Abstract
This essay locates the origin of biopolitics on the Caribbean plantation and elaborates a theory of “zombie biopolitics”—a phrase used to describe the living death of slavery and to revise, as well, Foucault’s dichotomy between sovereign power (which lets live and makes die) and biopower (which makes live and lets die). Zombie biopower, in contrast, makes live as dead. With attention to geography, capitalism, and race as aspects of biopower that need foregrounding in the Plantationocene, the paper moves from the scene of the living dead on the plantation of Barbados in the seventeenth century, to an account of the zombie’s origins in colonial St. Domingue, and turns in closing to the relation between the Caribbean origins of the zombie and Hollywood zombie culture.