University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Riddles of representation in fantastic media

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Riddles of representation in fantastic media

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Content RIDDLES OF REPRESENTATION IN FANTASTIC MEDIA by Janani Subramanian A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (CRITICAL STUDIES) August 2009 Copyright 2009 Janani Subramanian ii Dedication I dedicate this work to my parents, Ganesan and Chitra Subramanian and to my grandmother, Meena Swami iii Acknowledgements This project would not have been possible without the help and support of several individuals. My dissertation chair, Curtis Marez, was indispensable in the writing, editing and revising process and provided me with support, detailed feedback, and constant encouragement. It also helped immensely that he liked aliens as much as I did. My other committee members, Tara McPherson and Akira Lippit, provided me with unique directions to take my research and inspired me to pursue a creative and theoretically exciting approach to my topic. I thank my entire committee for their dedication, warmth and enthusiasm for my project. David James and Dana Polan helped me create and develop my initial ideas for this project, and Priya Jaikumar guided my research in Critical Race Theory in my project’s developmental stages. I am looking forward to working with the entire Critical Studies Department during my postdoctoral year. Linda Overholt, program coordinator, has been a rock throughout my seven years in the Critical Studies program and has cheerfully dealt with the bureaucratic business, paperwork, and minor/major headaches of helping me through my academic career. Her calmness and confidence in my abilities has been a source of comfort throughout these seven years and particularly during the dissertation writing process. I worked at the USC Writing Center for the last two years of my graduate career, and Erika Nanes, Roger Anderson and my co-consultants showed me a lovely and different facet of the graduate experience. The range of intellectual interests and personalities at the Writing Center was a constant source of joy and companionship, and I particularly thank Erika and Roger for creating a warm and welcoming environment. My iv special thanks go to Christine for her spectacular massages and her shared penchant for snacks (particularly of the sweet variety). Finally, I would like to thank my friends and family for their constant love, support and senses of humor. My colleagues and friends Alex Lykidis, Jorie Lagerwey, Veena Hariharan, Veronica Paredes, Jaime Nasser and Paul Reinsch were excellent partners in venting, eating, drinking and keeping me sane. Alex Lykidis and Ioana Uricaru provided valuable feedback in the initial stages of this project, and when our writing group turned into a dinner group, shared tasty meals with me. My roommates and best friends, Katie Brown and Shivani Patel, were tireless in praise and encouragement, and my parents, grandmother, sister and brother provided me with several shoulders to cry on and kept my feet firmly on the ground. Last but definitely not least, I would like to thank my sweet Chirag for encouraging me to have fun throughout the entire process. v Table of Contents Dedication ii Acknowledgements iii Abstract vii Introduction: The Fantastic Mise-en-Scene of Racial Identity 1 Tzvetan Todorov and the Fantastic 3 Psychoanalysis and Fantasy 10 Fantasy and Critical Race Theory 16 This Bridge Called My Back: The Anthology as Tableaux 23 Speculative Non-fiction: The Use of Fantasy within Critical Race Theory 29 Endnotes 39 Chapter 1: Alienating Identification: Science Fiction Film and Black Identity 41 Alienation and Identification: Reception Studies 44 Black Speculative Fiction and Visual Culture 46 Alienation in Science Fiction 54 Alienation, Science Fiction and Marxism 56 The Brother from Another Planet: A Case Study of Two Kinds of Alienation 59 The Black Science Fiction Star: Will Smith as Case Study 70 Endnotes 86 Chapter 2: The Fantastic Avant-Garde 89 The Avant-Garde and Science Fiction 91 The Autobiographical Avant-Garde 99 The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs and Tribulation 99: Fantasies of War 121 Endnotes 136 Chapter 3: Television and Fantasies of Migration 140 The X-files: The Truth is In Here 148 Battlestar Galactica: The Truth Might be Out There 171 Endnotes 189 Chapter 4: Races in the Machine 193 New Media, Music and Race 195 Pimp My Ride: Urban Techno-Wizardry 204 Geek-Chic: Will Smith and Nerd Identity 210 Endnotes 224 Afterword 227 Endnotes 235 vi Bibliography 236 vii Abstract My dissertation examines fantasy and identity across a variety of media, and I analyze how their various forms interact with historical contexts and help us understand narratives of race. Science fiction films act as a valuable testing ground for theories of identity, as the creation of alienating worlds reveals the play of alienation and identification at work in the recent history of race and representation. In Chapter 2, for example, I focus on John Sayles' 1984 film The Brother From Another Planet, where the main character’s status as both extraterrestrial and black man lends insight into the black citizen’s relationship to an alienating urban environment in the context of a Reagan-era retreat from federal government support for inner cities. In Chapter 3, I argue that avant- garde film forms a fascinating relationship to science fiction in its similar displacement of time, place and narrative; yet the formal abstractions of the avant-garde, when utilized by filmmakers exploring racial and ethnic identity, reveals the specifically filmic codes used to construct identity on screen. Science fiction television has an equally fascinating structural relationship to representation in its use of seriality, long narrative arcs, relationship to domesticity, and commercial nature; for example, in Chapter 4, I discuss how The X-files uses the psychoanalytic and cultural associations of paranoia to build an entire series exploring fears of Others and outsiders, displacing multicultural anxiety onto a host of monsters and extraterrestrials. I end my dissertation with an exploration of the way various platforms of digital media reveal the way that the alleged erasure of identity – a futuristic idea embraced by some Critical Race Theorists – actually highlights its constant tangibility. 1 Introduction: The Fantastic Mise-en-Scene of Racial Identity George S. Schuyler, in 1931, imagined a world where blackness could be erased with the use of a mysterious machine that could turn black Americans white. Black No More, which satirically creates an America without black skin, has been analyzed as both a part and sharp criticism of the Harlem Renaissance, but scant attention has been paid to the fantastic, even science fiction, aspects of Schuyler’s novel. 1 Projecting imaginary worlds into both distant and not-so-distant futures is the foundation of the science fiction genre, and the question that Schuyler’s novel raises is why he chose science fiction conventions to express his criticism of race in America. The moral of the novel’s tongue- in-cheek narrative is that skin color is just one facet of prejudice and racism, and he concludes rather optimistically that once we realize that we are all equal, society will be cured of its racist ills. While Schuyler’s message on questions of assimilation and difference is unclear, his use of fantastic, science fiction conventions – a special machine that dramatically changes the world as we know it – to explore the impact of skin color on society demands closer inspection. Schuyler’s novel, along with several of the canonical texts of the Harlem Renaissance, can also be read as an early example of Critical Race Theory. Critical race theorists, in their past and present work, analyze the intersection of race with various social, political, economic, legal and cultural institutions; Schuyler’s work examines these intersections through the use of fantastic narrative. One of the most persistent concerns of Critical Race Theory is determining the ontological roots of race as either socially constructed or essential, and this oversimplified binary has informed the way race is discussed in professional, political and popular arenas. The question of race as 2 “essential” assumes a real, raced identity at the core of various ethnic groups, and analysis of race as constructed tries, in turn, to expose this racial core as imaginary, made up instead of raced surfaces, ranging from clothing to hair to music to legal definitions of “black” or “Hispanic.” Perhaps it is this constant reference to both the real and the fantastic aspects of identity that makes the subject of identity an appropriate text and subtext of the science fiction genre; whether identity is, in itself, a fantastic notion or not, using the conventions of fantasy and science fiction to describe and narrate identity reveals the intricate ways that race is defined by the interplay of discourses about fantasy and reality. For example, Black No More uses the fantastic construct of a race-changing machine to expose the imaginary links between racial identity and skin color, ultimately arguing (somewhat ambiguously) that the “truth” about race is that there are no truths at all. The question then arises about fantasy’s role as both that which must be unveiled, in the case of the various fantasies constructed around race in society, and that which is doing the unveiling, such as Schuyler’s use of fantasy to challenge popular and theoretical conceptions of identity. I will investigate the ways in which fantasies of race become naturalized, as well as the way fantasy itself can be used as a critical tool for understanding narratives of race. My project as a whole hopes to address this question on a variety of levels, with the ultimate goal of creating a theoretical framework for analyzing fantasy, race and visual media. The first step, and the main question I will address in this chapter, is how fantasy and the fantastic are both defined and involved in the act of defining identity. This chapter will first address the definitions of fantasy and the fantastic that pertain to 3 my project. The word fantasy has definitions that range from the psychoanalytic to the generic, and my goal is to address these various meanings and their applicability to questions of race and representation. The second part of this chapter will examine different critical race texts and the role of fantasy within these theoretical positions. Analyzing how fantasy plays a role in the act of defining race and identity lays a foundation for investigating how fantastic conventions both construct and deconstruct race