\u201cElegy\u201d
\nSarah Juliet Lauro<\/p>\n
Common knowledge has it that before there can be an afterlife, there must be a death. And although this is an assertion that I hope we will question in this special issue, I want to start by acknowledging that this past week, I watched a man die. Literally, I watched a man draw his last breath on this earth, and it readied me to begin writing this introduction.<\/p>\n
I know, this isn\u2019t how these types of things are supposed to start. I\u2019m expected to talk about AfterLives in the abstract, or at least metaphorically rather than literally. What Kyle and I were really concerned with, after all, as we assembled this collection, is the manner in which we can take hold of the concept of \u201cAfterLives\u201d as a condition of the still living. Nonetheless, there is the expectation that I should perform a little telegraphy that signals to all the right predecessors. To be interdisciplinary, I\u2019d foreground my introduction with an epigraph from art historian Hal Foster, about the way we are all living in \u201ca condition of aftermath\u201d (126). But I\u2019d probably have to start by troubling that assertion, questioning if we really are that special\u2014any different from the moderns, for example, who distinctly felt a sense of rupture. For, as Frank Kermode writes of the modernists, \u201cthe mood was eschatological but skepticism and a refined sense of traditionalism held in check what threatened to be a bad case of literary primitivism\u201d (104). Drawing directly from Frank Kermode\u2019s transhistorical series of lectures, The Sense of An Ending<\/em>, we could retread many of the points he makes about depictions of the end times, from medieval apocrypha to cold war panic, to consider whether every generation hasn\u2019t seen itself as marked for greatness, the chosen ones that would live through the second coming, or feared that a more secular apocalypse was nigh. Maybe it is somewhat inherent to the human condition to feel both collectively and individually vulnerable; to feel the presence, at some times more potently than others, of the \u201cruffian on the stair\u201d that awaits us all, as W.E. Henley described Death in the 1877 poem \u201cMadam Life\u2019s a piece in bloom.\u201d<\/p>\n If I were writing the introduction this way, I would buttress our interest in the contemporary sense of aftermath described by Foster in terms of contemporary art by including a quote from Jacques Derrida\u2019s \u201cThe Ends of Man,\u201d to show the universal applicability of the concept: \u201cMan is that which is relative to his end, in the fundamentally equivocal sense of the word. This has always been so. The transcendental end can appear to itself and unfold before itself only in the condition of mortality, of relation to finitude as the origin of ideality. The name of man has always been inscribed in metaphysics between these two ends. It has meaning only in this eschato-teleological situation\u201d (44). According to Derrida, to consider being is to consider the end, and Man is that creature that considers his own being, and thus his own end. Perhaps then, the human is always already posthuman. Maybe it has always been a part of the human\u2019s psychological makeup to reckon with his own posthuman future, even if in his imagination, posthumanity will only be the transformation of the subject into the object of the corpse. And as we all know, resurrections, immortals, and a myriad of other figurations of living death (like the Jewish Golem), or of those living afterlives (like Dionysus, the twice-born god), may be (literally) the oldest story on Earth. Indeed, the first written texts we have, fragments of the Sumatran epic of Gilgamesh (the oldest of which are dated before 2000 BC), tell of a mortal traveling to the world of the dead.<\/p>\n But we continually find ourselves invoking the sense of an ending today as if it were particular to our historical moment and not without biting relevance. Take for instance Slavoj \u017di\u017eek\u2019s depiction of \u201cthe global capitalism system [that] is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point\u201d with its four horsemen of the apocalypse \u201cecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself\u2026and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions\u201d (x). The news is full today of reasons we might feel that humanity\u2019s drama is entering its final act.<\/p>\n To look beyond apocalyptic rhetoric for its application to the concept of the afterlife, and for the broader significance of AfterLives as mode of reconceiving of existence, I\u2019d wedge in something from Jeffrey Jerome Cohen\u2019s insightful piece in a previous issue of JFA<\/em>, \u201cUndead (a zombie-oriented ontology).\u201d In particular, his statement that \u201cZombies might be literally post-human but they remain disappointingly anthropocentric\u201d strikes me as an incredibly apt critique of previous work in the field, and I\u2019m excited by his call for an investigation of the zombie for what it reveals about \u201cinhuman ecology\u201d more broadly: \u201cinhuman ecology is a part of our Zombie Oriented Ontology, one in which we realize it is not simply the human body that is an assemblage of discordant, agential and envitalized objects, but the earth itself. \u2018Undead\u2019 means \u2018differently alive\u2019\u201d (397).1 <\/sup><\/p>\n Then, just as we risked falling into the void, I\u2019d pivot us towards the zombie, the vampire, living and dead corpses, and other figurations of afterlives, for the way they concretize these issues at hand. The central question I should be presenting in this introduction is: Why do we seem to have been so haunted, in the first decade of the 21st<\/sup>\u00a0century, by figures of the Undead and other posthumans? But I also want to illustrate the potentiality of conceiving of ourselves as already dead.