“Knowing Our Difference”: Class and the Literary Zombie

In bringing literary sophistication to the zombie story, Colson Whitehead and Ling Ma also transformed the ideological core of the genre, changing it from a narrative of civilizational collapse and survival to a drama of professional-class status anxiety and status election. Although Whitehead and Ma emphasize the racial identity of their protagonists, the central concern of their novels lies in a vindication of class superiority, which the novels cast less as socioeconomic advantage than as spiritual endowment. In this way, their narratives function as allegories of the justification of social hierarchy that Pierre Bourdieu calls “sublimation.”