Zombie Republic: Property and the Propertyless Multitude in Romero's Dead Films and Kirkman's "The Walking Dead"

In the West, property and the "human" are knotted. If posthumanism is about decentering the human, it would of necessity involve untying that knot. Reading George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978), and Land of the Dead (2005), along with Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead (2003–present), this essay argues that zombies allegorize the "multitude" of the propertyless, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri put it. They relentlessly threaten both property and the "human" that is predicated on it. Bound up in this foundational thematic of zombie narrative, though, is the survivors' response to the zombies' deterritorializing threat: they retrench, assert ownership of territory through bodily labor, and then engage in internecine struggles in property's defense. Indeed, the more the survivors seek to hold on to what is "human" through securing land and property at any cost, the more they themselves become monstrous.