I've noticed that, since 2001, zombie stories have mutated.  The Romero zombie now has competition in the zombie imaginary.  The new zombies, heralded perhaps by 28 Days Later (2001), are no longer just the placid, stumbling fools of Romero's "living dead" series, consuming anything they can surround.  Now zombies are angry.

In Romero's living dead stories, some zombies are angry -- but they generally seem to have a reason.  Or, at the very least, anger isn't a universal characteristic of Romero's zombies.  In Night of the Living Dead, the little girl, Karen, doesn't just bite her mother, she overkills her with a trowel.  In the graphic novel, Night of the Living Dead: Just a Girl, the authors explore why Karen might have been angry, even in death; they imagine her as an abused and molested step-daughter.  In Day of the Dead, Bud the undead soldier-in-training, has moments of anger at abuses he sees; but he isn't angry all the time.  In Land of the Dead, Big Daddy's clearly angry -- but the cause of his anger seems equally clear: humans are raiding Uniontown and killing its zombie citizens.  But Romero's zombies aren't uniformly enraged.

However, Romero's zombies are no longer the only or even the main zombie game in town.  The post-9/11 zombie, outside Romero's imaginary, is pissed.  Wrathful.  Despite Romero's protests that "zombies don't run," the new post-9/11 zombies do run, they scream, they brutalize -- and their biting seems to me to be less about consuming and more about polluting or transforming others.

I appreciated your analysis of Romero's zombies in your book, Gospels of the Living Dead.  What do you think about the new zombies, which are not content to merely stumble about consuming and fighting, like those bound in Dante's purgatory?  If there are "new zombies" to Romero's "old zombies" (and the "old old" Haitian zombies of US film), why do they hate us?

I believe that this shift toward imagining zombies as motivated by rage is significant to the conversation about Orientalism.

In September 1990, just after the US invaded Iraq for Gulf War I, The Atlantic Monthly published Bernard Lewis’s article, The Roots of Muslim Rage.  In it, Lewis proposed that Islamic Fundamentalists hate the US, as the leader of the Western world, not because of Western sexism, racism, or imperialism – instead, they hate the US because they do not value the Separation of Church and State. 

Lewis suggested that Muslims mistakenly believe themselves to be superior to Western culture – and are enraged and humiliated that the West has forced them to recognize their inferiority, through military, economic, and cultural domination.  Having claimed to debunk other explanations, Lewis asserted that Islamic Fundamentalists believe, "What is truly evil and unacceptable is the domination of infidels over true believers.”  (Or, as Ann Coulter put it, “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity.”)  Lewis characterized the relationship between Islamic Fundamentalism (which he leaves undefined) and the West as a “clash of civilizations” – with Islam in a war against secularism and modernism. 

In 1993, Samuel Huntington took up this idea in an article called, The Clash of Civilizations?, in which he argued that Islamic and Confucian (that is, Chinese) civilizations would become the West’s new enemies, taking the place of its Cold War enemies.  Huntington would expand on the article in his 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.  In it, Huntington repurposed Lewis’s mention of the Christian “Reconquista” of Muslim parts of Europe, warning that Mexicans threatened a “reconquista” of U.S. territory via immigration.  Thus, fears about Muslims and fears about Mexicans may be linked, in part, through fear of a “reconquista,” a reconquering of lands that the White West has claimed for itself.  (George Romero has raised – and critiqued – the idea of Latino immigration and zombies-as-Latinos, in at least two of his films.)

Lewis concluded The Roots of Muslim Rage with a quote from former U.S. President John Tyler.  Endorsing the separation of church and state, Tyler said, “The body may be oppressed and manacled and yet survive; but if the mind of man be fettered, its energies and faculties perish, and what remains is of the earth, earthly.” Lewis implies that, without separation of church and state, Muslims will lose their mental faculties, leaving only a mindless, enraged, earthly shell.

This Orientalist characterization of Muslims is not so different, then, from the characterization of modern zombies.  The modern zombie expresses Orientalist fears of violent “Islamic” (and perhaps soon, “Confucian”) opposition to modernity and secularism.