Hello, and welcome to The Monster & The Child, where childhood studies and monster studies collide! I am Dr. Kathleen Kellett, and this is one of my book review and recommendation videos for nonfiction academic texts. This one is a real favorite of mine that I have used to inform several projects, including analysis I did for my doctoral dissertation. The book is Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism by David McNally.
Right from that title, I think you kind of know ideologically what you’re getting into here, and if you’re anything like me, you’re extremely down for that. Now, unlike my last review, which was for Esther J. Hamori’s God’s Monsters – link in corner and description – this text is not written for a, like, broad, popular audience. Monsters of the Market is deeply academic and it can be difficult going. But though it is dense, it is not dry, so even though you may – and occasionally, I also did – struggle with untangling some of the complex theory that McNally is working with, you will not be bored. And honestly, that’s high praise for academic writing! So even if you don’t necessarily have, like, grad-level training, if the idea of using monstrosity to understand and reveal the workings of capitalism appeals to you, then I would definitely give it a try.
McNally begins with an introduction that lays out his case for using monsters to address this topic. One of my favorite parts of this introduction is that he kind of comes for my wig a bit, but in a way that is helpful for checking myself. He talks about the “giddy embrace of monstrosity” within cultural studies – with my work in childhood studies certainly overlaps with – because in many of these critical discourses, “monsters are positioned as heroic outsiders, markers of nonconformity and perversity, representing all those marginalized by dominant discourses and social values” (10). This is, in fact, frequently my approach to a lot of the monster stories that I analyze, particularly monster stories not just about but intended for young people. In a lot of adolescent literature (again, including my own), monstrosity is deliberately set up as a site of not just unjust marginalization but also a potential reclamation of power too long denied. You know, the old, “they want me to be a monster, so I’ll show them a monster” kind of deal. But it’s always important to remember that monstrosity is a huge, multifaceted concept, a shared language across the political spectrum, and a metaphor that can be applied in all sorts of directions. McNally acknowledges that, indeed, monsters frequently do serve as representations of marginality and minoritization. However, he argues, marginalized people and storytellers and theorists also use the concept of monstrosity to describe and comprehend the mechanisms of their oppression. So only paying attention to celebrating the marginalized “monsters” runs the risk of losing sight of the way the marginalized people battle the other kind of monsters that are things like the military-industrial complex, ever-expanding corporate power, and dictatorial rule.
McNally begins his breakdown of this latter group of monster metaphors with his first chapter, entitled “Dissecting the Laboring Body: Frankenstein, Political Anatomy and the Rise of Capitalism.” This is a fascinating look into mostly like seventeenth through nineteenth century European history, as the economic system of mercantilism gradually evolves into the capitalism we know today. McNally links the loss of the “commons” – literally, common public land for use by the people, as opposed to private property – with the encroachment of the ruling class onto the physical human body, as well. For instance, a “criminal” sent to the gallows for “poaching” or “smuggling” – that is, taking food from land that they do not own – could then find his body sent for dissection in the name of medical research. Everything, from the earth you walk on to the very meat you inhabit, is owned by someone else. So, yeah, that felt pretty monstrous to the people experiencing it. It feels particularly like cannibalism, one of the ultimate taboos. Yet McNally also acknowledges how affects of disgust and the grotesque also worked the other way around – remember we have that shared language of monstrosity – as the ruling class began to conceive the “popular body” as “open, untidy and fluid,” something that had to be separated and delineated by clear boundaries in order to be clean. Otherwise, they became the unruly (and sometimes revolutionary) mob, which was certainly something that began increasingly forming throughout Europe over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. McNally threads all of these ideas through monster literature and metaphors of the time, including Frankenstein. As new rules of the human social order emerged from the ruling class, their ideas of what was monstrous evolved. At the same time, the underclass felt these new rules very much violating their own ideas about what humanity is, making monsters of those imposing the rules. This is one thing that has always fascinated me about monster stories, and you’re going to hear me talk about it more in my next video essay, which is going to be about His Dark Materials. Monstrosity is in the mouth of the narrator, and so you can have two people simultaneously making monsters of each other in the way that they tell their stories.
