Wednesday 5 April, 4-6pm in Keynes Lecture Theatre 2

Zombyism and the Post-human Global Imaginary

Dr Adriana Neagu, Associate Lecturer, Babes-Bolyai University, Romania

The paper examines post-humanist representations in Anglo-American film productions from a perspective informed by global and hypermodern cultural theory. It is an enquiry into aspects of dystopian sensibility in global cinema seen as manifest in the prolific zombie genre of the post-apocalyptic strand. It is premised on the assumption that global society is endemically one marred by a catastrophic horizon of expectation, whose most congenial form of expression is dystopia, a genre on the rise worldwide, especially productive in Anglo-American cinematic practice. Drawing on global cultural theory, I seek to bring the zombie dominant to bear on what I construe as globality’s post-apocalyptic imagination.

Adriana Neagu is Associate Professor of Anglo-American Studies at Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Department of Applied Modern Languages. She is the author of two reference works in postmodern critical theory and of numerous literary and cultural theory articles. Her teaching areas are diverse, combining translation, interpretation, and cultural studies disciplines. Her main specialism is in the poetics of modernism and postmodernism, postcolonial theory and the literatures of identity, and translation theory and practice. At present her research centres on global theory and multiculturalism in post 9/11 context.