Humor and Hierarchies in Zone One Anonymous College

They drag their feet, slouching away from the sun, their palsied, wandering eyes clouded with the blood of rage-busted veins. Desire—the only living thing in them—snarls in the pit of their stomachs, the sole force carrying them forward in their dark, crowded world. All they know is how to keep going. Stumblingly, blindly, they lurch on, down sidewalks, alleys, subway tunnels, in search of what will finally make them whole again. If you pictured zombies, you’d be right, but you’d also be right if you pictured the average New Yorker. Colson Whitehead’s novel Zone One addresses and parodies them both through the use of similar descriptive terms, a tactic common to zombie-related media. However, Whitehead does this in a way that not only frustrates expectations of the zombie novel, but also those of African-American literature.

Zone One defies expectations of African American literature by replacing the concept of the “black experience” with the human/zombie binary, using satirical humor to mock the nature of hierarchical classification, and avoiding overt discussion of race until the end of the novel. One of the key ways in which the novel anticipates its perceived responsibility to present and comment on the “black experience”...