on-screen. The theorists under scrutiny in this chapter do not focus exclusively on visual media, instead using different visual texts merely as support for their larger conclusions. My goal in this project is to extend the work of critical race theorists into a more extensive analysis of how representation and fantasy play out visually. The medium of the novel gives George Schuyler a particular kind of space to explore the consequences of eradicating race from American society, but my project asks: what are the visual counterparts to these literary and novelistic fantastic devices, and how do they affect the way that race and identity are visually defined and imagined? As this chapter lays the foundation for my subsequent foray into only the visual, I will utilize both visual and non-visual examples to illustrate various theoretical positions. Tzvetan Todorov and the Fantastic I will return to Todorovian fantasy periodically throughout my project because his definition of the fantastic remains seminal to both literary theory and studies of fantasy, and a smaller goal within my larger project is to update Todorov’s definition of the fantastic for contemporary contexts. Expanding the theoretical boundaries of an intellectual paradigm raises other, tangential questions about the relationship between 4 contemporary scholars and older scholarship, and I hope also to address the implications of this question in the course of my project. As a structuralist, Todorov is rigorous in his definition, detailing the differences between the fantastic, the uncanny, the marvelous, poetry and allegory. Once establishing the specificity of the fantastic and detailing its structural properties, Todorov expands his discussion into what he calls the “semantic or thematic,” asking the question: “what does the fantastic contribute to a work?” 2 In the last four chapters of the book, the author focuses on the themes present in fantastic literature, classifying the themes and then interpreting his classification, and it is this portion of Todorov’s study where I find potential for expansion into the realm of the visual. The first thematic network is the “themes of the self,” which represents themes related to man’s perception of the world around him, specifically the breakdown between the physical and mental and mind and matter. The second thematic network is the “themes of the other,” “the relation of man with his desire” 3 – basically man’s active pursuit of relationships with others. The importance of these two networks of themes lies in the extent to which they disrupt a text, introducing new concepts of time, space, perception, causality and desire into narratives. The disruption of traditional narratives by fantastic events leads to what Todorov calls “hesitation” on the part of both reader and character – a liminal space that encourages the reader/character “to hesitate between a natural and supernatural explanation of the events described.” 4 Todorov’s definition of the fantastic genre rigorously enforces that the fantastic is not merely the supernatural, the marvelous, the allegorical or the poetic, and in fact 5 fantastic conventions work in specifically structural ways within the text. Towards the end of his study, and crucial to any contemporary consideration of Todorov’s work, the author touches on the larger effects of the fantastic, equating the formal qualities of the works to their social function of representing forms of transgression which are often beyond conventional representation. The author examines the literary and social trends that are bypassing or incorporating the role of the fantastic, describing how psychoanalysis, for example, creates fantastic narratives cloaked in scientific terms to explain the human psyche. Finally Todorov claims that fantastic literature has evolved beyond fantastic events set in natural settings, but instead fantasy, the absurd, and the marvelous define entire narrative worlds, Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” being the main example of this trend. Todorov ends his analysis at this point, and his segue into later trends provides a strong starting point for outlining an updated definition of the “fantastic.” As Todorov himself mentions, psychoanalytic definitions of fantasy start taking the place of the genre itself; what I would like to maintain is that the psychoanalytic definitions of fantasy, while seemingly couched in the more “official” language of science, are still also narratives constructed to describe and imagine the human psyche. Todorov also includes a brief mention of science fiction as a genre that represents what he calls the “generalized fantastic,” the creation of unnatural worlds which become naturalized in the course of the narrative. I hope to discover in my project how science fiction and the fantastic are related and show that science fiction in many ways can be analyzed as a contemporary version of the fantastic, a version that incorporates scientific and fantastic ideas about 6 race in order to provoke a potentially critical hesitation over the construction and significance of racial identity. Another way that I would like to reconsider the fantastic is to analyze the notion of “hesitation” in relationship to identity and representation. Todorov defines hesitation as the moment in the text when the reader or character questions what is natural versus what is supernatural, and the result is that the category of the “natural” is rendered unstable. Considering the two ways that I am approaching the concept of fantasy in relation to identity – as a method of essentializing identity and as a narrative tool that questions identity – the fantastic notion of hesitation lends a unique perspective to analyzing identity as the interplay of the natural and unnatural. Can the moment of hesitation be given a psychological dimension in relation to identity; put another way, can hesitation be used to describe the way that people process identity’s instability? Can the interaction between the “real” conditions of racial identity and those which are imagined be likened to a Todorovian fantastic narrative, where certain events render the “real” an unstable, always fluid construct? Or is the fantasy of identity devoid of hesitation, and if so, how does it work to secure itself as “real”? Reading identity in this light adds another dimension to the representation of identity within science fiction or fantasy narratives, for if hesitation can be considered a part of the psychological processes surrounding identity, then what happens when it is also used as a tool to interrogate identity? These alternate perspectives on the fantastic will inform my readings of the work of critical race theorists and my analysis of various media texts. For example, while Schuyler’s novel might be categorized as the “marvelous” in Todorov’s lexicon, where the strange phenomenon of a 7 race-changing machine is accepted and explained within the narrative, the machine also introduces a fantastic hesitation towards the concept of race. Just as the characters in a fantastic narrative experience a hesitation towards the story’s events – are they real or not? – the characters in Schuyler’s novel must confront a similar tension between race as skin color, race as defined by society, race as biology, and so on. Placing the definition of race under scrutiny disrupts everything in the course of the narrative, from relationships to politics to the economy to notions of history and memory, which not only alters the narrative on a structural level, but also, for the reader, calls into question common assumptions about the world in general. Previous scholarly application of Todorov’s fantastic to film is rare, which is another lacunae that I wish to address. In “ ‘Like Unto a Leopard’: Figurative Discourse in Cat People (1942) and Todorov’s The Fantastic,” Tom Gunning analyzes the use of figurative language in both Val Lewton’s Cat People and in The Fantastic, ultimately arguing that the fantastic sets itself apart from poetry and allegory by incorporating figurative language into narrative. In Cat People, the main character’s status as human being or cat person is constantly in debate, and Gunning argues that the question of whether Irena is a cat or is like a cat introduces a Todorovian hesitation into the narrative. The use of figurative language also becomes a narrative strategy; Irena goes from being like a cat to actually turning into one. While Gunning goes on to discuss how Todorov distinguishes the fantastic from poetry and allegory, I would like to consider how the tension between the literal and the figurative within this fantastic narrative relates to identity. Returning to my previous discussion of the fantastic and identity, Gunning’s 8 isolation of figurative language encourages a slightly different way of relating identity to a Todorovian hesitation. Gunning asks, “The fantastic exists in the film precisely in the hesitation between like and is. Is Irena simply like a panther, or is she actually a panther?” 5 Can a similar question be extended to the question of race, where the tension between comparison and literal interpretation reveals the complex way that race is defined and functions in society? Perhaps such a question, when applied to racial representation, encourages a critical look at definitions of identity and their interplay between “essential” and “constructed” characteristics. For example, when examining black representation on screen, asking whether characters are black or are like black raises questions about the way blackness is defined culturally and in relationship to social, political, and historical factors, as well as other representations. Gunning gives brief mention to psychoanalytic interpretations of the film and the way that the psychoanalytic negates the fantastic by giving meaning to the fantastic’s supernatural events, also explaining that more work should be done connecting the film’s use of the fantastic and its psychoanalytic dimensions, particularly in relation to femininity. Focusing on the differences between like and is in a narrative in relation to identity will lead to new revelations about how identity works on a narrative level, but it also encourages a new way of examining psychoanalytic concepts of identification and subject formation. In my chapter on science fiction film, for example, I will examine the relationship of blackness to the concept of alienation; is blackness like alienation, or is it alienation itself? That query leads to a series of interrelated questions - about the alien’s 9 relationship to the science fiction text, about Marxist alienation, and about the role of race in the formation of subjectivity. Mark Bould also attempts to engage with the fantastic in a contemporary context, particularly trying to expand the boundaries of Todorov’s purely literary definition into a Marxist paradigm. After pointing out Todorov’s a-historicity and criticizing Rosemary Jackson’s attempt to define the fantastic as “subversive” using psychoanalysis, Bould goes on to create his own rough definition of what a Marxist theory of the fantastic would look like. His first step is to re-consider fantasy in broader social, economic and political contexts, along the lines of theorist Jose Monleon, expanding Todorov and Jackson’s limited understanding of subversion into one which relates the blurred line between the natural and supernatural to the political or moral upheavals of the time period. For example, in relation to Monleon’s reading of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, Bould says, “[Economic changes in the 19 th century] transforms our understanding of The Turn of the Screw as the hesitation identified by Todorov becomes a signifier of self- conflicted, contradictory ideology which is brought into focus by the new role of domestic servants in a class society which perpetuates myths of equality despite its fundamental exploitative economic relationships.” 