Professor Dina Khapaeva‌

Dina Khapaeva is Professor at the School of Modern Languages at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research comprises death studies, cultural studies, historical memory, and intellectual history. Dr. Khapaeva has authored several mongraphs, including The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture (University of Michigan Press, 2017), Nightmares: From Literary Experiments to Cultural Project (Brill, 2013), and Portrait critique de la Russie: Essais sur la société gothique (Eds. de l’Aube, 2012), shortlisted for a book prize Prix Russophonie 2014. Her articles have appeared in Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Social Research, Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, Le Débat, Merkur, Social Sciences Information, et al. Most recently, she was invited to lecture at New College, Oxford, the University of Edinburgh, Emory University, and as a visiting professor at Écoles des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris.

Death as a Cultural Condition

In the mid-1990s, a unique new way of engaging with death crystallized in Western culture: the mounting fascination with the “violent delights” of fictionalized death on screen and in fiction resurrected the Gothic and apocalyptic genres, galvanized horror with torture porn, slasher movies, and BDSM, and turned murderous monsters – vampires, zombies, serial killers, cannibals – into the new cultural idols. These artistic developments coincided with unprecedented and sweeping changes in funeral rituals, the spread of death symbolism in fashion, the invention of dark tourism and the marketing of murderabilia, the establishment of death education curricula, the proliferation of new concepts related to death, and the stunning popularity of Halloween celebration and the worship of Santa Muerte (“Saint Death”).

I propose a theoretical framework that connects interpretations of the simulated world of fiction and movies to social and cultural change, and considers the demand for images of violent death and the dramatic transformations in death-related practices as aspects of a single movement. I suggest that the new attitudes toward human beings articulated in the representations of popular culture should guide our understanding of the meaning invested in the new rituals, seasonal celebrations, vocabulary, educational initiatives, and commercial ventures. The cult of death, as I conceptualize this movement, reconsiders the place of humans in the spectrum of species, rejects human exceptionalism, and redefines our understanding of humanism and humanity in the secular value system. It offers antihumanism as a new popular cultural commodity.

In my talk, I will discuss the most important stages in the development of this movement from the late 1970s to the 2010s. The popular culture images altering our basic food taboo on eating humans will be the focus of my attention. This historical and cultural analysis will address the importance of the mortality studies to an understanding of the present cultural condition.