<\/p>\n In an explanation for the various ways we adumbrate the category of AfterLives in this collection, and in musing about our culture\u2019s intensified interest in the topic, of late, I\u2019d touch upon, as probable causes, the turn of the millennium, the unforeseeable future living in the anthropocene era, the condition of \u201clate late\u201d capitalism, and the disorientation produced by the \u201cpost-postmodern\u201d in art. In questioning how this pervasive sense of an ending has manifested in recent years, I would address the turn away from the human in philosophy, toward the cyborg, the animal, and the object, as in Object Oriented Ontology. My interest in the latter camp of theory, like the work of Graham Harman, being the following syllogism: If a corpse is an object, and objects have being, then there must necessarily be some kind of \u201clife\u201d after death. Perhaps I\u2019d suggest that all of these various posthumans and (n)ontologies exist because of our sense that we are already living in the After, whether this sense of crisis is the result of the turn of the calendar, or disaffection with capitalism amidst an inability to imagine what might succeed it, or a feeling of impending doom due to global climate change.<\/p>\n Then I\u2019d wrap this up tight, returning to Derrida and his now well-worn concept of \u201chauntology\u201d: \u201cStaging for the end of history\u2026that would harbor within itself, but like circumscribed places or particular effects, eschatology and teleology themselves,\u201d holding in balance \u201cthe opposition between \u2018to be\u2019 and \u2018not to be\u201d (Specters of Marx<\/em> 10). That would be a fine way to introduce this collection: It would set up the conversation that Kyle and I have tried to elicit in this compilation of essays. But I\u2019m not going to write the introduction this way, generalizing about people today or attempting to historicize and present diverse cultural attitudes towards life and death. Instead, I\u2019m going to do something very human, and make this about myself.<\/p>\n I study zombies for a living. And so, this maneuver doesn\u2019t seem totally inappropriate to me, for the zombie is always\u2014a figure in a mob, one among many, no longer an individual\u2014in some strange way, plural at the same time that it is singular. A friend recently asked me if we should ever refer to \u201cthe zombie\u201d or if this isn\u2019t inherently a misnomer: is \u201czombie\u201d actually a plural noun, like \u201cmedia,\u201d or \u201cbacteria\u201d? Should I say \u201czombium\u201d when referring to a lone example of a walking corpse? Death is like that: the great universal, but also, intensely personal. And so maybe our understanding of AfterLives has to be that way, too. I\u2019ll share here some of my feelings about the concept we are seeking to describe, informed by my ten-year study of \u201cthe zombie\u201d and my recent experience with a death and its<\/em> afterlife.<\/p>\n Both Kyle and I hold the dubious honor of being zombie experts for what we hope qualifies us to weigh in on the topic of AfterLives, our scholarship on the undead and its recent popularity in cultural theory, which Kyle has famously called the \u201cZombie Renaissance.\u201d Since I published, with Karen Embry in 2008, a piece called \u201cA Zombie Manifesto,\u201d I\u2019ve been talking, writing, and thinking about the zombie\u2019s various dualisms; and just as it is simultaneously both living and dead, plural and singular, the zombie (and I would extend this concept to other AfterLives as we articulate them herein) can also suggest, at the same time, both the past and the future.2<\/sup>\u00a0My own work on the zombie emphasizes its history and what its endurance says about our culture\u2019s relationship to slavery and colonialism, integral elements of the zombie mythology.3<\/sup>\u00a0It is easy to see the way that the zombie, or the specter, or even the immortal vampire, point in both temporal directions, like another kind of hollow man, a scarecrow. Gesturing to the past, such figures suggest that our world remains haunted by something in its history, and that this is the reason the dead refuse to stay buried, but they also signal towards a terrifying and unlivable future, if only in that they remind us of our own, inevitable, mortal finitude.