6 The Todorovian hesitation in James’ novel - whether or not the governess is hallucinating or seeing ghosts – represents larger concerns about capitalism’s fantasies of equality: not only the “anxieties about servants and other subordinated groups knowing their proper place, but also of maintaining social hierarchy when everyone within is reducible, if not yet reduced, to her exchange value.” 7 Bould criticizes Monleon for using historical context to limit the interpretation of 10 fantastic texts, and his criticism leads to a more important question regarding the relationship between the fantastic and history; perhaps it is more helpful to consider both the fantastic and history as narratives that use and incorporate fantasy to different extents. Could the fantastic The Turn of the Screw be considered an exaggeration or highlighting of the fantasy or absurdity already present in the economic and class dynamics of nineteenth-century British society and the fantastic language used to describe this economic situation? The other facet of Bould’s Marxist theory is the incorporation of labor and commodity into the production of the fantastic text, as he considers much analysis of fantasy texts and their alleged subversion – he uses media studies approaches to fandom as his example –too easily incorporated into capitalist discourse. Within his analysis, Bould places the subject and its relationship to both labor and imagination at the center of his theory: “This is, of course, not to conflate the categories of fantasy and labour but to acknowledge the role of fantasy (in the sense of imagination and design) in human labour and the elements of labour (the construction in language, and hence in reality, of structures raised in the imagination) in the production of the fantasy text.” 8 Bould’s theory of the subject brings to light fantasy’s role in constructing a variety of identities in relation to social, political and economic contexts, and I will continue to explore his theory in my next section, about psychoanalysis and fantasy. Psychoanalysis and Fantasy In The Language of Psychoanalysis, J. Laplanche and J-B Pontalis define fantasy as an “Imaginary scene in which the subject is a protagonist, representing the fulfillment of a wish (in the last analysis, an unconscious wish) in a manner that is distorted to a 11 greater or lesser extent by defensive processes.” 9 The authors spend the majority of their entry outlining the various Freudian definitions of fantasy/phantasy, emphasizing the degree to which Freud focused on the relationship of phantasies to reality and imagination and to the different levels of consciousness (preconscious, unconscious, conscious). The authors explain Freud’s main definition of phantasy: “What Freud means in the first place by ‘Phantasien’ are daydreams, scenes, episodes, romances or fictions which the subject creates and recounts to himself in the waking state.” 10 This definition of fantasy has become a colloquial one in reference to a person’s flights of imagination, but as soon as the subject who is doing the fantasizing comes under scrutiny, the definition becomes more complex. In Freud’s account, fantasy and dreaming are similar, although occurring in different conscious registers, in that they represent an expression of repressed thoughts, feelings, or identities, and it is in this expression of the repressed that scholars such as Rosemary Jackson find similarities between fantasy literature and psychoanalytic fantasy – both are expressions of what has been hidden in either society or a person’s psyche. Mark Bould’s criticism of Jackson’s reworking of Todorovian and psychoanalytic fantasy is that the relationship is too simplistic and must be complicated by the consideration of contexts of both fantastic and psychoanalytic literature. Bould, throughout his article, is wary of the term “subversion,” both in structuralist and cultural studies contexts, for he feels that the radicalism inherent in the word must be justified by expanding the boundaries of what is considered "worthy” of analysis and by adjusting this analysis with consideration of the material and social conditions of production. 12 To return to the place of the subject within fantasy, Laplanche and Pontalis explain that Freud’s location of phantasy on all levels of consciousness indicate that “it is the subject’s life as a whole which is seen to be shaped and ordered by what might be called, in order to stress this structuring action, ‘a phantasmatic.’” 11 The subject is an active part of constantly creating these fantasies, and Laplanche and Pontalis’s language depicts the fantasmatic as a type of ongoing, internal narrative. They say, “In imaginary formations and psychopathological structures as diverse as those enumerated here by Freud, it is possible to meet with an identical content and an identical organization irrespective of whether these are conscious or unconscious, acted out or imagined, assumed by the subject or projected onto other people.” 12 Laplanche and Pontalis’s characterization of fantasy as a type of narrative process or scene, rather than the desire felt by a stable subject, is one way to complicate and broaden the relationship between the literary and psychoanalytic definitions of fantasy. Both types of fantasy are commonly described as a type of distance between reality and the unreal, whether it is imaginary or supernatural, but Laplanche and Pontalis’s definition of phantasy ascribes a fluidity towards the desiring subject that allows he or she to occupy several roles, positions or identities at the same time. The subject is not “real” and his or her fantasy is not “imaginary,” but rather both are part of the ongoing work of the phantasmatic, what Laplanche and Pontalis call the “mise-en-scene of desire.” 13 Laplanche and Pontalis’s interpretation of Freudian fantasy opens up the discourse between psychoanalytic and literary fantasy, and Mark Bould’s attempt to create a Marxist theory of the fantastic combines psychoanalysis and literary studies in a 13 very specific way. While Bould’s use of psychoanalysis echoes Laplanche and Pontalis in its complication of the desiring subject, Bould also proposes a relationship between psychoanalysis and the fantastic that considers the material conditions of production of both psychoanalytic and literary fantasies. Bould first takes on the Althusserian model of ideology and subject positioning, where ideology hails a concrete subject into existence, by deconstructing the notion of a concrete or stable subject. He says, “The subject, then, is not to be considered as a singular point, a monadic intersection, through which all hailings pass, but as a cluster or cloud of positions, constantly shifting and repositioning in response to each new hailing.” 14 Bould’s purpose in reclaiming the subject in this manner is to introduce the concept of agency – or the way the subject actively participates in fantastic work – into the psychoanalytic and literary definitions of fantasy, which he feels is overlooked by defining fantasy as an “eruption” of the unconscious (which again assumes a stable subject). Bould’s next step is to describe fantasy in terms of the psychoanalytic term “paranoia,” which the author feels links the categories of imagination and labor in a way that encapsulates both the psyche and fantastic literature. The paranoiac, to summarize rather crudely the conclusions of Freud, Lacan and their interpreters, creates an elaborate and delusional world around himself, where the various imagined phenomena have defined explanations and causality. Bould likens this process to the act of literary production: “If the Symbolic Order is indeed nothing more than a culturally sanctioned paranoid system, the act of imagining can be seen as playing upon the themes, structures, possibilities and constraints of that system with varying degrees of complicity and dissent.” 15 He distinguishes fantastic literature from fiction in general by 14 highlighting the fantastic’s emphasis on world-building and its disavowal of a relationship to the real, which, Bould goes on to say, is central to the form of fantastic literature and the basis of its market (people buy fantasy and science fiction novels because they create strange and mysterious worlds). Bould proposes his Marxist model and then suggests that it be applied to various fantastic texts, from novels to films, “which narrativise and thematise paranoia, ontology and subject formation.” 