I get the feeling that with graduation nostalgia comes a lot of regret. Sure, everything's done, but besides the sheer joy of completion, what does anyone really have to show for it? I, for one, spent every free moment for six months of my life reading and writing about zombie tales.

Suffice it to say that I had serious remorse issues when I walked across the stage at my graduation. I was in the thick of a serious existential crisis, which, trust me, I'd know a little something about (the part of my youth not blown on zombies was blown on reading key texts in the French literary canon, all of which are existential).

A lot of people might question the relevance of spending 24 weeks and 36 pages on zombies. Here in the United States the living dead are an endless source of Friday night entertainment, not uncompromising academic scholarship. They're not for the days spent in the library but rather late-night fanboy fantasies about a post-apocalyptic world.

There is, of course, something bizarre and troubling about the enthusiastic embrace of a devastated planet and the well-armed holdouts inherent to the zombie fantasy. But if you step back, it makes sense in our larger cultural context. Global warming, aggressive violence, deadly viral infections-these fears are universal and omnipresent in contemporary American culture.

The thing is that the zombie, an artistic harbinger of social unrest, wasn't born in the U.S., and it's one of the most popular cultural imports on any given blockbuster summer. Originating in Central Africa, the French-speaking zombie intrepidly made its way to Haiti and into New Orleans. The history of the zombie film is slightly different, though the trajectory is essentially the same. But the crisis surrounding the zombie's various artistic appearances changes, and today in South Africa is a very dire crisis indeed.

Mobs of South Africans are forcing foreigners, both legal and illegal immigrants, from their homes. Tensions have been exacerbated by unemployment and a food shortage. Criminals who probably don't care about the tense political and cultural rivalries continue to exploit them nonetheless. To date, 14 people have been killed, 12 of them "beaten by mobs, shot, stabbed or burned alive" according to Berry Bearak of The New York Times.

This is, in short, an outbreak of violence in Johannesburg underscoring a very serious problem. A lot of people, especially those of us who hadn't been keeping up with global events, may not have seen this coming. But let me tell you who did-Jean Comaroff, John Comaroff and Isak Niehaus, three scholars who've written about the economic, political and social implications of the zombie tale in South Africa.

Niehaus, citing the Comaroffs, says zombies are "an 'army of spectral workers' who, like immigrants from elsewhere on the continent, usurp scarce jobs from young people and prevent them from establishing families … Zombies bear testimony to the rupture of connections between people and place."

The anxiety, fear and overwhelming emotion present in South African zombie tale stories as early as 2005 were indicative of the unrest in the moment and of the revolt on the horizon. This is why the arts (not to mention academic scholarship on the arts) are important-the painting, the story and the film tell us more about ourselves than we could hope to tell anyone else. So no regrets about those theses, friends. It was time well-spent.