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve long wondered whether the seemingly ubiquitous feeling captured in the postapocalyptic narratives I\u2019ve studied, like those about global plagues and legions of the walking dead, or even those about roving tribes of undead vampires, and about the posthuman figures (like clones and cyborgs) that we\u2019ve considered in my classes, aren\u2019t a direct result of the fact that, as a culture, we may feel that (looking to the future) we\u2019ve worn out our welcome on this planet, that the damage is already done to the environment, and that what lies ahead can only be bleak. We may feel ourselves to be dinosaurs, living in a place we no longer rightfully belong\u2014already, knowingly or unknowingly, existing in the aftermath of our species, simultaneously a relic of the past caught in an unlivable future. In a postapocalyptic novel like Cormac McCarthy\u2019s The Road <\/em>(2006) or Colson Whitehead\u2019s zombie novel, Zone One <\/em>(2011), for instance, readers glimpse terrifying nightmare scenarios that no longer seem so far fetched as to invoke the designation of fantasy fic. Then there is the more popular fare like Stephanie Meyer\u2019s Twilight <\/em>series (2005, 2006, 2007, 2008) and Max Brooks\u2019s World War Z <\/em>(2006). And though none of our contributors take on these texts directly, there are also figures of the undead not only in fiction like Alice Sebold\u2019s The Lovely Bones<\/em> (2002) but all around us: from the zombie walks and runs that have gained popularity over the past decade, to a spike in ghost tourism described by scholars like Tiya Miles and Glenn Gentry.4 <\/sup>And, as we continue to imagine a more diverse posthuman future, technology is implicated in the drama of narratives about cyborgs, as in, one of my favorites,<\/em> Jennifer Egan\u2019s story \u201cBlack Box,\u201d about a cyborg spy, first delivered to her fans one tweet at a time in May 2012. The evolution of the human into a new kind of organism, or its extinction, is a fantasy of a collaborative experience of our species moving together into the sweet hereafter; but, in reality, death awaits each of us, everyone individually, when, as Henley writes, \u201cyour little job is done.\u201d<\/p>\n The man I watched die was my Uncle Pete. There had been a lot of conversations about afterlives around his hospital bed in Sacramento, California, and around the kitchen table. Not only about what dreams may come\u2014what lay in store for Pete, after he would draw his last breath\u2014and what we would do with his body, but also, as often happens now because of advances in medical technology, whether he wasn\u2019t \u201calready gone\u201d\u2014that death would not be the end, for the end had come long before. And yet, my uncle\u2019s case is also unique because he belonged to a category (actually, several categories) of people continually compared to the living dead.<\/p>\n Pete was a \u201cdrunk,\u201d his word, an alcoholic whose 56 years on this earth were largely spent seeking oblivion. A rare vintage of alcoholic: huffing gasoline at the age of eleven, drunk continuously from 14 to 40, taking any pills he could get his hands on, smoking pot more often than he breathed clean air\u2014this sounds like hyperbole, but he was also a three-pack-a-day cigarette smoker. I got to know him best during the precious 15 years of sobriety he held onto from 1998 to 2013. He was such a kind and gentle man that when he worked construction, his nickname had been \u201cSweetness.\u201d He never married, probably because his only mistress was a steely-eyed bitch called Vodka, but he was a talented artist and a musician, self-taught on both fronts. He wore his hair long, like an aging surfer, and, the consummate rebel, he introduced himself at the AA meetings he attended with a gravelly and defiant \u201cI\u2019m Pete and I\u2019m a drunk<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n But then, in Pete\u2019s last year, he fell off of the wagon, and his alcoholism took him down, hard. Refusing all treatment, he was evicted from his apartment, lived in his truck for a torturous California summer, and then drank through the proceeds from selling that vehicle. He became homeless\u2014another population often compared to zombies for their social ostracism\u2014and his new peer group would tell my mother how worried they were about him when she came to find him, which was often, to bring him food or a clean change of clothes, to put him up in a motel when the weather was bad, or to bring him to her house for as long as she could get him to stay. Once, he passed out drunk in a fast food drive-thru, and someone stole what little money he had in his pockets and the silver cross he always wore around his neck. Pete wasn\u2019t religious, per se, but he sure had his own brand of spirituality. He talked constantly to our dead relatives, as if he had some connection to the other side, and this was when he was sober! He voraciously read tales of near-death experiences and depictions of the afterlife. He was never afraid of death; in fact, he looked forward to it, my mother used to say, like New Year\u2019s Eve.A month ago, at a homeless encampment, Pete crawled into his sleeping bag with a blood alcohol level, we only learned much later, of .425, which could kill a normal person, and the embers of a still-living cigarette burning in his jeans. We don\u2019t know how long the fire burned before he noticed it, but reaching for something to put it out, he dumped his vodka on the flames and went up in a blaze. By the time my parents found out about the accident, both of his legs had been amputated, and he lay in the burn unit of the UC Davis Medical Center with fourth-degree burns over sixty percent of his body. An older doctor said she\u2019d never seen wounds so bad in the length of her long career.