Intensification of Biopolitical Strategies: Governing Bodies’ Treatment of Apocalyptic Zombification in Max Brook’s World War Z

Abstract

Summary In Max Brook’s World War Z: An Oral History of Zombie War, the zombie world introduces moments of crisis in the governing system of world powers. Although some have read these moments as being capable of shattering conventional governance systems, the present study sides with the pessimist critics who believe that even in such apocalyptic set of circumstances, governing systems would always regulate their governance through utilising biopolitical strategies. The study divides the novel’s narrative progression into pre-apocalyptic, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic phases so that governing bodies’ unique biopolitical strategies could be analysed in each phase. Through utilising Sherryl Vint’s conceptualisation on bio-politics and neo-liberalism, the study concludes that a series of militaristic, medical and economic miscalculations and stereotypes – which constitute the biopolitical phase of letting people die/making people live in the novel – regulate the governing bodies’ dominance in the pre-apocalyptic phase, while in the apocalyptic and zombie phase, spatial striation and its dependence on safe/unsafe and inside/outside binaries – that comprise the biopolitical phase of making people die/letting people live – become the survival key for the remaining governing bodies. In the post-apocalyptic world, a more tamed and calibrated version of conventional governance and their governing problems would be perpetuated, and no genuine change or acknowledgement of governance complicity in the transpiration of the apocalypse would emerge.