The Zombie-Posthuman Figure as ‘Multispecies World-making’ in M. R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts

This paper aims to examine the zombie-posthuman figure in M. R. Carey’s The girl with all the Gifts. Carey’s novel presents an expansive and ethical posthuman vision that suggests us to overcome anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism by providing a perspective of hybridity and multispecies when we consider the meaning or the conditions of humanity. As a zombie apocalypse narrative, Carey’ novel expands the genealogy of zombie narratives through the one that places the hybrid being of humans and zombies in the foreground and does not assume humans as the central and inevitable element of evolution. Specifically, this study refers to Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World, which offers an insight into the vision of posthuman with its main concept, the multispecies world-making. In conclusion, this paper asserts Carey’s novel suggests ethically proper perspectives which accept and approve the world of hybridity and multispecies. For this goal, this paper also examines the novel’s film version, whose screenplay the author Carey participated in writing, delving the different choices between the novel and the film’s narrative devices. Instead of comparing these two genres in detail, however, this study focuses on the representation of zombie-posthuman of the novel, which has consciously chosen a different path from the film’s.