<\/p>\n Over the past month, we\u2019ve all thought a lot about life and death and the boundary line that lies between them. Did his life really end in the fire? Or had he been gone much longer, some time after he took up the drink? He was seldom conscious in that hospital room, awakening once, to everyone\u2019s surprise, when my sister visited him, to turn his face up for a kiss. In the past four days, I\u2019ve only seen his eyes flutter open once or twice, and then, there was no flash of recognition. Pete was kept on a ventilator, fed by tubes, and then the conversations about \u201cquality of life\u201d began, a topic that always makes me uncomfortable for the intimation that some lives, like those of the severely disabled, are not worth living. Had he already ceased to be human, become a cyborg, breathing, fed, and evacuated by the dozen machines that had become central to his continued existence?<\/p>\n In an era in which medical technology has advanced to a point that it can keep people alive much longer than nature ever could, people in this state are often described as the living dead, as are the homeless, as are alcoholics, as are the drug-addled. But there may also be this sense of living past one\u2019s rightful due on a much more everyday level: when we look in the other direction, not toward our own personal death but from whence we have, as a species, traveled.<\/p>\n Individually, how many of us might have been dead already had we been born in another era? (I think often of the outcome line from an early educational computer game called Oregon Trail<\/em>, in which the player tried to navigate the path of the pioneers, that read simply: \u201cYou have died of dysentery.\u201d) Born in another century, before antibiotics, I might have died of the high fever that left me cross-eyed at the age of six, or any of the various battles with strep throat that I endured as a child and an adolescent, or even, at any point, of the flu, like my great great-uncle did, in his early 20s, in the epidemic of 1918. Even if I had made it to adulthood, I would certainly have perished in the difficult childbirth of my son. So, on a personal note, I\u2019ve often been keenly aware that I am already living in a kind of \u201cafter\u201d simply because I would have been long dead had I been born in a place or time other than this one. Does everyone feel this way, or is it unique to those with sickly constitutions, illnesses that were erstwhile untreatable, or disabilities?<\/p>\n In the end, the heavy burden of the decision about whether or not Pete\u2019s life was livable was made for us. On the way to the hospital, knowing it was the end, my mother looked up at the cloud formation as we drove across the causeway that separates Davis and Sacramento and said, \u201cThat\u2019s what they call a \u2018buttermilk sky.\u2019\u201d Later, talking to my father, she described the experience of looking Death in the eyes this way: \u201cDo you remember that time we took LSD and thought we\u2019d never be the same again? It was like that.\u201d And that\u2019s true. These several days after the event feel as though I\u2019m living an afterlife, now, Pete\u2019s afterlife; but probably, like a hallucination, the memories will fade.<\/p>\n We sat with him all day, watching the monitors, listening to Johnny Cash and J. J. Cale, saying prayers silently and then aloud, and telling stories. An old friend came by, and in the end he went surrounded by loved ones: a niece, a nephew, and his two sisters. My mother said, \u201cWe loved him into the Unknown.\u201d Everything happened as they said it would on the Internet: his hands grew icy cold, his heart rate soared and then slowly began its final descent, his breathing became mechanical, and then, it stopped. It startled me that it took another minute for his heart rate to register at zero. And even after that, I\u2019m not sure at what point the thing in that hospital bed stopped being my uncle and started being his corpse. But it did happen.<\/p>\n The line between life and death is murky: it wasn\u2019t, in my experience, like a light switch being turned out, but more like the slow fade-out of music, so that you can\u2019t be sure when you really stop hearing it, and when what you might feel you\u2019re hearing is only your anticipation of the continuation of the chorus, one more lilting strain conjured by your imagination.<\/p>\n My sister has said that she feels like she\u2019s emerged from the trauma with a second-hand case of PTSD; several weeks earlier, before we told them to crank up the morphine\u2014that<\/em> at least, we knew was \u201cwhat he would have wanted\u201d\u2014she saw Pete writhing in pain, and in sheer terror. Presumably, a result of drug-induced amnesia, every time he awoke he had to rediscover the accident, looking down for his missing legs, over and over again. Trauma Studies, which erstwhile enjoyed a flurry of academic attention, perhaps deserves rediscovery within the category of AfterLives, especially as so many veterans are returning home, in the wake of these long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, broken in body and spirit, suffering from the wounds they experienced and survivor\u2019s guilt for the ones they escaped. AfterLives\u2014and we acknowledge with our preference for the plural noun here, a diversity of meanings and conceptions for the word\u2014are not merely temporal categories, but ones that can be shared, common spaces we can inhabit. It\u2019s part of a bigger movement I\u2019ve started calling \u201cVitalogy\u201d (no, not after the Pearl Jam album), which groups together all of the philosophic interest in new vitalisms and different ontologies with cultural study of myths of the dying and the undead. It\u2019s a large umbrella under which categories like biopolitics and some studies of disability can also find shelter.