by David Mendez

Like so many other people in the early 2000s, Shoreline College professor Eric Hamako was inundated by zombie fiction. Films like “28 Days Later,” comic books like “The Walking Dead” and novels like “World War Z” and “Zone One” spoke to a renewed fascination in the living dead and humans surviving an apocalypse.

On one hand, those stories can speak to collectivists who are inspired by the power of community and hope in the darkest times.

On the other, they can become power fantasies of strongmen who want to rebuild the world through force, annihilating inhuman, animalistic monsters.

On Tuesday night, Hamako — an American Ethnic Studies professor at Shoreline College — will join the Public Knowledge Speaker Series at Drumlin in Ridgecrest to talk zombie fiction and its ties to modern political culture. The lecture, “Zombie Orientals Ate My Brain!” will look at connections between zombie media and anti-Arab and anti-Asian themes — and how fascists make foreign “others” into inhuman monsters to justify their superiority.

There are common threads among zombie tales: that hordes of inhuman invaders have overrun communities, demolished resources, devoured animals and humans alike, destroying the communities and societies of good people.

“I realized, those are stories that resonate very much with the kinds of stories that get told about groups of people today. Really, a lot of those stories are reiterated over and over again to whoever the villainized group of the day is,” Hamako told The Osprey. “In thinking about that, I started drawing connections between those stories that have been told — about Native Americans and Filipinos and Chiniese and Japanese and Mexicans, and now Arabs and Muslims, in the United States — and the stories that get told about zombies.”

Zombie stories migrated to the U.S. from Haiti, where folktales spoke of reanimated corpses raised by sorcerers. These zombies weren’t flesh-eaters, but mindless bodies bound to serve their master, even in death. If you notice a slight connection to slavery and imperialism that’s no coincidence. It lines up, Hamako said, with the concept of Orientalism — the way that the Western world builds itself as superior to other nations with stories of foreign “primitives” and “barbarians.”

The second wave of zombie stories, in the 1960s and ‘70s called to mind non-white, non-Christian villains, in line with the rise of Black Muslims and Black Power groups.

“I would suggest that it’s not coincidental that around that time, again, stories about an inferior but numerical enemy that was a threat from within, was consuming resources, that was a threat to white womanhood and white purity and was potentially taking people’s jobs,” Hamako said.

Around 2003, during the third wave of zombies — fast, angry, rage-filled monsters — Hamako started thinking about these stories and their connection to the world.

“What was this fear of societal collapse? This fear of a decadent society that was past its prime, that maybe was rotting and needed to be renewed through violence, which very much was the story post 9/11,” Hamako said. Violence — both in zombie media and in post-9/11 America — became about re-purifying the world and eliminating threats from within, he suggested.

Hamako has taught this subject as a quarter-long course at Shoreline College with the title “Nazi Zombies Ate My Brain,” as an opportunity to examine the world through culture.

“Fascism relies on a number of traits, including a sense of renewal, the idea that through violence we will get rid of those people who do not belong — we will become stronger again, we will become pure again. Fascism relies on a kind of putting down of the other, a demonization, to justify that violence,” he said.

For instance, you might remember September 2024, when far-right agitators and neo-Nazis spread lies that Haitian immigrants were stealing, butchering and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. You might remember that those lies were amplified and repeated by Donald Trump and J.D. Vance as they sought to win the White House. You might also remember that Trump in 2024, as he did in 2020 and 2016, made anti-immigrant fear and hatred central to his presidential campaigns.

Hamako believes that political conservatism and fascism are not hand-in-glove concepts — that many conservatives are opposed to fascism, and that he’s never once had a student speak in favor of fascism. But his course, he said, is a learning opportunity.

“I am opposed to fascism, but also I am in favor of teaching people about fascism, and I’m in favor of helping people grapple with what their own values are,” he explained. “I think we live in a society where fascism is increasingly valued by some people, whether they would call it fascism or not.”

“That’s why I talk about this idea of ‘Nazi zombies ate my brain,’ turning on its head that fascists often cast the other as the zombie,” he added. “I want to suggest that maybe it’s fascism that has a zombifying effect on people.”