What might zombies have to do with the implosion of neoliberal capitalism at the end of the twentieth century? What might they have to do with postcolonial, post revolutionary, nationalism? With labor history? With the “crisis” of the modernist nation state? Why are these spectral signifiers making an appearance in epidemic proportions in several parts of Africa just now, especially in efforts to heal communal suffering and alienation? And why have immigrants become pariah citizens of a global order in which, paradoxically, old borders are said everywhere to be dissolving? This paper explores the connections among such seemingly exotic issues and the hard edged material, cultural, epistemic realities of our times. The alien-nation of pariah proletarians, dead and alive, seems to conjure with inchoate fears about community and belonging, about rights to work and capacity to reproduce an identifiable moral world. But while they attest to the erosion of the basis of a conventional politics of labor and place and public interest, these creatures also raise new, provocative possibilities for compelling the state to take note. Even to act.