<\/p>\n This special issue concerns the communal experience of the AfterLives that we reach for here on earth, manufactured in our fictions, those collective dreams or nightmares, in order to dramatize the Unknown that awaits all of us, or to metaphorize our current state of being. In our narratives, we describe beings that are literally caught in this (non)space\u2014such as ghosts, vampires, and zombies\u2014or we reconceptualize the corpse and its process of decomposition for the way it, too, muddies the waters between life and death. Or we try to imagine a future beyond the human (especially in our interface with technology and media), to look for ways that we\u2019ve already crossed into new territory. Perhaps we tend to do this because the literal end will be less terrifying if we can depict ourselves as already living afterlives, but there\u2019s a greater yield to be taken from the exercise, too.<\/p>\n Donna Haraway\u2019s \u201cA Cyborg Manifesto\u201d began a trend of seeking, in imagining the human\u2019s transformation into the posthuman, a rich potentiality. Carried forth by Deleuze and Guattari, N. Katherine Hayles, and many others, we have been challenged to think of the way our interface with other organ-isms\u2014like the biotic flora in our guts\u2014or with media\u2014like the apps on our cell phones\u2014extend our being beyond our defined sense of self and our corporeal outlines. The same can be done here with a shift in our thinking about AfterLives, if we can imagine this as a category that lays to rest the individual and embrace instead a pluralistic conception of being on the model of the swarm organism, as Karen Embry and I argued in our \u201cZombie Manifesto\u201d.5 <\/sup>If the living dead zombie cannot provide the kind of catharsis we seek, maybe the broader category of AfterLives can.<\/p>\n In my uncle\u2019s memory, I ask our readers here to think carefully about the appellation of the term \u201czombies\u201d to people like the dying, the homeless, the mentally and physically disabled, the traumatized, the drunk and the drug addicted: is it useful to denigrate such people as less than living or already dead? And anyway, maybe there is something valuable in the occupation of the interzone: watching the slow transition of my Uncle reminded me that we\u2019re all, on a cellular level, dead already.<\/p>\n Embracing the afterlife as a potential condition of humanity could mean living not as an individual human self, one member of a species raised above others, but thinking of being as a plural and intra-species state: one in which we are connected to all other things, human and nonhuman, living and dead and not living. I invite others to continue thinking with us about death not as the end of life, but as the end of those conceptions of self that have undergirded capitalism and industry, the ideology of \u201cevery man for himself,\u201d that has, in large part, accelerated the erosion of the environment for the sake of profit margins and led to unjust wars. If we define death as a passage into such an afterlife, it would be a journey worth taking, well before we draw our last breath.<\/p>\n Notes<\/p>\n Works Cited<\/p>\n Bishop, Kyle. American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture<\/em>. Jefferson, NC: McFarland Press, 2010. Print.<\/p>\n Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. \u201cUndead (A Zombie-oriented Ontology).\u201d Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts<\/em> 23.3 (2012): 397-412. Web. July 2014.<\/p>\n Derrida, Jacques. \u201cThe Ends of Man.\u201d Philosophy and Phemenological Research<\/em> 30.1 (Sept. 1969): 31-57. Print.<\/p>\n \u2014. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International<\/em>. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print. Foster, Hal. Design and Crime and Other Diatribes<\/em>. London: Verso, 2002. Print. Henley, W.E. \u201cMadam Life\u2019s a piece in bloom.\u201d PoemHunter.com<\/em>. Web. 31 July 2014.<\/p>\n Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction<\/em>. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1966. Print.<\/p>\n Lauro, Sarah Juliet and Karen Embry, \u201cA Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism.\u201d Boundary 2<\/em>, (Spring 2008) 35.1, 85-108. Print.<\/p>\n Thacker, Eugene. After Life<\/em>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Print. \u017di\u017eek, Slavoj. Living in the End Times<\/em>. London: Verso, 2011. Print.