Modern Zombies as Subaltern in Max Brooks’s World War Z: An Oral History of The Zombie War (2006)

Max Brooks’s World War Z (2006) has made many contributions to the zombie genre, particularly in making it an international plague. With key situations occurring in the Middle East, which in the Christian tradition will be the location of the “End of Days,” the Apocalypse, the Armageddon at the Megiddo. While Brooks was not the first to assign infectious disease/plague/epidemiology as the cause of zombies, he emphasized that explanation for the 21st-century culture that has been rife with fears of disease and pandemics, from Ebola, Bird flu, etc. This study aims to show the image of the modern zombie as the postcolonial subject who has no voice and this is the subaltern character, devoid of a voice in society. The most marginalized in society, so often the poor, are the outcasts. Spivak sees the subaltern as oppressed individuals, of course, we can see it in the form of various minorities, the Uyghurs in China, for example, so zombies are a fictional example of the subaltern, the people without a voice in society, without a place, other than to be used and abused, to be disdained or ignored. The current study analyzes Brooks’s World War Z from a cultural and postcolonial perspective, concentrating on the historical context of the times. The study uses Gayatri Spivak’s concepts of “Subaltern” and “Subsubaltern”. The study concludes that Spivak’s whole point is that people shouldn’t speak for other people, especially if it’s a white person speaking for a person of colour, a man speaking for a woman, or someone from the West speaking for someone from the East. It is all about colonial appropriation. So, it could work on two levels: a white Western narrator in the book or just Max Brooks as the author, a white Westerner.