16 His model is helpful in thinking about the fantastic film, for film is a very particular and specific kind of commodity, and considering the material conditions of film production will affect the way filmic fantasy worlds are interpreted and analyzed. Bould succeeds in re-grounding the term “subversion” in relationship to the fantastic, but his theory about paranoia as a way of reconsidering fantasy leaves out one of Todorov’s main characteristics of the fantastic, the use of hesitation. Bould criticizes Todorov’s assumption that readers of fantastic literature are naïve and will oscillate between a natural and supernatural explanation for events, yet he fails to re-introduce the reader into his description of fantasy as paranoia. What does the Todorovian concept of hesitation look like in Bould’s paradigm? He alludes to a renewed conception of hesitation when discussing Jose Monleon’s theories of the fantastic, but what does hesitation become in a Marxist, commodity-oriented view of fantasy, particularly one based on the tightly woven world of the paranoiac? Can hesitation still be considered a liminal space that holds the possibility of subversion? My suggestions to solving this problem in Bould’s paradigm are two-fold. One is to focus specifically on the medium-specific aspects of texts, in my case visual media, in 15 order to determine what the relationship is between the reader/viewer and the text in question. To return to the previous example of Cat People, are there specific visual and aural conventions used within the film that heighten the viewer’s moment of hesitation about Irena’s status as either human or animal, and what is the relationship between these conventions and the film’s commodity status? The hesitation surrounding Irena’s identity is the film’s main draw, but there are moments that Tom Gunning alludes to, particularly near the end of the film, that render the question of Irena’s identity as unresolved and resist the film’s push towards a resolution. Bould says, “…paranoia can be used to describe the force which holds the fuzzily-determined subject together, the shuttling between the vast array of subject positions on offer, which must in some way be reconciled with each other if the subject is ever to feel unified or whole. This is the role of fantasising.” 17 Cat People seems to represent the fantasizing that Bould suggests, for the film, visually and narratively, shuttles between different explanations for events, and this narrative hesitation leaves Irena’s identity also shuttling between a variety of registers – human, feline, feminine, etc. In this manner the film’s hesitation is both a stylistic and thematic choice that leads to an interpretation of the film in terms of Irena’s representation as a woman in the context of 1940s discourses about gender; perhaps the use of the fantastic in the film speaks to the dissolution of fantasies of femininity in the wake of World War I and the onset of World War II. Using Bould’s formulations, we might argue that a woman in the 1940s experienced a similar kind of fantastic shuffling between gender norms and roles as her paranoid attempt to form a unified feminine subjectivity in a patriarchal society. But Bould would also claim that characterizing this 16 filmic hesitation as inherently subversive (what Bould is criticizing in Todorov and Jackson) would be too simplistic, considering that Tourneur consciously uses fantasy within the film’s narrative and therefore explicitly creates the film as a fantastic commodity. My second solution to Bould’s omission of hesitation from his final paradigm is the consideration of hesitation in relationship to identity within fantastic narratives, as I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. If Todorov’s definition of the fantastic is outdated, one way to reconsider it is in relationship to the representation of identity in contemporary science fiction and fantasy narratives. Bould criticizes the turn in literary and media studies towards a focus on identity politics, citing in particular one scholar’s description of alien abduction stories as similar to 18 th and 19 th century slave narratives, but a focus on identity reveals a fascinating way to consider the workings of both fantasy and psychoanalysis in contemporary media. Within Bould’s model of a tightly wrought fantastic and paranoid world, a hesitation towards the relationship between that world and “reality” (in the Lacanian sense of the Real) reveals a similar hesitation between the “real” and “imagined” aspects of identity in characters, and the question “is/are it/they real or not?” leads to a potential unmooring of long-held assumptions and representations of various identities. Fantasy and Critical Race Theory As I have indicated, fantasy can be defined in various ways, and while none of the aforementioned theorists focused solely on identity, the theme of subjecthood is crucial to generic and psychoanalytic facets of fantasy. Analyzing the work of critical race 17 theorists reveals more specific ways that psychoanalysis and fantasy can be used to investigate identity. Critical race theorists borrow from a variety of disciplines – sociology, law, media studies – to highlight and deconstruct the influence of race on society and vice versa. The work of critical race theorists adds a valuable dimension to the abstract conceptions of identity and fantasy previously discussed, for racial identity (along with gender and sexuality) plays out in very specific, material and tangible ways in society. One’s country of origin determines the legal definition of citizenship in America, for example, even though the very notion of national citizenship is already bound up in assumptions and abstractions; labeling the government’s definition of “citizenship” as arbitrary does not remove the material effects of this definition on the country’s citizens, both legal and illegal. In the section above, I explained Mark Bould’s Marxist paradigm for the fantastic, which takes into account material and social contexts of fantasy as a process, and the formation and representation of ethnic or racial identities provides an excellent case study for the active work of fantasy in society. One of the central debates in the study of racial or ethnic identity and society centers around questions of reality and fantasy – the status of racial identity as either constructed or essential. The critical race theorists that I will be focusing on in this section engage with this debate in varying degrees, although the majority of them agree that the “constructed v. essential” binary is misleading and an unproductive way of discussing identity. The psychoanalytic definition of fantasy as a tableaux or scene is one way of exploding this binary and incorporating both the “real” and fantastic elements of identity into discussions of identity formation and representation. If identity can be 18 accessed from multiple points and is in constant flux, then focusing on how subject formation occurs is crucial to understanding the function and place of race and ethnicity in society. The critical race theorists that I will be highlighting throughout this project use works of fiction, from visual media to theater to literature, that imagine the multiple ways that subjects are formed, and I would like to keep these applications of fantasy and identification in mind when I analyze the way that fantastic visual media access identity. I will begin this section with a discussion of theorists who use psychoanalysis in their analysis of identity and then move into a whole range of critical race theories that use fantasy to different extents to describe race. The scholars I will describe speak of a variety of identities, including ethnic, racial, gender and sexual, and while they specify them to particular contexts, the scholars also propose their theories work to describe larger processes of identification. David L. Eng’s study of Asian-American masculinity, Racial Castration, is one example of a critical race text that analyzes the different ways that an “abstract national subject of a unified and coherent national body” is created. 18 Eng’s work attempts to apply a corrective to the separation of categories of race and sexuality and instead focus on their intersections and how they borrow from each other, a move within critical race theory that defines identity in terms of multiplicity rather than singularity. Eng uses psychoanalysis to access this multiplicity, and one of the author’s methods is to analyze the presence of race within Freudian psychoanalytic theory, particularly in relation to the contexts of colonialism and imperialism. Within Totem and Taboo, Freud draws distinctions between the sexual development of “savages and half-savages” and those of 19 European descent, claiming that natives, being close to early man, have not developed an unconscious and instead lead their lives through action, not thought. Similarly, says Eng, Freud argues in “On Narcissism” that homosexuality must be repressed in order for heterosexuality to emerge, so homosexuals represent the same type of stalled development as the native or savage. Eng compares Freud’s arguments to embed sexuality within race and vice versa to contemporary moves within the field of psychoanalysis, asking the question, “How might we understand homosexuality and race to converge at the outside limits of the symbolic domain governed by norms of heterosexuality and whiteness?” 19 What I would like to point out in Eng’s descriptions of Freud’s essays is the author’s emphasis on the differences in temporality that accompany Freud’s theories of sexual development; the savage and the homosexual apparently exist “during Freud’s time” but not “in Freud’s time.” 20 Accompanying the imbrication of race and sexuality within psychoanalysis, then, is an almost science fiction narrative describing development as occurring in two different dimensions; Eng’s (and Freud’s) arguments involve the language of fantasy in the description of the process of identification itself. As I will discuss in subsequent chapters, new media theorists such as Alexander Weheliye will use this concept of alternate temporalities to describe how the use of sound recording technologies by various ethnicities challenges notions of modernity and race. Eng also mentions the Althusserian model of identification in his introduction to point out that identification happens on both imaginary (the symbolic order, as defined by Lacanian psychoanalysis) and material levels. He says, “While the formation of the 20 minority Asian American subject takes place on the material terrain of disparate social relations, the processes through which the marked Asian American male subject is interpellated and stitched into the national fabric are sustained through the register of an imaginary whose force of seduction and lure of fantasy create a fiction of identification as seamless equivalence.” 21 My focus in this study is on the “lure of fantasy” that Eng refers to and how the use of fantasy on a narrative and visual level in many ways exposes and deconstructs the fantasies that make up identification and that define the symbolic order. Eng’s use of an Althusserian model forms an interesting counterpart to Mark Bould’s Marxist theory of the fantastic. If, as Eng argues, Asian American identity (and identity in general) is formed by a combination of the imaginary and real social relations, then Bould’s theory about the fantastic and paranoia is a useful lens through which to examine the creation and representation of identity. Bould uses paranoia as a way to describe the work fantasy does in creating imaginary and unified worlds, and his use of the term “work” is tempered by the consideration of works of fantasy as commodities. If identity can be described in terms of paranoia, borrowing from experiences and external stimuli to create new worlds, then what holds these worlds together? This is another way of asking how a unified subject is created from a range of possible identities, with the added perspective of the identity as a type of commodity that circulates in society, has an assumed value, and is often divorced from the conditions of its production. Describing identity in the Marxist terms of Eng and Bould also characterizes the subject as having individual agency that is often limited by larger (hegemonic) forces, an important point to consider when this subject is placed in front of a film, television or computer screen. 