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cIntroduction: AfterLives: What\u2019s Next for Humanity\u201d Sarah and I share the rather unusual designation of \u201czombie scholars,\u201d so one might assume this special collection of essays for the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts<\/em> will feature a strong bias towards the walking dead. While the current Zombie Renaissance is certainly no longer something scholars can deny or ignore, those marauding figures represent just one of the many AfterLives available to society today, as manifested in popular culture, particularly speculative literature, film, television, theatre, poetry, and video games. Society continues to exhibit a cathartic fascination with uncanny and metaphorical images of \u201cwhat comes after,\u201d demonstrating an ongoing obsession with life, death, mortality, morbidity, sickness, infection, decay, and existential uncertainty that, while manifesting most overtly during times of war and economic instability, is always a key feature of being a living, reasoning being. The articles in this special issue challenge the reductive binaries of alive\/dead, human\/monster while seeking meaning in our culture\u2019s ubiquitous vampires, zombies, ghosts, robots, and even simply corpses themselves. Taken collectively, they ask what it means to become \u201cposthuman,\u201d questioning what types of afterlives we incarnate, if only in our fictions.<\/p>\n Our exploration of these various AfterLives begins with Laura Wright\u2019s \u201cPost-Vampire: The Politics of Drinking Humans and Animals in Buffy the Vampire Slayer<\/em>, Twilight<\/em>, and True Blood<\/em>.\u201d Each of the three texts that she examines closely, in addition to Bram Stoker\u2019s Dracula<\/em>, demonstrates the problems of meat consumption and challenge Western dietary standards from a variety of critical perspectives. Wright argues we might be able to learn something from the vampires and humans depicted in these narratives of the undead, proposing a posthuman condition that transcends the eating of flesh in favor of a more enlightened nutritional path. In Dawn Keetley\u2019s \u201cZombie Republic: Property, the Propertyless Multitude, and the Walking Dead,\u201d she uses key zombie narratives\u2014including much of George A. Romero\u2019s canon and Robert Kirkman\u2019s The Walking Dead<\/em> comic series\u2014to propose a posthuman future founded on deterritorialized \u201cpropertylessness.\u201d In the modern, capitalistic world, individuals often define themselves through ownership; in fact, humanity has become entwined with the possession of land, buildings, and other material goods. Zombie narratives, in contrast, envision a future in which no one really \u201cowns\u201d anything, and attempts to enforce perceived ownership\u2014through entrenchment, the fortification of spaces and places\u2014actually encourage the surviving humans to behave in ways more monstrous than their walking dead foes.<\/p>\n Moving from the realm of vampires and zombies to the world of artificial intelligence, Steven Shaviro explores Maureen McHugh\u2019s 2011 short story \u201cThe Kingdom of the Blind\u201d in terms of what it suggests for the future of humanity. McHugh\u2019s piece questions what it means to be alive, and Shaviro focuses on how humans struggle to recognize cognition in an entity other than themselves, as the concept of the nonhuman that surrounds us today is indeed active in its own right. By examining the possible beginning of a new, conscious life form\u2014an intricate computer program that perhaps represents the first posthuman heir of this planet, destined to replace the current dominant race\u2014Shaviro argues that McHugh forces readers to consider their own consciousness, their own complex humanity. In a similar vein, Nicolas Anderson considers the rise of the android and what a race of sentient robots would mean for humanity in his \u201c\u2018Only We Have Perished\u2019: Karel \u010capek\u2019s R.U.R<\/em>. and the Catastrophe of Humankind.\u201d As the mass-produced robots of \u010capek\u2019s play increase in number and power, they come to challenge the supremacy of the human race. In response, humanity demonstrates itself to be cruel and brutal, striving to protect its own perceived classification of \u201chuman\u201d and, by inference, superior. Anderson reads the play as a critique of liberal humanism, positing the posthuman may not necessarily be as \u201chuman\u201d as some would prefer.<\/p>\n Two essays in this special issue investigate the most literal of all posthuman conditions: natural, biological death. Jesse Stommel, in his \u201cThe Loveliness of Decay: Rotting Flesh, Literary Matter, and Dead Media,\u201d considers three explorations of death and the bodily abjection of rot and decay found in diverse media: a series of photographs by Cindy Sherman presenting herself as a stylized dead body, Poppy Z. Brite\u2019s serial-killer novel Exquisite Corpse,<\/em> and H. P. Lovecraft\u2019s sensational short story \u201cThe Outsider.\u201d Stommel argues for the potential aesthetic beauty of decomposition\u2014in conversation with Julia Kristeva\u2019s conception of the abject\u2014claiming that the processes of death and decay maybe aren\u2019t things to be feared but, in their time, embraced. Jim Byatt takes a similar approach to the terminal afterlife in \u201c\u2018From Zoo.<\/em> to Bot.<\/em>\u2019: (De)Composition in Jim Crace\u2019s Being Dead<\/em>,\u201d challenging society\u2019s rejection of the natural processes of decay and its estrangement from death. Byatt calls humanity\u2019s contemporary denial of death a \u201csociological revolution,\u201d a cultural shift that invariably (and negatively) distances people from their undeniable biological identity. Byatt presents Crace\u2019s novel as a study of two murdered lovers that blurs the line between life and death, increasing readers\u2019 appreciation of the former through an unabashed celebration of the latter.