Although ‘post-apocalyptic’ has become a pervasive descriptive category within popular culture, little scholarly work has been interested in articulating the post-apocalyptic’s ‘differentia generica’ relative to related genres and narrative forms. This paper outlines ‘putropia’ as a term that both delineates the logic of the post-apocalyptic and provides a means to think through its political implications within specific conjunctures. Rather than an imagined good or bad place, best or worst government, putropia is an image of a familiar society in a state of putrescence. Through an analysis of three twenty-first-century American post-apocalyptic films – The Book of Eli (2010), Daylight’s End (2016) and Bushwick (2017) – the layered and textured interconnections of the vertebrate body and the processual nature of decomposition are proposed as a way to think of the state as a complex, mortal, and material system that is illustrated in and explored through post-apocalyptic fictions.

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