- 401 W. Kennedy Blvd. Box R Tampa, FL 33606
- 813.257.3322
Sarah Juliet Lauro
University of Tampa, English and Writing, Faculty Member
- English Literature, English, American Literature, Film, Caribbean Literature, Disability Studies, and 28 moreCritical Theory, Comparative Literature, Performance Art, Magic and the Occult (Anthropology Of Religion), Anthropology, Anthropology of Consciousness, Magic, Religion, Spiritualism, Folklore, Mediumship, Trance, Altered States of Consciousness, Psychedelics, Paranormal, Parapsychology, Paranthropology:, Shamanism, Philosophy, History, Literature, Marxism, Zombies, Apocalypticism In Literature, Gothic Fiction and the horror film, Ghosts, Popular Culture, and Death Studiesedit
- Sarah Juliet Lauro (Ph.D. University of California, Davis, Department of English, 2011) is Associate Professor of hem... moreSarah Juliet Lauro (Ph.D. University of California, Davis, Department of English, 2011) is Associate Professor of hemispheric literature in the department of English and Writing at the University of Tampa. Lauro’s areas of expertise are postcolonial literature, especially of the Caribbean, American literature, and film. She also researches narratives of disability, and modern day narratives of slavery and revolt. Lauro is author of The Transatlantic Zombie: Slavery, Rebellion, and Living Death (Rutgers Univ. Press, 2015), co-editor of Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human (Fordham Univ. Press, 2011), and co-author of the essay “A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism” (boundary 2 35:1 [Spring 2008]: 85-108), and author of Kill the Overseer! The Gamification of Slave Resistance (U Minn 2020). Her next book project addresses commemorations of slave revolt in literature, film, art, and performance.edit
Kill the Overseer! profiles and problematizes digital games that depict Atlantic slavery and “gamify” slave resistance. In videogames emphasizing plantation labor, the player may choose to commit small acts of resistance like... more
Kill the Overseer! profiles and problematizes digital games that depict Atlantic slavery and “gamify” slave resistance. In videogames emphasizing plantation labor, the player may choose to commit small acts of resistance like tool-breaking or working slowly. Others dramatically stage the slave’s choice to flee enslavement and journey northward, and some depict outright violent revolt against the master and his apparatus. In this work, Sarah Juliet Lauro questions whether the reduction of a historical enslaved person to a digital commodity in games such as Mission US, Assassin’s Creed, and Freedom Cry ought to trouble us as a further commodification of slavery’s victims, or whether these interactive experiences offer an empowering commemoration of the history of slave resistance.
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Research Interests: Buddhism, History, Asian Studies, Gender Studies, Philosophy, and 27 morePolitical Philosophy, Art History, Southeast Asian Studies, Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, Latin American and Caribbean History, Art Theory, Political Theory, Nineteenth Century Studies, Medieval Studies, Political Science, Monster Theory, Gothic Literature, Vampire Literature, Frankenstein, David Lynch, Monsters and Monster Theory, Vampire Studies, Zombie Films, Decolonial Thought, Women and Gender Studies, Zombies, Vampires in Film and Literature, Vampires in folklore, Monsters and the Monstrous, Zombie, and Frankenstein Mary Shelley
Zombie studies manifested across academic disciplines in the humanities but also beyond, spreading into sociology, economics, computer science, mathematics, and even epidemiology. Zombie Theory collects the best interdisciplinary zombie... more
Zombie studies manifested across academic disciplines in the humanities but also beyond, spreading into sociology, economics, computer science, mathematics, and even epidemiology. Zombie Theory collects the best interdisciplinary zombie scholarship from around the world. Essays portray the zombie not as a singular cultural figure or myth but show how the undead represent larger issues: the belief in an afterlife, fears of contagion and technology, the effect of capitalism and commodification, racial exclusion and oppression, dehumanization. As presented here, zombies are not simple metaphors; rather, they emerge as a critical mode for theoretical work. With its diverse disciplinary and methodological approaches, Zombie Theory thinks through what the walking undead reveal about our relationships to the world and to each other.
