Monster narratives structure the Other as a racial pollution threat to white womanhood.

Evidence

The zombie film based on Seabrook’s 1929 book is White Zombie (1932), in which the blackness of the Haitians and the threat of zombification are used to establish the fear of racial mixing. Much like the monster in Frankenstein and Dracula, the zombie has the potential to pollute and destroy the “white race.” In the tradition of texts like Othello, Frankenstein, Zofloya, and Dracula, the monstrous Other poses a special threat to the virginal white Christian woman. Here, she is attacked and infected by the black Haitian zombie—once again, the threat of racial pollution is at the center of the narrative: “The image of the white woman who becomes a zombie puts whiteness right back into the frame of voodoo, and yet also makes it strikingly aberrant: the white zombie is an unnatural figure because she is both white and has surrendered to voodoo to the extent that it seems to possess her completely.” The idea that the racial or political subaltern poses a threat to white hegemony is central to the zombie story, and while not all zombies are dead—sometimes they are killing machines driven by an external force—zombies are always infected. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 713

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s core thesis about how the Muslim monster is manufactured in the Western imagination — this shows the same monster logic (racial pollution threatening the white Christian woman) operating across zombie, vampire, and Muslim-monster figures.
• SHARE: The citation of Othello, Frankenstein, Zofloya, and Dracula as a shared tradition of the monstrous Other threatening the white woman is worth sending to anyone working on comparative monster studies.