21 Anne Anlin Cheng’s The Melancholy of Race focuses solely on this conflicted subject, specifically exploring the concept of melancholia and the Asian-American subject. As with many critical race theorists, Cheng borrows from film, literature and theater to support her analysis of melancholia among the racialized – members of society who are at the receiving end of racism. Her study tries to untangle racialized subjects complicated relationship to their own marginalization, and Cheng uses psychoanalytic terms to describe and analyze the interplay of desire, subjectivity and identity. She says, “While much critical energy has been directed towards deconstructing categories such as gender and race, less attention has been given to the ways in which individuals and communities remain invested in maintaining such categories, even when such identities prove to be prohibitive or debilitating.” 22 Cheng resurrects those ghosts in the rest of her book, plunging into the workings of desire and fantasy in the melancholic object, and her study into the complexity of racialized grief attempts to nuance the categorization of raced subjects as victims. Cheng’s position on psychoanalysis is important to my study in that she deploys it as a tool to read “intangible” cultural products such as literature and philosophy in a manner that reveals solid conclusions about subjectivity and identity. She says, “The problem, however, is that in trying to compensate for that history, we often sacrifice discussions of all the immaterial, pressing, unquantifiable elements that go into the making of ‘reality’ and end up with a very narrow definition of what constitutes ‘material’ history.” 23 Cheng also touts psychoanalysis as a method of moving away from the false binary of the “concreteness” of history and the “abstractness” of grief, 22 psychology, philosophy, etc.: “Far from inscribing essentialism, psychoanalytic thinking recognizes essentialism as but a guise of subjectivity.” 24 One of the ways that Cheng uses psychoanalysis to challenge commonly held notions in critical race theory is to discuss the interplay of desire and fantasy in two seemingly different works, David Henry Hwang’s play M. Butterly and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. In the fourth chapter of her study, Cheng analyzes the degree to which both works employ fantasies about race and masculinity and how the incorporation of these fantasies into narratives leads to varying political ends. In M. Butterfly, a play about a white man who takes on an Asian male as a lover, assuming he is a woman, there comes a revelatory moment when the Asian male, Song Lilling, drops his pants and reveals himself to his lover. The audience knows that Song is a man from the beginning of the play, and Cheng wonders at the fact that audiences continue to gasp at this pivotal plot point. The author argues that the shock comes not from the revelation of the “reality” of sexuality, but rather from the revelation that fantasy has governed what is real and what is illusory in Song and Gallimard’s relationship. Rather than exposing Gallimard’s “true” sexuality or Song’s “real” gender, the dropped pants signifies that both the real and the unreal are equally constructed through the use of fantasy; desire cannot be defined as the feeling between one stable human being and another, but rather is always fluctuating between fantasies of race, gender, sexuality, and power. The fluidity of desire leads Cheng to LaPlanche and Pontalis’s definition of fantasy as a process rather a particular kind of narrative content; as Cheng says about their definition of the fantasmatic, “In this account, fantasy does not have a target, an object per se; 23 instead, it is a mental process that works much like a tableau in which the ‘subject’ finds himself in multiple positions.” 25 For Cheng, M. Butterfly works well to illustrate the workings of the fantasmatic as a type of scene or tableaux, for Gallimard’s occupation of various positions – feminized, masculine, dominant, subservient, the fetish or the fetishized – is dramatized through the exaggerated and theatrical form of the stage play. The question that arises now is – how does the definition of the fantastic (or fantasmatic) as a scene with multiple subject positionings play out on a more subtle level in other texts, and what narrative or visual techniques encourage conceptions of identity as “stable” within this fluid tableaux? To go one step further, how does the definition of the fantasmatic as a scene apply to the actual scenes within film and television, and how can we then reconceptualize our ideas of identification and the representation of identity on screen? This Bridge Called My Back: The Anthology as Tableaux As I move into a more in-depth analysis of critical race theorists, I will be isolating elements within the text that are fantastic in nature. By showing that the theories use fantasy in their characterization and description of race and raced subjects, I hope to show that these theorists are narrating identity in a very particular way, just as filmmakers and writers narrate characters onto the screen or page. Both the authors of these works and their subject matter can be scrutinized as examples of identity formation and representation, and analyzing the form and content of these theoretical texts reveals the different ways that fantasy functions as a complex and fluid tableaux, with multiple positions and points of identification. 24 Criticized, lauded and thoroughly dissected, This Bridge Called My Back is a treatise about political mobilization around concepts of identity, a call to arms towards the white mainstream feminist movement, and a foundational text for critical race theory. The text marks a distinct move from the previously mentioned works in this chapter, for Bridge is a book that seeks to make a tangible intervention in the lives of women of color; while the other theorists I have mentioned are writing for a very specific audience, the authors of Bridge consider words to have a powerful effect on the world at large. Like David Eng and Anne Anlin Cheng, the authors of Bridge consider ethnicity alongside sexuality, but their theoretical moves are race-specific and political in nature, not focused on any abstract notions of identity. The female writers of Bridge consistently draw attention to the political, economic, social and aesthetic ramifications of race – Latina, black, Native American and Asian – as a lived, suffered and celebrated reality. Cherrie Moraga proclaims in her introduction, “The materialism in this book lives in the flesh of these women’s lives: the exhaustion we feel in our bones at the end of the day, the fire we feel in our hearts when we are insulted, the knife we feel in our backs when we are betrayed, the nausea we feel in our bellies when we are afraid, even the hunger we feel between our hips when we long to be touched.” 26 The collection is divided into six sections, based on six different themes, and incorporates essays, poems, experimental writing, and personal experiences into its format. What I would like to consider is mainly the form of Bridge as a literal example of phantasy as a tableaux, and the implications of this form to the subject or subjects that the text represents. The concept of the collection is in itself a kind of fantastic concept, 25 an imaginary bridge that is meant to represent the metaphorical connections between women of color and the backs of the women – their flesh, blood and tears – that have made these connections possible. As the foundation of the collection – a bridge – oscillates between being metaphoric and tangible, Tom Gunning’s isolation of the Todorovian figurative language comes to mind. Gunning defines the fantastic as the hesitation occurring between like and is, and while he is referring to the narrative content of a film, one can sense the same hesitation working within This Bridge Called My Back. An imaginary bridge forged from the real efforts of real women represents the problems and strengths of any identity-based movement – keeping up an imaginary unity in the face of multiple differences. The hesitation between like a bridge and is a bridge works the favor of the writers of the collection, though, for the multi-part structure allows its readers and writers to exist in this hesitation and use it to political ends. The collection’s six parts are as follows: a section about childhood (Children Passing in the Streets: The Roots of Our Radicalism), a section about personal experience (Entering the Lives of Others: Theory in the Flesh), a section about racism within the women’s movement (And When You Leave, Take Your Pictures With You), a section about other facets of identity including class and sexuality (Between the Lines), and finally, a section about writing itself (Speaking in Tongues: The Third World Woman Writer). The form of the collection allows the reader and the writer multiple points of access to the concept of “woman of color,” whether it is through philosophical meditation, personal experience, poetry, memory, letters, or stream of consciousness. In this way, This Bridge Called My Back represents the phantasmatic scene referred to by 26 Laplanche and Pontalis; the subject (the woman of color) is not fantasizing about what should or could be, but rather she is actively occupying multiple roles and identities at the same time. The method of access, as I mentioned above, is constantly changing, as are the roles that the hypothetical woman of color occupies – mother, writer, worker, fighter, victim, minority, among a myriad of other positions. As Norma Alarcon says, “The peculiarity of [Bridge’s writers’] displacement implies a multiplicity of positions from which they are driven to grasp or understand themselves and their relations with the real, in the Althusserian sense of the word.” 27 The emphasis that the writers of the collection place on the act of writing also forms a potential connection to fantasy in both the psychoanalytic and literary senses, for, as Freud, Laplanche and Pontalis, Mark Bould, Anne Anlin Cheng have all suggested, fantasy is both noun and verb, the passive product of active fantasizing. While Bridge does not explicitly reference “fantasy” as a genre, the use of a structured, fantasmatic form suggests that Bridge is an example of Bould’s model of fantasy as paranoia. The contributors are responding to a context that treats the woman/feminist/lesbian of color in absurd ways, and the result is a tightly wrought world with multiple points of access, a work that represents the combination of imagination and labor that goes into a work of fantasy (in Bould’s definition). I am reading Bridge’s form through the lenses of phantasy and fantasy, but other theorists have also attributed fantastic meanings to the content of Bridge and other works of Chicana feminists, most famously postmodern feminist Donna Haraway. Haraway, in “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” equates the woman of color with a cyborg, an entity that has 27 the freedom to adopt as many identities as she wants. Paula L. Moya states the comparison as such: According to Haraway, the primary characteristic of the cyborg is that of a creature who transcends, confuses, or destroys boundaries. Chicanas, as products of the intermixing of Spaniards, Indians and Africans, cannot claim racial or cultural purity. Their neither/nor racial status, their unclear genealogical relationship to the history of oppression (as descendants of both colonizer and colonized), and their ambiguous national identity (as neither Mexican nor fully “American”) give Chicanas their signifying power within the terms of the cyborgian myth. 28 From the other readings about ethnic identity that I have analyzed in this section, it seems that the fluidity of identity that defines Chicanas can be attributed to most ethnicities, and the indeterminate nature of Haraway’s characterization is what bothers Moya and other critics of Haraway’s work. Haraway’s science fiction appropriation of minority identity reveals the fantasy inherent in postmodern theories of identity – the existence of identity on various dimensions – but it also ignores the contexts that are so important to understanding identity. As Moya says, “Because she lacks an analysis of how the social categories that make up our social locations are causally relevant for the experiences we have, as well as how those experiences inform our cultural identities, Haraway cannot conceive of a way to ground identities without essentializing them.” 29 The multi-part nature of Bridge suggests the complexity of the woman of color without reducing her to merely a postmodern construct, the bits and pieces of a variety of identities haphazardly mashed together to form a whole as is suggested by Haraway’s fantastic paradigm. I point out this example mainly to show how fantasy can operate in a theory of identity and how critical race theorists attempt to ground that fantastic, post-race notion in social, 28 historical and political contexts; this is a debate that will continue throughout my discussion of critical race theory and appear in different forms in my analysis of visual media. Rather than discount Haraway’s theories, though, I would like to consider how her use of a science fiction metaphor – the cyborg – is actually a helpful illustration for the fantastic nature of identity. Haraway, as Paula Moya points out, claims the margins as a location of agency and power, and the “chimeric” monster that is the cyborg, existing in the boundaries and liminal spaces of the world’s binaries, represents both the post- feminist woman and the woman of color in her analysis. Where Haraway’s theory is useful is in her discussion of writing and its importance to the cyborg identity. The author says, “Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism.” 30 The recognition of language and writing, particularly in the work of Cherrie Moraga, emphasizes that the fantasy of identity is accessed in multiple ways through the construction of narrative; while Moya associates a kind of ease to the cyborg’s power, a closer reading of Haraway’s theory reveals that the cyborg’s constant recreation of itself, through writing, highlights the work involved in both creating and challenging identity. Norma Alarcon makes a similar point, without referring to the cyborg paradigm, in “The Theoretical Subjects of This Bridge Called My Back” by claiming that within the feminist movement, the Anglo-American woman assumes a kind of unified self-consciousness that ignores the myriad ways that subjects are formed; the writers of This Bridge Called My Back challenge this notion by writing 29 from multiple positions as women of color, queer women, underprivileged women, Third World women, etc. The recognition that identity, in all its facets of both the imaginary and real, is accessed through language and narrative is important to my project as a whole, particularly in relationship to visual media; how does the language of film, television or new media affect the way that identity is “written”? Can the technological aspects of Haraway’s cyborg – its mishmash of both the high-tech and the human – apply specifically to the technology of film, television and digital media and the way identity is represented in those media? Speculative Non-fiction: The Use of Fantasy within Critical Race Theory The multi-part, multi-voiced form of This Bridge Called My Back exemplifies the psychoanalytic definition of fantasy as a kind of scene, with multiple access points, and the collection raises questions about the relationship between race as a tangible reality and the fantastic ways that particular reality is represented. Other texts in Critical Race Theory use fantasy more explicitly in their content, and their deployment of fantastic narratives or themes to explain theories about identity suggests, as I have explained in the rest of this chapter, that identity itself involves fantasy in its development and constitution. For the rest of this chapter, I will explain examples of Critical Race texts and theorists that use notions of fantasy to highlight the way that race plays out in society; isolating these fantastic moments sets the scene, so to speak, for the analysis of science fiction and fantasy genres within television and film. George S. Schuyler’s Black No More is based on the premise that blackness can be eradicated through the use of scientific procedure. The author was lampooning current 30 movements within African-American populations – hair relaxing procedures, for example – but as he carries out his fantastic idea to a conclusion, the hypothetical implications of erasing race reveal a social commentary about the way race and society are intertwined. In terms of visual tropes, Schuyler makes use of the dichotomy between seeing and being seen in his treatment of race; Max Disher, the novel’s protagonist and the first recipient of the Black No More treatment, consistently encounters inner and outer conflicts between his “black” interior and white exterior. Disher uses his white skin and knowledge of black culture for his own personal and financial success, but the surface/depth dialectic causes conflict throughout the rest of American society. People begin to question whether exterior whiteness eradicates interior blackness, and their confusion is heightening by the fact that white couples begin having black babies; for Schuyler, biology and reproduction reveals the “fact” of racial essence. For all of Schuyler’s seeming desire for a world where race does not exist, he spends a great deal of the novel fetishizing the visual implications of skin color. America’s paradoxical obsession with blackness by the end of the novel exemplifies the idea that race, although ultimately meaningless, is still something to be outwardly recognized and pervasive enough to determine multiple facets of American society. Reading Black No More through the lens of Todorovian fantastic results in a more in-depth analysis of the novel’s use of race as a kind of scientific and thematic starting point for sociological commentary. The novel lacks what Todorov isolates as the primary element of pure fantastic literature – a “hesitation” towards and within the text, a moment of hesitation on the part of the character and the reader with regards to the events 31 in the narrative. But near the end of the book, Todorov explains that the genre has changed – this second characteristic is moot – and fantastic events have become the rule in contemporary literature, rather than the exception. Entire worlds are founded on bizarre and imaginary principles, and characters, like Gregor and his family in Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” adapt quickly to the absurdity rather than question its nature. 31 In several ways Black No More follows this model, basing its narrative structure, character motivation and subject matter on an exaggerated, slightly absurd scientific procedure. The rules of Schuyler’s world remain similar to ours – time, mortality, and physical laws all function in a manner that we are familiar with. The only difference lies in race, where black has become white at a furious pace that changes the entire foundation of American society within years. Here is where Todorov’s notion of “pan- determinism” – radical upheavals of causality in fantastic texts – becomes important, for the fact that black is now white changes the functioning of economics and politics, as the platforms of political parties change, labor issues come to the fore, and American industry suffers from the lack of black workers to fill certain blue collar positions. In Todorov’s strict structuralist definition, in a fantastic narrative world events and objects always have the possibility of significance, no matter how random or inconsequential they seem. 32 While actual objects in Schuyler’s text are not marked by otherworldly powers, the physical fact of race becomes imbued with a charge that can only exist in the fantastic world; Crookman’s treatment represents the breakdown of boundaries between the physicality of races and between their various social, political, economic and moral implications and consequences. Ironically, the treatment is supposed to create a utopia 32 where the physical fact of whiteness engenders possibilities, much like the otherworldly powers of characters in pure fantasy, but instead the racial crossover reveals how deeply intertwined race is with various other American institutions; new barriers arise for Americans, regardless of their “original” race, due to a general uncertainty about the place of blackness in society. It is in this thwarting of a utopia (although a different ideal is reached in the end of the novel) that Schuyler’s work becomes fantastic in the manner of much Latin American literature, for the interlacing of the uncanny within reality produces a pointed critique of America’s foundation. Race pride groups and other social institutions generally marked “good” are targeted as much as groups that encourage prejudice, calling into question assumptions we have about the “proper” functioning of government, race relations, and social practice. The other manner in which Black No More invokes the fantastic is through the point of view of its main character, Max Disher/Matthew Fisher. Todorov describes some of the narrative content of fantastic stories, often motivated by mental or physical metamorphoses in characters, as “the transition from mind to matter has become possible.” 