Contributors: Fred Botting, Kingston U; Samuel Byrnand, U of Canberra; Gerry Canavan, Marquette U; Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, George Washington U; Jean Comaroff, Harvard U; John Comaroff, Harvard U; Edward P. Comentale, Indiana U; Anna Mae Duane, U of Connecticut; Karen Embry, Portland Community College; Barry Keith Grant, Brock U; Edward Green, Roosevelt U; Lars Bang Larsen; Travis Linnemann, Eastern Kentucky U; Elizabeth McAlister, Wesleyan U; Shaka McGlotten, Purchase College-SUNY; David McNally, York U; Tayla Nyong’o, Yale U; Simon Orpana, U of Alberta; Steven Shaviro, Wayne State U; Ola Sigurdson, U of Gothenburg; Jon Stratton, U of South Australia; Eugene Thacker, The New School; Sherryl Vint, U of California Riverside; Priscilla Wald, Duke U; Tyler Wall, Eastern Kentucky U; Jen Webb, U of Canberra; Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Central Michigan U.
Contributors: Fred Botting, Kingston U; Samuel Byrnand, U of Canberra; Gerry Canavan, Marquette U; Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, George Washington U; Jean Comaroff, Harvard U; John Comaroff, Harvard U; Edward P. Comentale, Indiana U; Anna Mae Duane, U of Connecticut; Karen Embry, Portland Community College; Barry Keith Grant, Brock U; Edward Green, Roosevelt U; Lars Bang Larsen; Travis Linnemann, Eastern Kentucky U; Elizabeth McAlister, Wesleyan U; Shaka McGlotten, Purchase College-SUNY; David McNally, York U; Tayla Nyong’o, Yale U; Simon Orpana, U of Alberta; Steven Shaviro, Wayne State U; Ola Sigurdson, U of Gothenburg; Jon Stratton, U of South Australia; Eugene Thacker, The New School; Sherryl Vint, U of California Riverside; Priscilla Wald, Duke U; Tyler Wall, Eastern Kentucky U; Jen Webb, U of Canberra; Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Central Michigan U.
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A Special issue of the Journal for the Fantastic in the Arts issue 25.3 Winter 2014. Here I include just the TOC and my introduction. Copies can be ordered through JFA
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edited collection with Kim Manganelli
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In his many works, Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau wrestles with Caribbean identity, colonial influence, the complexity of blackness, and the history of slavery. Best known for his Prix Goncourt winning novel Texaco (1992),... more
In his many works, Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau wrestles with Caribbean identity, colonial influence, the complexity of blackness, and the history of slavery. Best known for his Prix Goncourt winning novel Texaco (1992), Chamoiseau is considered a major voice in francophone literature, contributing significantly to the literature of the African diaspora and its self-definition. His works disrupt expectations of genre and form: Texaco, for example, braids together disparate kinds of narrative (journal entries, letters) and cultural references (historic incidents and spiritual concepts). This attitude to the polyvalence of storytelling may have led to Chamoiseau’s work in another narratological form, the field of videogames. He is credited on two titles both produced by Cocktel Vision: Freedom: Rebels in Darkness, an 8-bit game produced in 1988, and Méwilo, a 1987 first-person point and click adventure game, which like Texaco, dramatizes the 1902 volcano eruption that destroyed Saint Pierre. Freedom: Rebels in Darkness combines the adventure game (and even some Street Fighter-like button mashing) with the intense historical reality of slave resistance. Méwilo is a detective game where the playable character must solve a mystery about a paranormal haunting with its roots in the 1831 slave revolt. This paper offers a reading of these two games alongside several of Chamoiseau’s literary offerings and the broader theory espoused in his work in order to analyze these texts as commemorations of slave resistance that make use of a strategy of opacity evident in much of Chamoiseau’s work. This article comes out of a piece I was writing on “Creolizing videogames,” and I think of these two articles as sisters. Here, I offer a close-playing of the games, and my goal is to introduce these understudied texts to those who might want to play them. In this medium, I can share screencaps and videos of my gameplay.
