ABSTRACT
The trope of the undead or zombie finds its route in the specificities of the colonial project in the Caribbean. It refers to the enslaved who were used as building blocks for the development of European empires – individuals “hollow[ed] out of human agency by degraded forms of labour” (Sheller, 2003: p. 145). This chapter considers the contemporary tenor of the undead, positing a rereading of the notion that sees it in a restorative – as opposed to a traumatic, fraught – light. It borrows from the field of literature to interrogate visual arts practice, deploying Sam Durrant’s understanding of the post-colonial narrative as that which is caught between psychoanalytic and deconstructive commitments; as that which oscillates between its function on the individual (personal) level to bury history’s dead and its work on a collective level (society at large) to conjure and remember the dead. The chapter analyses work by Caribbean artist Annalee Davis, examining how she attends to personal and collective histories. It argues that her practice of post-colonial imaging is a manifestation of an undead psyche. Her art is proposed as that which offers a therapeutic paradox, one whereby an undead condition characterised by processes of laying the past to rest and reanimating that past, gestures towards psychic well-being.