33 He relates the transformation of perception-consciousness to both madness and drugs, and I would argue that occupying Max’s dual racial consciousness has a similar effect. Todorov says, “The multiplication of personality, taken literally, is an immediate consequence of the possible transition between matter and mind: we are several persons mentally, we become so physically.” 34 Max is white on the outside, but he is always conscious (as are we) of the fact that he is playing a role; his frank conversations with Bunny, his occasional longing for the black community, and his fear 33 of discovery all indicate that his subjectivity is split between blackness and whiteness (and whatever definitions we attribute to those in the context of the novel). Identifying with Max’s two positions – being black, acting white – gives the reader insight into the experience of passing, but it also functions in a fantastic manner of allowing Max and the reader to occupy two places at once. We are given the rare opportunity to experience life as a black man and see the world react to him as a white man, and it is this play with the concept of “sight” and “insight” that prompts radical change in Schuyler’s world. As I mentioned before, the visibility of Max’s whiteness versus the hidden, “more real” nature of his blackness structures the novel’s satiric take on race relations, but it also goes further to radically re-imagine the world as we know it. Todorov explains that themes of vision in fantastic literature are usually related to the transcendence of physical sight and the development of inner, deeper sight, and Schuyler’s use of Max’s point of view leads to a new insight for the characters on the issue of race. But aside from Schuyler’s idealistic end, the play with subjectivity and vision also leads the reader toward a heightened awareness of the interplay of race and society; what “could have been” raises questions about “what is.” Schuyler’s novel is fiction that trespasses into Critical Race Theory, but contemporary theorists also involve themes of the fantastic or science fiction in their analyses of race and society. The question that arises is how and why race, which is manifested tangibly in almost all facets of American society, can be explained using the tropes of fantasy, and what this relationship reveals about the way race is represented within visual manifestations of fantasy. In Derrick Bell’s exploration of racism in 34 America, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism, the author begins the book with an epigraph explaining his title: “Black people are the magical faces at the bottom of society’s well. Even the poorest whites, those who must live their lives only a few levels above, gain their self-esteem by gazing down on us…” 35 His musings reflect how fantasy is ingrained into the everyday reality of race, and the rest of the collection attempts to convey the dire situation of race in America with a mix of fact, fiction and fantasy. The contradictions that Schuyler described in his novel are startlingly echoed in Bell’s introduction, which lays out the specific facets of American society that make up “racial schizophrenia.” Bell outlines the ways that poor whites, who have more in common with poor blacks, ultimately identify with other whites and the racist politics of white politicians. He also explains that whites support blacks when it is beneficial to do so, and the battle against racism must never be resolved in order for American society to continue functioning. Bell’s use of words such as “illusory” in relation to black equality suggest why he follows his dire introduction with a series of fictional vignettes that involve fantasy and attempt to impart information. The last, most famous story in the collection – “The Space Traders” – centers around an alien visit, where the aliens offer to solve America’s problems in exchange for its black population. Like Schuyler, Bell’s tone is satirical as he examines the consequences of this visit to a future America that is racially divided and on the brink of disaster, but Bell’s conclusion is much more pessimistic than Schuyler’s fairy-tale assimilationist finish. What is important to note is that Bell believes strongly in the tangible presence of race in American institutions, yet he approaches analysis of race and 35 society through fantasy and science fiction. The concept of race schizophrenia is fantastic in itself – for one population to be treated in wildly different ways is absurd in a society that upholds equality as a value. The use of blackness as a way to scapegoat and guarantee white dominance is as elaborate a construction as a fantasy narrative, which uses a fictional starting point to create an entire world; Bell argues in his introduction that racism is written into the very systems that attempt to address it. As “The Space Traders” shows, the only way for Bell to address the “permanence” of racism is the fantastic removal of an entire race, a concept that as ludicrous as the notion of prejudice, and the irony is that in relation to white society, the aliens are not so different from the black Americans they are removing. Paul Gilroy’s Against Race takes another position on the essentialism/postmodernism debate, one that is more in line with current trends in CRT to move beyond race. The very premise of this move is fantastic in nature; it is the theoretical counterpart to Bell and Schuyler’s fictional, black-less worlds. The “post- race” theorists deem that further discussion of race is detrimental to critical race theory, and their theoretical moves focus on culture, politics or biology rather than solely on race. As society moves towards a science fiction present, advances in biotechnology and digital media can either obscure or negate the importance of identity; in a world of online profiles and user names, identity becomes a kind of blank slate ready for manipulation. Subsequently, post-race theorists direct their attention to race’s declining importance to society, a view that many criticize as a fantastic way of overlooking the manifestation of race in all levels of American society. 36 Gilroy’s main argument is that a focus on “raciology” is actually a throwback to the fascist and racist mindset of the Nazis. His book retraces the history of modernity and its relationship to race, ultimately proving that any consideration of race – biological, political or cultural – can only lead to a society based on ethnic absolutism and division. Gilroy says, “The undervalued power of this crushingly obvious, almost banal human sameness, so close and basically invariant that it regularly passes unremarked upon, also confirms that the crisis of raciological reasoning presents an important opportunity where it points towards the possibility of leaving “race” behind, of setting aside its disabling use as we move out of the time in which it could have been expected to make sense.” 36 Yet Gilroy is careful to distinguish his argument from previous appeals to liberal humanism; his is a move away from racial specificity to human specificity rather than “the lofty habits and unamended assumptions of liberal thinking.” His ultimate goal, he says, is “a restoration of political culture.” 37 Gilroy’s humanism throughout the rest of the book is carefully connected to specific ways of reconceptualizing ideas of humanity and universalism. In his last chapter, though, he makes a theoretical appeal to ideas of the future and extraterrestiality that is distinctly fantastic in nature. Gilroy is conflicted about the meanings he associates with science fiction iconography and blackness. On the one hand: appealing to scientific and interplanetary visions of the future and blackness gives issues of race a global dimension and redefines black modernity (the future being a concept that was denied to blacks in the past). As Gilroy says of television’s first interracial kiss, on Star Trek, “It endorsed the inevitable conclusion: because race consciousness is so manifestly arcane, 37 its victims and others who perceive the open secret of its residual status must be closer to advance interplanetary travelers than they are to its deluded earthly practitioners.” 38 But on the other hand, the use aliens, space travel and mysticism in black narratives also conveys a deep sense of frustration with the present. Gilroy seems to bemoan these science fiction tendencies as “irrationalist techno-scientific” fantasies that do not engage practically with racial problems but rather serve as powerful reminders of how race cannot be rationally reconciled with today’s reality. He says of science fiction movies where men of all races bond to rid the Earth of some interplanetary menace, “Though the mechanisms of the connection remain unclear, the proliferation of films in which men bond transethnically in the face of the greatest danger represented by aliens, invasions, comets and threatened planetary conquests does affirm something of the radical powerlessness produced by a chronic inability to reduce the salience of racial divisions in social, economic and cultural life.” 39 Gilroy’s invocation of science fiction narratives and iconography brings up several points that are crucial to my study. First of all, the author’s points about the presence of mysticism and science fiction fantasies in already formed philosophies such as fascism and The Nation of Islam suggests that a departure from reality in some form or fashion is called upon to depict or explain the irrationality present in society. Second of all, this use of fantasy can function as a means of escapism or a potent symbol of a population’s suffering in the face of extreme prejudice, and beyond that, icons of science and the future can help reconceptualize modernity in relation to ethnic populations. My goal, in the following pages, is to investigate these icons of the future and fantasy in 38 relation to representation, looking closely at the power Gilroy associates with them and trying to discern their political implications. 39 Introduction Endnotes 1 George S. Schuyler, Black No More ( New York: Modern Library) 1999. 2 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975) 93. 3 Ibid., 139 4 Ibid., 33. 5 Tom Gunning, “Like Unto a Leopard: Figurative Discourse in Cat People (1942) and Todorov’s The Fantastic” Wide Angle 10.3 (1988), 31. 