Shoreline Community College is offering a new course this quarter called “Nazi Zombies Ate My Brain!”: Fascism and the End of the World, American Ethnic Studies (AES) 292. Yes, that is the name of the class, and it will run from Apr. 21 to Jun. 18 as an online class.
This class is a fully online, late-start, two-credit course in which students will learn about fascism, racism, and anti-Asian and anti-Muslim oppression while exploring zombie films and fiction.
“I’ve been interested in zombies as a metaphor for social problems for some time,” said Eric Hamako, the professor of this class. “I have previously written about zombies as a metaphor for the ways that the United States might think about various oppressed racial and religious groups. Specifically, the ways that stories about zombies are very similar to some of the stories about different Asian groups, Muslims, and Latinos. I think people [will be] interested in zombies; zombies have been very popular for the last couple decades and have been popular in two other major periods of U.S. history.”
“I also know there are some students who really would benefit from having two credit courses. Sometimes, students will enroll in 15 credits of classes and then drop one of their five credit classes. Now, they only have 10 credits. Many students need to have at least 12 credits, whether it’s for their visa status, particular GI benefits, or financial aid. There are students who may, even if they’re not interested in zombies or in fascism, think, ‘well, I need a two-credit class, and this is a two-credit class that I won’t be starting late because the class starts a little later.’”
“I hope that it will be a fun and engaging opportunity for students. Students will have the opportunity to learn more about the popular cultural figure of the zombie and what zombies are. We’ll also think a lot about what fascism is so that students will be able to spot fascism in the same way that [characters] need to identify zombies in a zombie story. While zombies are not real, fascism is very real. It’s important that people be able to recognize fascism when they see it because, as with the zombie outbreak, if you can’t recognize the zombies early, they take over very quickly,” said Eric Hamako.