The reason, of course, that everyone’s reaching for monstrosity as a way to tell those stories is that monster metaphors are inherently powerful. And no one knew that better than ol’ Karl Marx, which is the subject of McNally’s second chapter, “Marx’s Monsters: Vampire-Capital and the Nightmare-World of Late Capitalism.” He goes through Marx’s own writings to show how monsters, especially the undead, have always been one of the ways that those critiquing capitalism have tried to explain how this system works. McNally argues that these metaphors are not only illuminating but also rhetorically important, because by invoking monsters, Marx and other critics are refusing to be civil and measured. Bringing monstrosity into your critique makes it clear that you’re saying, no, it really is inhumanly bad out there. As the chapter title implies, vampires are a big one here, and why wouldn’t they be? Sucking the life-blood from the workers to feed an insatiable avatar of death? Seems right to me! We’ve also got the phantasmic unreality of “occult economies,” in the ways that shares and credit and investments are all literally abstract and invisible, yet haunt the realities of billions. Then there’s the metaphor of zombie labor – which was always part of what zombies were supposed to be, as they originate from Haiti, and represent (among other things) a fear that even the loss of the mind or death itself won’t be an escape from enslavement.
That brings us to the third chapter, “African Vampires in the Age of Globalization.” Here, McNally does a deep dive into the stories of the undead (both vampires, as the title implies, but also zombies) from twentieth and early twenty-first century Sub-Saharan African nations. He looks at films and published works, as well as news stories, urban legends, and popular rumors. On the first page of this chapter, we have the telling example, “In Nigeria, newspapers carry reports of passengers on motorcycle-taxis, who, once helmets are placed on their heads, transform into zombies and begin to spew money from their mouths, as if they had become human ATMs” (175). So we see throughout the whole book that thread of the inherent and horrifying monstrosity of one’s own body being a commodity that you don’t actually own or control. McNally focuses on “the persistence of images of corporeal fragmentation and disembodiment” throughout the stories in this chapter (181). He also talks about how a lot of these African stories challenge the notion of modern “disenchantment” – that is, the loss of belief or engagement with the supernatural, witchcraft, spirits, etc., in the face of Western Enlightenment rationality that is seen as synonymous with modernity. The stories that he unpacks in this chapter, he argues, aren’t just traditional – “traditional” – tales persisting against modernity, but rather “fables of modernity” in and of themselves, as they are actively and specifically used as ways of understanding and explaining modern conditions (184). I mean, ATM-motorcycle-zombies can’t exactly be dismissed as old-timey superstition or old-timey anything, which is so frequently the racist way that white imperialist nations approach narratives from the Global South. But McNally argues this is contemporary monstrosity responding to contemporary conditions.
McNally closes things out with a conclusion entitled “Ugly Beauty: Monstrous Dreams of Utopia.” He dives into some Bakhtinian theory – which you will also see more of in my next video essay – and he writes, “As Bakhtin reminds us, utopia often comes bathed in the grotesque. It does so in reaction to the anti-sensuous, anti-corporeal striving of official cultures to tame bodies and desires, enclose property and personality, regulate labor and recreation, control festivity and sexuality” (254). All those monsters of the market that he describes throughout the book are the ones that do the dismembering, that divide up the bodies of the Earth and its inhabitants, but it’s the victims that are left to be grotesquely embodied within these violated forms. The market-monsters remain cold and dead and incorporeal – clean by virtue of abandoning all semblance of materiality, while simultaneously creating the material conditions for everyone else. So any rebellion against those conditions will involve reclaiming that grotesquerie, refusing to worship the abstract and extractive, returning to the bodies that our systems are trying so hard to just use up. This, too, requires art. McNally talks about the jazz of Thelonious Monk and the legacy of enslavement on Black American music, and how deeply embodied emotionality within this music and in any art may feel grotesque, but it’s a necessary and revealing grotesquerie, a beautiful type of horror and a horrifying type of beauty. As such, it resists all of those clean delineating lines, all of those discrete categories of a numerically ordered existence.
So clearly, there is a lot that this book talks about, and I didn’t nearly touch on all of it, but if any of those little tidbits of theory and critique pique your interest, definitely give it a try. I have links to the book and to McNally’s work in general in the description. Also down in the description are links to my website, themonsterandthechild.com, and my Patreon, if you are interested in more monster education and community. On the website, you can check out my Monster Book Clubs – the next book for adult Monster Book Club is Nimona – and my Youth Monsterology educational mentorship program, which I am hoping to start in the spring. Please spread the word among teens and people who know or work with teens in your life! Meanwhile, if you become a patron, you get monthly monster story reaction videos and a chance to vote on future video essay topics. I would love to see you there! Remember to give this video a like if you enjoyed it, and to share so more people can hear about cool works of monster theory. Subscribe to the channel if you haven’t already so that you never miss a monstrous conversation. I will be back here next week with my His Dark Materials video, so until then, take care, and I will see you soon with more monstrous food for thought.
Check out McNally’s work: https://www.davidmcnally.org/
Want to read it for yourself? Purchase here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/469-monsters-of-the-market
Want more monster education and community in your life? Check out my website and my Patreon: https://themonsterandthechild.com/, https://www.patreon.com/cw/TheMonsterAndTheChild
