Books and Edited Collections by Sarah Juliet Lauro
Kill the Overseer! The Gamification of Slave Resistance, 2020
Kill the Overseer! profiles and problematizes digital games that depict Atlantic slavery and “gam... 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.
Listening to Our Monsters, 2017
Zombie studies manifested across academic disciplines in the humanities but also beyond, spreadin... 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.
A Special issue of the Journal for the Fantastic in the Arts issue 25.3 Winter 2014. Here I inclu... more 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
edited collection with Kim Manganelli
Academic Articles by Sarah Juliet Lauro
Archipelagos, 2023
In his many works, Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau wrestles with Caribbean identity, colonia... 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.
TDR: The Drama Review., 2021
Dread Scott’s two-day Slave Rebellion Reenactment, part recreation and part historical revision, ... 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
History of the Present 10.2, 2020
This article presents, troubles, and ultimately seeks to answer two simple questions: What does t... 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.
Art Papers, 2020
This is an article I was commissioned to write for Art Papers on artist Dread Scott's collaborati... more 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.
Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror., 2020
This article looks at Jordan Peele's horror film Get Out for its resonances with slave rebellion.
History of the Present issue 10, 2020
abstract This article presents, troubles, and ultimately seeks to answer two simple questions: Wh... 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.
The Aesthetics of Necropolitics (book collection), 2018
This comes from a collection of essays on Achille Mbembe's Necropolitics. It engages both with Mb... more 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.
This is a good introduction to the zombie for undergraduates; the simple writing aims at a more g... 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."
This article comes out of a longer project looking at digital commemorations of slave rebellion. ... 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
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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Books and Edited Collections by Sarah Juliet Lauro
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.
Academic Articles by Sarah Juliet Lauro
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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