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Dread Scott’s two-day Slave Rebellion Reenactment, part recreation and part historical revision, dramatized the 1811 slave rebellion in a more fully developed manner than historical records authored by slaveholders, incorporating a range... more
Dread Scott’s two-day Slave Rebellion Reenactment, part recreation and part historical revision, dramatized the 1811 slave rebellion in a more fully developed manner than historical records authored by slaveholders, incorporating a range of strategies used in other artworks depicting slave resistance, including: elisions, caesura, lacuna, off-screen action, obfuscation, abstraction, redaction, and more. These devices safeguard history from appropriation or commodification on the one hand; and on the other, highlight the way slave resistance is neglected in the historical record and commemorative landscape
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This article presents, troubles, and ultimately seeks to answer two simple questions: What does the digitization of slave resistance look like, and can it serve as a virtual memorial commemorating historic events where markers are lacking... more
This article presents, troubles, and ultimately seeks to answer two simple questions: What does the digitization of slave resistance look like, and can it serve as a virtual memorial commemorating historic events where markers are lacking in geographic places, such as locations where slave revolts occurred? In four main parts, this article presents an example of digital commemoration of slave resistance in a now defunct online list of shipboard rebellions; it then contrasts this digital resource to material monuments to slave revolt leaders and to diverse types of museum displays (as at the International Museum of Slavery at Liverpool); the next section profiles online resources about slave revolt, including Vincent Brown’s animated map of slave insurrections in Jamaica and repositories, archives, and databases of newspaper advertisements for runaways, arguing that these resources can sometimes be understood not merely as educational tools but also as digital commemorations of slave revolt. Finally, engaging with theory on monuments, memory, and history, this piece explains why digital commemorations existing in virtual space might productively acknowledge our discomfort with the existent archive and the insurmountable gaps in our knowledge of history.
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This is an article I was commissioned to write for Art Papers on artist Dread Scott's collaborative performance piece Slave Revolt Re-enactment, staged in November, 8-9, 2019 in New Orleans and its surrounding areas.
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This article looks at Jordan Peele's horror film Get Out for its resonances with slave rebellion.
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abstract This article presents, troubles, and ultimately seeks to answer two simple questions: What does the digitization of slave resistance look like, and can it serve as a virtual memorial commemorating historic events where markers... more
abstract This article presents, troubles, and ultimately seeks to answer two simple questions: What does the digitization of slave resistance look like, and can it serve as a virtual memorial commemorating historic events where markers are lacking in geographic places, such as locations where slave revolts occurred? In four main parts, this article presents an example of digital commemoration of slave resistance in a now defunct online list of ship- board rebellions; it then contrasts this digital resource to material monuments to slave revolt leaders and to diverse types of museum displays (as at the International Museum of Slavery at Liverpool); the next section profiles online resources about slave revolt, including Vincent Brown’s animated map of slave insurrections in Jamaica and repositories, archives, and da- tabases of newspaper advertisements for runaways, arguing that these resources can some- times be understood not merely as educational tools but also as digital commemorations of slave revolt. Finally, engaging with theory on monuments, memory, and history, this piece explains why digital commemorations existing in virtual space might productively acknowledge our discomfort with the existent archive and the insurmountable gaps in our knowledge of history.
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This brief contribution to Simon Bacon's edited collection The Gothic: a Reader is a study of Ron Honthaner’s film The House on Skull Mountain (1974), a late example of the Vaudou zombie. The book can be found here:... more
This brief contribution to Simon Bacon's edited collection The Gothic: a Reader is a study of Ron Honthaner’s film The House on Skull Mountain (1974), a late example of the Vaudou zombie. The book can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/Gothic-Reader-Genre-Fiction-Companions/dp/1787072681/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=simon+bacon&qid=1550508561&s=books&sr=1-3
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This comes from a collection of essays on Achille Mbembe's Necropolitics. It engages both with Mbembe's theory, Hegel's Master-Slave Dialectic, as it puts forth a reading of Jordan Peele's horror film Get Out.
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This is a good introduction to the zombie for undergraduates; the simple writing aims at a more general readership. It was published in Michael Paradiso-Michau's special issue of Listening; a journal of communication ethics, religion and... more
This is a good introduction to the zombie for undergraduates; the simple writing aims at a more general readership. It was published in Michael Paradiso-Michau's special issue of Listening; a journal of communication ethics, religion and culture, "Listening to Monsters."