<\/p>\n The final two pieces in our collection explore the posthuman in terms of contemporary technology and media. Steen Christiansen sees the future of humanity in terms of an increasing interdependence on technology, positing a horrifying, transformative posthumanity he calls \u201cTerminal Media.\u201d Using Gore Verbinski\u2019s film The Ring<\/em> and the Pulse<\/em> cycle of movies as the primary narratives for his argument, Christiansen demonstrates how humans are simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by technology, and he illustrates that the resultant connectivity\u2014a controlling force often depicted in terms of contagion\u2014challenges conceptions of human ontology. As various forms of technology increasingly mediate our interactions with the world and with each other, people run the risk of being redefined through such media, perhaps even being replaced by them under a new ontological definition of the human. Mark Deuze argues this kind of transformation has already taken place, that we currently exist in an AfterLife dictated by modern media. In \u201cLiving as a Zombie in Media Is the Only Way to Survive,\u201d he makes the case that a version of the zombie apocalypse has already taken place, one in which we have all been turned into members of a mindless horde constituting a \u201czombie society.\u201d However, in contrast to most dystopian zombie narratives, Deuze presents this social zombification in a positive light, proposing a \u201cmedia life\u201d as a healthful mode of survival through mediated human interactions. As with other pieces in this collection, Deuze\u2019s article suggests an existent posthuman society determined by a collective, anti-hierarchical experience of human engagement.<\/p>\n Sarah and I hope that, taken collectively, the articles in this special issue can be read as a conversation about \u201cwhat happens next\u201d\u2014after we die, after our society ends, or as the world around us invariably changes. Some perspectives argue for the need for a posthumanity that differs from our own, a utopic alternative to life, offered us, perhaps ironically, by narratives about monsters, the monstrous, and the non-human. Others argue that the only afterlife for the human race will come through death, imagining that the end might, in fact, be beautiful. And still others argue the posthuman condition is already upon us, which, by extension, means every new advancement, development, or movement can represent the latest afterlife in a never-ending series of afterlives. One thing remains clear: humanity can never (and should<\/em> never) remain in a static state or condition, and we can look to the world of fantastic, imaginative, and speculative art to recognize what is coming next for us as individuals, as a society, and even as a species.<\/p>\n Elegy Introduction: Overview of AfterLives: What\u2019s Next for Humanity? \u201cOnly We Have Perished\u201d: Karel \u010capek\u2019s R.U.R<\/em>. and the Catastrophe of Humankind \u201cFrom Zoo. to Bot.\u201d: (De)Composition in Jim Crace\u2019s Being Dead Terminal Films Living as a Zombie in Media is the Only Way to Survive Zombie Republic: Property and the Propertyless Multitude in Romero\u2019s Dead Films and Kirkman\u2019s The Walking Dead Thinking Blind The Loveliness of Decay: Rotting Flesh, Literary Matter, and Dead Media Post-Vampire: The Politics of Drinking Humans and Animals in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Twilight, and True Blood Carlen Lavigne\u2019s Cyberpunk Women, Feminism, and Science Fiction: A Critical Study David Seed\u2019s Under the Shadow: The Atomic Bomb and Cold War Narratives Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper\u2019s Undead in the West: Vampires, Zombies, Mummies, and Ghosts on the Cinematic Frontier Antonio L\u00e1zaro-Reboll\u2019s Spanish Horror Film Jad Smith\u2019s John Brunner Vito Carrassi\u2019s The Irish Fairy Tale: A Narrative Tradition from the Middle Ages to Yeats and Stephens Maria Lindgren Leavenworth and Malin Isaksson\u2019s Fanged Fan Fiction: Variations on Twilight, True Blood, and The Vampire Diaries Jane Aaron\u2019s Welsh Gothic Kenneth Gross\u2019s Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life Tatiana Kontou and Sarah Willburn\u2019s The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult Frenchy Lunning\u2019s Mechademia 7: Lines of Sight Tom Henthorne\u2019s Approaching <\/em>The Hunger Games Trilogy: A Literary and Cultural Analysis Jorg van Bebber\u2019s Dawn of an Evil Millenium: Horror\/Kultur im neuen Jahrtausend Andrew M. Butler\u2019s Solar Flares: Science Fiction in the 1970s Jonathan R. Eller\u2019s Becoming Ray Bradbury Susan Redington Bobby\u2019s Beyond His Dark Materials: Innocence and Experience in the Fiction of Philip Pullman Claire P. Curtis\u2019s Postapocalyptic Fiction and the Social Contract: \u201cWe\u2019ll Not Go Home Again\u201d Francis Young\u2019s English Catholics and the Supernatural, 1553-1829 Hilary Grimes\u2019s The Late Victorian Gothic: Mental Science, the Uncanny, and Scenes of Writing Julie D. O\u2019Reilly\u2019s Bewitched Again: Supernaturally Powerful Women on Television, 1996-2011 Matthew Dickerson\u2019s A Hobbit Journey: Discovering the Enchantment of J. R. R. Tolkien\u2019s Middle-Earth Aalya Ahmad and Sean Moreland\u2019s Fear and Learning: Essays on the Pedagogy of Horror Simon J. James\u2019s Maps of Utopia: H.G. Wells, Modernity, and the End of Culture Sandra J. Lindow\u2019s Dancing the Tao: Le Guin and Moral Development Vandana Saxena\u2019s The Subversive Harry Potter: