...of the Dead: The Rhizombie, An Indigenous-Informed Approach to Contagion

Abstract

Contagion increasingly overlays other social concerns infecting our world, such as racial oppression and climate crises, and thus threatens to render all other issues invisible. This project, however, argues that contagion is interconnected with these other issues in complex entanglements. I call these entanglements the “rhizombie,” which is informed by a combination of Gilles Deleuze and Pierre-Félix Guattari’s rhizome, Donna Haraway’s multispecies work, and the Mi’kmaq concept of Netukulimk. Each of these methodologies propose a multiplicity, but they differ in when, where, how, and with whom their multiplicities manifest. Zombie narratives in the twenty-first century have evolved to reflect a need for multiplicity thinking because the zombie’s body exploded to include Indigenous zombies, South Korean zombies, and ecological zombies, just to name a few. The combination of increased globalization, increased diversity in horror, and the inability to differentiate when and where one contemporary issue begins or ends results in the zombie’s body becoming rhizomatic. The rhizombie is thus not simply the zombie as an allegory of singular, individual threats, in the manner that the figure of the zombie has been so well used and analysed since they first shuffled into our narratives (as, for example, an allegory for contagion, capitalism, climate change, consumption, or systems of racialized oppression). Understanding the zombie as rhizomatic highlights the figure as an embodiment of the complex entanglements of all of these threats and more and how they feed on and reproduce each other: threats of the past, present, and future; biological threats that are human, animal, plant, and pathogen; social threats of racial oppression, colonialism, political paranoia, and terrorism; anthropocentric threats of viruses and climate crises. The rhizombie exists in the interplay of all of these and more, a multiplicity of metaphors shuffling—and sometimes galloping—as both individuals and herds (or hordes).