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This article comes out of a longer project looking at digital commemorations of slave rebellion. In this excerpt from that work, the author considers the issues at stake in videogamic representations of colonial Saint Domingue and its... more
This article comes out of a longer project looking at digital commemorations of slave rebellion. In this excerpt from that work, the author considers the issues at stake in videogamic representations of colonial Saint Domingue and its denizens, particularly for their depiction of the prehistory of the Haitian Revolution. In two mainstream videogames, both part of the Assassin's Creed franchise, the history of Saint Domingue, its legacy of slave resistance, and the Haitian Revolution are made into fodder for an interactive entertainment experience that intervenes in and reshapes history in a complex manner. There are several issues at stake, which the author focuses on exclusively in terms of the commodification of Saint Domingue. First, the games place the history of slave revolt into the hands of game players of diverse ancestry, allowing for a redistribution of ownership over narratives of emancipation and empowerment. Second, the games identify themselves as tampering with history, and their mélange of fictional characters and real personages seems to risk rewriting the history of Saint Domingue's legacy of slave revolt and—by extension—of the Haitian Revolution itself. Given recent events in the United States, and increased attention to strategies of black resistance such as the Black Lives Matter movement, it seems all the more imperative that our depiction of slave revolts in popular culture be handled with care. And yet, the author finds a subversive maneuver visible in the games: the use of untranslated language, especially Haitian Kreyol, may work to preserve and limit the player's mastery over these histories. This article provides a tour of this complex territory of digital Saint Domingue. Online article: http://smallaxe.net/sxarchipelagos/issue02/playing-haiti.html
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This is an annotated bibliography on resources on zombie cinema and other visual media.
in The Walking Med: Zombies and the Medical Image, ed. Sherryl Vint and Lorenzo Servitje
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Disabled poet Larry Eigner makes striking use of the space of the page to create poetry that operates in a visual as well as linguistic register. Many critics have read Eigner's oeuvre in light of his physical condition, but no scholar... more
Disabled poet Larry Eigner makes striking use of the space of the page to create poetry that operates in a visual as well as linguistic register. Many critics have read Eigner's oeuvre in light of his physical condition, but no scholar has previously looked to the parallels between the Black Mountain artists' experiments in abstraction and Black Mountain poet Larry Eigner's work, though the same influences are clearly evident. Working collaboratively and interdisciplinarily, the authors combine their expertise in the disciplines of literature and art history, reading both the words on the page and the page as picture, in a manner that engages specifically with phenomenological philosophy, to explicate how these poems work on the body of the reader. (blank spaces make the slowing things levelled off rooted spots distances between are surprising 1
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in Deconstructing Brad Pitt, ed. Chris Schaberg and Robert Bennett
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... 17 In most of these stories, decapitation is the endgame of the gruesome narrative. ... Edmund, King of East Anglia before 870 …' from the Anglo-Saxon version as it appears in Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Primer, 9th... more
... 17 In most of these stories, decapitation is the endgame of the gruesome narrative. ... Edmund, King of East Anglia before 870 …' from the Anglo-Saxon version as it appears in Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Primer, 9th edn. ... 34 Porter and Baltzell, 'The Old French Lives of Saint', p. 82. ...
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Journal of Modern Literature, Volume 40, Number 2, Winter 2016, pp. 189-192.
Please see the journal to download this book review.
Please see the journal to download this book review.
Please see the journal to download this book review. Science Fiction Film and Television, Volume 9, Issue 1, 2016, pp. 137-142
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A short article published on Monument Lab Bulletin about the figure of the enslaved woman known as Escrava Anastácia, and the commemorations of her in Brazil.
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Interview for PBS web series Monstrum, later aired on PBS television
Interview featured in podcast episode "Zombie Dearest" June 13, 2019
Zombies are almost the mascots of our dark times. Hard to avoid in popular culture, they have become so ubiquitous that even the Centers for Disease Control put out a tongue in cheek guide to surviving the zombie apocalypse. Sarah Juliet... more
Zombies are almost the mascots of our dark times. Hard to avoid in popular culture, they have become so ubiquitous that even the Centers for Disease Control put out a tongue in cheek guide to surviving the zombie apocalypse. Sarah Juliet Lauro discusses the origins of the zombie, from enslaved worker to liberated rebel in revolutionary Haiti, to the consumer zombie of the 1960s, and today’s anxiety about societal collapse
Halloween Interview on NPR show On Second Thought, on zombies and their popularity
Briefly mentioned, quoted in this piece on zombie popularity.
Acted as consulting producer for the Haiti segment and interviewed in this documentary film on the zombie.
Article on Zombie Classes on College Campuses
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This article comes out of a longer project looking at digital commemorations of slave rebellion. In this excerpt from that work, the author considers the issues at stake in videogamic representations of colonial Saint Domingue and its... more
This article comes out of a longer project looking at digital commemorations of slave rebellion. In this excerpt from that work, the author considers the issues at stake in videogamic representations of colonial Saint Domingue and its denizens, particularly for their depiction of the prehistory of the Haitian Revolution. In two mainstream videogames, both part of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, the history of Saint Domingue, its legacy of slave resistance, and the Haitian Revolution are made into fodder for an interactive entertainment experience that intervenes in and reshapes history in a complex manner. There are several issues at stake, which the author focuses on exclusively in terms of the commodification of Saint Domingue. First, the games place the history of slave revolt into the hands of game players of diverse ancestry, allowing for a redistribution of ownership over narratives of emancipation and empowerment. Second, the games identify themselves as tampering with histor...
