Burying DeSantis’ Zombie Ideas
By Dr. Renée Fox, Dr. Michael Chemers, and Dr. Noah Wardrip-Fruin
University of California Santa Cruz
In his ongoing attacks on public higher education in Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis has taken aim at university programs (“DeSantis Proposes Legislation to Eliminate DEI Bureaucracies in Florida Colleges,” National Review January 31, 2023) that he claims are “hostile to academic freedom,” programs he claims “impose ideological conformity” and “provoke political activism.” In describing the kinds of programs he wants to do away with, he reaches for the most absurd, over-the-top, sarcastically inflammatory example he can think of to represent the areas of study that public universities should jettison in favor of providing students with curriculums “grounded in actual history” and “actual philosophy that has shaped Western civilization.” In a speech on January 31st, DeSantis revived one of his oft-used lines: “We don’t want students to go through, at taxpayer expense, and graduate with a degree in Zombie Studies,” the Governor said (“DeSantis Takes On the Education Establishment, and Builds His Brand,” NYT, Jan 31, 2023).
For DeSantis, the idea of Zombie Studies is pure farce–nothing that anyone would really study. But what kinds of things can we learn about ourselves and the world around us when we take the study of zombies and other monsters seriously, when we learn to see them as cultural ciphers? We live in a time of accelerating dehumanization, othering, oppression, and injustice. We see it globally in the rise of political parties dedicated to anti-immigrant discrimination. We see it in the murders of indigenous defenders of the Amazon. We see it in the disregard for Black lives, women's lives, and trans lives in U.S. institutions of justice — from local police forces to the Supreme Court — and from the offices of certain of our nation’s Governors.
One powerful way that education can respond to these injustices is to embrace and subvert tropes of monstrosity — the very tropes so often used as tools of dehumanization. Monsters have always been essential to the fabric of western culture, demarcating even as they transgress the boundaries of identity, community, and self-knowledge: “Here be dragons,” wrote 16th-century mapmakers to tell people that dangerous and thrilling uncertainty lay beyond their known borders. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen wrote in his foundational essay, “Monster Culture: Seven Theses,” the monster “is pure culture,” an embodied amalgam of “fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy” that we invent and reinvent to identify all that we must exclude to feel safe within our always precarious understanding of ourselves as humans.
While monsters have long fascinated anthropologists, social psychologists, folklorists, and cultural historians, since the 1990s Monster Studies itself has become an increasingly influential interdisciplinary field of scholarship. Monster Studies scholars and practitioners explore monsters and monstrosity from an array of methodological, theoretical, and historical perspectives, and have homes across the arts, humanities, and social sciences at academic institutions around the world.
The University of California, Santa Cruz has made this scholarly field the foundation for a new campus Center for Monster Studies. This highly collaborative and interdisciplinary Center focuses on the relationship between monstrosity and social injustice across different historical moments and geographies and has a deep commitment to fostering a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive world. It has developed a committed following in the students at UCSC, who have great enthusiasm for the cultural material in which monsters are so often found: humanities and arts courses taught by UCSC Center for Monster Studies faculty members enroll more than 500 students every year. No other institution is doing this combination of socially relevant research, highly motivating teaching, and public events in the field of Monster Studies. Vampires, werewolves, mummies, zombies: they’re not just for Hollywood anymore.
We doubt that DeSantis really thinks that such a field as Zombie Studies actually exists, but —if someone told him it did—would he be anything but horrified to discover that such a field traverses the histories of Africa, the Americas, and Europe and engages with anti-colonial uprisings and centuries of cultural/political resistance against enslavement? Would he be deaf to the fact that Thomas Carlyle, one of the conservative Western historians and philosophers of “great men” that DeSantis might imagine as central to his fantasy curriculum of Western history and philosophy, refers numerous times to zombie-like reanimated corpses in his descriptions both of European industrialism and of much Western historiography? Would DeSantis dismiss any value to contemporary science, scientific ethics, or medical technology in examining early experiments with galvanism and electricity on dead bodies? Would he absolutely scoff at the idea that pop culture phenomena like The Walking Dead or Pride and Prejudice and Zombies could educate us about the development of community, culture, and self-government in the wake of a devastating global pandemic, or bring one of the greatest writers of Western civilization meaningfully into the purview of new generations?
If anyone offered DeSantis these very bare outlines of how Zombie Studies, and Monster Studies more largely, might introduce students to foundational Western thinkers, to the non-Western religions, cultures, and traditions with which the West has so often violently converged, and to intersections between history, technology, and ethics, he would likely double down on his original point: nothing could possibly be worse for his oppressive anti-intellectual agenda than a mass of young Zombie Studies majors rising from his graveyard of public education to remake the world in their own image.