apocalypses and Cosmopolitics of the Peoples in the Southern Cone of America

Alejandra Bottinelli Wolleter — 2024-09-12

Minding the Gap Between Worlds

Emily Ray — 2024-09-12

Doomsday Prepping as Prophecy, Predestination, and Media Spectacle

Robert E. Kirsch — 2024-09-12