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Kill the Overseer! profiles and problematizes digital games that depict Atlantic slavery and “gamify” slave resistance. In videogames emphasizing plantation labor, the player may choose to commit small acts of resistance like... more
Kill the Overseer! profiles and problematizes digital games that depict Atlantic slavery and “gamify” slave resistance. In videogames emphasizing plantation labor, the player may choose to commit small acts of resistance like tool-breaking or working slowly. Others dramatically stage the slave’s choice to flee enslavement and journey northward, and some depict outright violent revolt against the master and his apparatus. In this work, Sarah Juliet Lauro questions whether the reduction of a historical enslaved person to a digital commodity in games such as Mission US, Assassin’s Creed, and Freedom Cry ought to trouble us as a further commodification of slavery’s victims, or whether these interactive experiences offer an empowering commemoration of the history of slave resistance. Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship
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This is an annotated bibliography on resources on zombie cinema and other visual media.
Research Interests: Art and movie theater
<p>Disabled poet Larry Eigner makes striking use of the space of the page to create poetry that operates in a visual as well as linguistic register. Many critics have read... more
<p>Disabled poet Larry Eigner makes striking use of the space of the page to create poetry that operates in a visual as well as linguistic register. Many critics have read Eigner’s oeuvre in light of his physical condition, but no scholar has previously looked to the parallels between the Black Mountain artists’ experiments in abstraction and Black Mountain poet Larry Eigner’s work, though the same influences are clearly evident. Working collaboratively and interdisciplinarily, the authors combine their expertise in the disciplines of literature and art history, reading both the words on the page and the page as picture, in a manner that engages specifically with phenomenological philosophy, to explicate how these poems work on the body of the reader.</p><p> </p><p>Key words: embodiment, abstraction, poetics, typography, metaphysics, phenomenology</p>
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This article presents, troubles, and ultimately seeks to answer two simple questions: What does the digitization of slave resistance look like, and can it serve as a virtual memorial commemorating historic events where markers are lacking... more
This article presents, troubles, and ultimately seeks to answer two simple questions: What does the digitization of slave resistance look like, and can it serve as a virtual memorial commemorating historic events where markers are lacking in geographic places, such as locations where slave revolts occurred? In four main parts, this article presents an example of digital commemoration of slave resistance in a now defunct online list of shipboard rebellions; it then contrasts this digital resource to material monuments to slave revolt leaders and to diverse types of museum displays (as at the International Museum of Slavery at Liverpool); the next section profiles online resources about slave revolt, including Vincent Brown’s animated map of slave insurrections in Jamaica and repositories, archives, and databases of newspaper advertisements for runaways, arguing that these resources can sometimes be understood not merely as educational tools but also as digital commemorations of slave...
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Dread Scott’s two-day Slave Rebellion Reenactment, part recreation and part historical revision, dramatized the 1811 slave rebellion in a more fully developed manner than historical records authored by slaveholders, incorporating a range... more
Dread Scott’s two-day Slave Rebellion Reenactment, part recreation and part historical revision, dramatized the 1811 slave rebellion in a more fully developed manner than historical records authored by slaveholders, incorporating a range of strategies used in other artworks depicting slave resistance, including: elisions, caesura, lacuna, off-screen action, obfuscation, abstraction, redaction, and more. These devices safeguard history from appropriation or commodification on the one hand; and on the other, highlight the way slave resistance is neglected in the historical record and commemorative landscape.
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Dread Scott’s two-day Slave Rebellion Reenactment, part recreation and part historical revision, dramatized the 1811 slave rebellion in a more fully developed manner than historical records authored by slaveholders, incorporating a range... more
Dread Scott’s two-day Slave Rebellion Reenactment, part recreation and part historical revision, dramatized the 1811 slave rebellion in a more fully developed manner than historical records authored by slaveholders, incorporating a range of strategies used in other artworks depicting slave resistance, including: elisions, caesura, lacuna, off-screen action, obfuscation, abstraction, redaction, and more. These devices safeguard history from appropriation or commodification on the one hand; and on the other, highlight the way slave resistance is neglected in the historical record and commemorative landscape.