Pandemics and 'Zombies': How to Think Tropical Imaginaries with Cinematic Cosmologies
The result's identifiers
Result code in IS VaVaI
<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216208%3A11210%2F21%3A10430884" target="_blank" >RIV/00216208:11210/21:10430884 - isvavai.cz</a>
Result on the web
<a href="https://verso.is.cuni.cz/pub/verso.fpl?fname=obd_publikace_handle&handle=.NjyUxjElr" target="_blank" >https://verso.is.cuni.cz/pub/verso.fpl?fname=obd_publikace_handle&handle=.NjyUxjElr</a>
DOI - Digital Object Identifier
<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.25120/etropic.20.1.2021.3768" target="_blank" >10.25120/etropic.20.1.2021.3768</a>
Alternative languages
Result language
angličtina
Original language name
Pandemics and 'Zombies': How to Think Tropical Imaginaries with Cinematic Cosmologies
Original language description
The tropics in occidental imaginaries are typically coded as either edenic paradise or as hell. It is in the latter mode that they come to be linked with zombies, diseases, and questions relating to the autonomy of the human body. In this article I first summarise historical connections between colonialism and the tropics as expressed through dealings with disease set against a background of Christian-secular cosmology. I then further think the issue with two films that approach disease and the tropics through the zombie, which I conceive of as radical heteronomy. One film, Zombi 2, is a Euro-American engagement with the tropics as imagined from a temperate zone and a Christian tradition. The other, Cemetery of Splendor, is a Thai film that engages notions of disease and the autonomy of the human body from within the tropics and a Buddhist imaginary. I tie these questions of disease, 'zombies' and the tropics in with more general discussions of cosmologies, including those of the moderns. The displacement of modern ontological certainty (which is imagined through the zombie and conditioned by cultural and ideological imagination) opens a space for engaging the problem of a pandemic with notions of subjectivity and corporeality. An underlying thematic throughout this article is an argument for the importance of the cinema image in dealing with bio/socio/political issues. Here, in this translation of the cinematic world into discourse we are engaged at the intersection of tropics, disease, bodies and heteronomy.
Czech name
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Czech description
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Classification
Type
J<sub>ost</sub> - Miscellaneous article in a specialist periodical
CEP classification
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OECD FORD branch
60301 - Philosophy, History and Philosophy of science and technology
Result continuities
Project
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Continuities
S - Specificky vyzkum na vysokych skolach
Others
Publication year
2021
Confidentiality
S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů
Data specific for result type
Name of the periodical
eTropic [online]
ISSN
1448-2940
e-ISSN
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Volume of the periodical
2021
Issue of the periodical within the volume
20.1
Country of publishing house
AU - AUSTRALIA
Number of pages
25
Pages from-to
315-339
UT code for WoS article
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EID of the result in the Scopus database
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