Edward Dutton

I read this because the title seemed offensive/wrong, or at least highly provocative, and I was curious to see if the author could make a reasonable and data-supported argument in favor of physiognomy. He made some reasonable arguments, but not conclusive. There were also a lot of editing failures in the book (bad formatting, inconsistent levels of detail). However, I'm going to be pretty charitable because it wasn't completely and obviously wrong while making a provocative assertion; it just wasn't definitive.

One of the immediate responses to this idea is that it's racist -- ironically that's one thing which he pretty clearly and convincingly argued against, as almost all of the correlations are only valid within a given race (and generally only within even more closely related groups, such as ethnicity or nation). The nazi abuse of phrenology was cited as being particularly abusive to data. There are reasonable gender-based arguments, supported by both data and biology, but a lot of the most interesting pieces were differences with 0.1-0.3 level correlation internal to gender/ethnic groups.… (más)

I was writing something that included an undead character. Not a vampire or zombie in the sense that we think of them today, but more along the lines of the Haitian Voodoo/Vodou zombies. As research I read Zora Neal Hurston's Tell My Horse and attempted to read this book, Race, Oppression and the Zombie: Essays on Cross-Cultural Appropriations and the Caribbean Traditions. The Hurston book was great - informative and helpful. This however...dry as a bone. I know it's chock-full of great information but I just could not even get past the introduction.

It may be my loss, but I was unable to continue with this and ultimately passed it on to my sister who is a huge zombie film fanatic and loves to read this sort of dry analysis of the horror film genre. Best of luck to her.… (más)

From the origins of zombies in the belief system of Haitian Vodou to the movie 'Night of the Living Dead' considered in the era of Sidney Poitier, to the legacy of orientalism, zombie consumerism, and current-day racial/national conflicts, this wide-ranging collection engages on a great many levels. Some of the essays are more academic than others (perhaps too much so for a general reader), but as a whole they offer a complex look at how a particular cultural tradition has been appropriated to embody a dizzying array of cultural anxieties. I appreciated the breadth of engagement in the topic from a variety of fields.… (más)

This anthology of academic research on zombie lore is about the "Caribbean tradition" of the zombie as a reanimated corpse, or a spirit enslaved by a magician. A companion volume, published at the same time by the same editors, deals with the more recent Hollywood tradition of zombies as hordes of flesh-eating drones caused by some sort of catastrophe. The distinction is a valid one. In the United States the "Caribbean tradition," as the editors' introduction and several other contributions argue, has often become tangled up in the country's obsession with race. It's not for nothing that the zombie originated in Haiti, the second oldest republic in the Americas, and the only one created by a rebellion of black creole slaves.

The chapters in the book are uneven, and I won't try to describe each one. It's not the kind of book that usually finds a mass market, but is aimed more at research libraries. Cultural historians, scholars of American studies, and literary types will form their own opinions of the insights offered here. More generally, devoted fans of horror movies and shlock cinema may find this book worth seeking out for its filmography alone.… (más)