Adolescent Rebellion and Containment in the J.K. Rowling Novels Michael Saler\u2019s As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality Stephen David Ross\u2019s Enchanting: Beyond Disenchantment Natacha Vas-Deyres\u2019s Ces fran\u00e7ais qui ont \u00e9crit demain. Utopie, anticipation et science-fiction au XXe si\u00e8cle [Those Frenchmen Who Wrote Tomorrow: Utopia, Anticipation and Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century] James Marriott\u2019s The Descent<\/em> Valerie Estelle Frankel\u2019s Teaching With Harry Potter Gary Westfahl\u2019s William Gibson Alissa Burger\u2019s The Wizard of Oz as American Myth: A Critical Study of Six Versions of the Story, 1900-2007 Benjamin Poole\u2019s Saw Caroline McCracken-Flesher\u2019s Scotland as Science Fiction Isabella van Elferen\u2019s Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny Sabine Coelsch-Foisner and Sarah Herbe\u2019s New Directions in the European Fantastic William Gray\u2019s Fantasy, Art, and Life: Essays on George MacDonald, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Other Fantasy Writers Aaron John Gulyas\u2019s Extraterrestrials and the American Zeitgeist: Alien Contact Tales Since the 1950s James Aston and John Walliss\u2019s To See the Saw Movies: Essays on Torture Porn and Post-9\/11 Horror Mark Bould\u2019s Science Fiction Editor\u2019s Introductions \u201cElegy\u201d Sarah Juliet Lauro Common knowledge has it that before there can be an afterlife, there must be a death. And although this is an assertion that I hope we will question in this special issue, I want to start by acknowledging that this past week, I watched a man die. Literally, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-732","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=732"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/732\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":733,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/732\/revisions\/733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
\nKyle William Bishop<\/p>\nArticles<\/h3>\n
\nSarah Juliet Lauro<\/p>\n
\nKyle Bishop<\/p>\n
\nNicholas Anderson<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Jim Byatt<\/p>\n
\nSteen Christiansen<\/p>\n
\nMark Deuze<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Dawn Keetley<\/p>\n
\nSteven Shaviro<\/p>\n
\nJesse Stommel<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Laura Wright<\/p>\nReviews<\/h3>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Kathryn Allan<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Brent Ryan Bellamy<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Kyle William Bishop<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Alexis Brooks de Vita<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Gerry Canavan<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Sarah Cleto<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Catherine Coker<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Mark De Cicco<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Pawel Frelik<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Regina Hansen<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Steven Holmes<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>&
\nMary F. Pharr and Leisa A. Clark\u2019s Of Bread, Blood, and <\/em>The Hunger Games: Critical Essays on the Suzanne Collins Trilogy
\n<\/em>Rev. by Jacob Jedidiah Horn<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Daniel Illger<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Orion Ussner Kidder<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Andrea Krafft<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Gabrielle Kristjanson<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Matthew Masucci<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Kristen McDermott<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Leigha McReynolds<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Jennifer L. Miller<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by John W. Morehead<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Rikk Mulligan<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Graham J. Murphy<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Gretchen Papazian<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Donna S. Parsons<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Josh Pearson<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Sandy Rankin<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Amy J. Ransom<\/p>\n
\n&
\nJames Rose\u2019s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
\n<\/em>Rev. by Joshua Richardson<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Don Riggs<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Lars Schmeinck<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Matt Schumacher<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Shannon Blake Skelton<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Amber N. Slaven<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Hans Staats<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Audrey Taylor<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Johanna Brinkley Tomlinson<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Ted Troxell<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by William Wandless<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Matt Yockey<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"