6 Mark Bould, “The Dreadful Credibility of Absurd Things: A Tendency in Fantasy Theory,” Historical Materialism 10:4 (2002), 68. 7 Ibid., 69. 8 Ibid., 77. 9 J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1967) 314. 10 Ibid., 316. 11 Ibid., 317. 12 Ibid., 317. 13 Ibid., 318. 14 Bould, 77. 15 Ibid., 80. 16 Ibid., 81. 17 Ibid., 80. 18 David L. Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001) 3. 19 Ibid., 14. 20 Ibid., 7. 21 Ibid., 23. 22 Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) 7. 23 Ibid., 27. 24 Ibid., 28. 40 25 Ibid., 120. 26 Cherrie Moraga, et. al, eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983) xviii. 27 Norma Alarcon, “The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American Feminism,” Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras, ed. Gloria Anzaldua (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1990) 356. 28 Paula M.L. Moya, Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) 28. 29 Ibid., 32. 30 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991) 176. 31 See Todorov, 157-175. 32 Todorov, 112-113. 33 Todorov, 114. 34 Ibid., 116. 35 Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism. (New York: BasicBooks, 1992). 36 Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000) 29. 37 Ibid., 29. 38 Ibid., 344. 39 Ibid., 355. 41 Chapter 1: Alienating Identification: Science Fiction Film and Black Identity In the previous chapter, I touched on the ways that fantasy and race are intertwined within both psychoanalysis and critical race theory. Moving from the theoretical to the tangible involves applying my conclusions to actual texts, seeing how fantastic modes represent the complex intersections of reality and fantasy within identity itself. Can Todorov’s notion of hesitation be applied to the interplay of reality and fantasy within identity – for example, can self-consciousness or the awareness of ethnic identity come with a Todorovian moment of hesitation? The tension, Todorov explained, between supernatural and logical/realistic explanations within a fantastic text creates a radical potential; the reader will potentially be made aware of the constructed nature of the text and of his own process of reading. To extend the question to identity, when Schuyler’s hero encounters the same conflict in relation to his blackness – the essential versus the constructed nature of his identity – he subsequently becomes conscious of the processes of racialization, the forces that convene to define “black” in American society. The extension of this notion of the fantastic involves reconsidering identity as a kind of narrative that we tell ourselves and others through the use of various media. In terms of visual media, a definition of the fantastic becomes more complex. Todorovian fantasy works on the basis of printed words and a reader who must confront the ambiguity of those words. In the realm of the visual, ambiguity takes on a different resonance; the line between fantasy and reality in a film or television program is generally rendered obvious through the use of special effects or camera-work. The use of classical Hollywood realism has been challenged and deconstructed by film theorists who 42 identify themselves as avant-garde, Marxist, Third Cinema, or postcolonial. As Mark Bould says, the critiques leveled against naturalism were “concerned with the ways in which deeply ideological representations typically normalized and naturalized dominant ideology while appearing merely to reproduce neutral images of reality.” 1 From this perspective, formal and narrative avant-garde and experimental techniques have revolutionary potential, and moving away from “reality’ was deemed to be the best way to represent human existence and its complexities. In this chapter I will begin to explore visual representations of race in fantastic films, looking specifically at the moments of disruption or hesitation in narrative and visual contexts that lead to a reconsideration of racial identity. On the one hand, I will examine the way the science fiction icons and conventions of John Sayles’ 1984 film, Brother from Another Planet, along with their relationship to the historical and cultural contexts of 1980s, Reagan-era America, destabilize codes of black representation and lend insight into the fantastic aspects of racial identity itself. On the other hand, I will also exemplify how the science fiction genre in a different context – 2007’s I Am Legend, a contemporary big-budget film with star power – can reinforce the same dominant narratives about black identity that black speculative fictions unsettle, particularly in a political climate where blackness has paradoxically become a contested site of both belonging and exclusion. The spectator of fantastic media, I would argue, oscillates between alienation and identification; I find these two concepts helpful umbrella terms for my project as a whole. The phrase “alienation” has a specific relationship to the genres of fantasy and science fiction, where authors make an effort through characterization and mise-en-scene to 43 alienate viewers and readers from the environments of other worlds, dimensions or futures, and give them critical perspectives of their own worlds. As black science fiction author and critic Samuel Delany says, “…anyone who reads and writes science fiction seriously knows that its particular excellence is in another area altogether: in all the brouhaha clanging about these unreal worlds, chords are sounded in total sympathy with the real.” 2 Both terms also have roots in psychoanalysis where they describe a subject’s relationship to his or her psyche and the outside world. Psychoanalytic film theorists from Christian Metz onwards use the oscillation between identification and alienation to theorize how a viewing subject reacts to projected images. Finally, the concept of capitalist “alienation” has a Marxist dimension, defined as the divorcing of products from the labor which produced them; the “alien” referring both to the object’s relationship to the worker and the worker’s feelings toward the object. In terms of race, the most egregious example of this kind of alienation is slavery, involving a literal devaluing of human life in the interest of producing surplus values. 3 In terms of representation, reading visual media through the lens of Marxist alienation produces a Todorovian hesitation within narratives of race and identity, leading to a consideration of race as an alienated/ing object and disrupting ideologically dominant portrayals of race and ethnicity. Science fiction and fantasy texts both encourage identification with and alienation from themes and larger ideas, and my goal is to connect these various theoretical dots of subjecthood, Marxist theory and the viewing experience to speculative media. 44 Alienation and Identification: Reception Studies The notion of the “gaze” is essential to both film studies and Critical Race Theory; in both fields, the act of “seeing,” both literally and metaphorically, is essential to producing various identity meanings. As Samuel Delany says, “one of the strongest manifestations” of racism “is as a socio-visual system in which people become used to always seeing blacks with other blacks and so – because people are used to it – being uncomfortable wherever they see blacks mixed in, at whatever proportion, with whites.” 4 Delany’s words form a fascinating counterpart to his earlier discussion about real and unreal worlds, for he implies that racism is a system that functions similarly to science fiction in its play with the “natural” and “unnatural” and its operation on the level of the “socio-visual.” The fact that both science fiction and racism revolve around an investment in the visibility of otherness (an alien landscape, an alien skin color) suggests that speculative modes allow for a manipulation of racial and ethnic signifiers that naturalistic fiction cannot accomplish. Jane Gaines notices the intersection between film studies and Critical Race Theory when she comments: “Double consciousness, [Du Bois] says in the familiar quotation, is that ‘peculiar sensation’ that ‘sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of the world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.’ Suddenly one of the foundational statements in race theory appears as film theory, addressing the question of the execution of power through the trajectory of the eye.” 5 Du Bois’s “double consciousness” relies primarily on the visual and the speculative to understand the complex role of Black Americans in society, and as we will see later, his imaginative use of vision and 45 recognition are useful tools for analyzing racial representation within science fiction. The gaze of the black film spectator, as Gaines exemplifies with James Baldwin, is almost fantastic in nature as it oscillates between the identifiable and the alien on the screen, subsequently hesitating between the identifiable and alien within racial identity itself. Looking closely at how these dual processes of alienation and identification play out in science fiction provides a useful paradigm for film spectatorship in general, an idea that few film theorists have taken up, particularly considering the neglect that the science fiction genre has received in general. Concepts of alienation and identification also inform theories of race and spectatorship in film, raising questions about how spectators relate to representation on screen and engaging in the important similarities and differences that can be drawn between on- and off-screen identities. Race has generally also been neglected in the field of psychoanalysis and in psychoanalytically inspired theories of spectatorship. The intersection, therefore, of race, science fiction and psychoanalysis seems ripe for use in not only forming a more nuanced notion of spectatorship in general, but also for lending insight to theories of racial identification/alienation and the radical aesthetic and political potential inherent in science fiction cinema. One of the fields of study that has brought together race and reception studies is scholarship about race movies from the early 20 th century. Research about these films’ form, content, and spectatorship draws helpful conclusions about race, identification and film. For example, Jane Gaines uses the experiences of author James Baldwin with the 46 screen stars of the 1930s and 40s to begin a discussion of race and spectatorship. Baldwin mentally transforms the white screen stars of his childhood into black images, turning a black woman into Joan Crawford and seeing himself in Bette Davis. Baldwin uses fantastic language to describe his experience; he “hesitates” (in a Todorovian fashion) between making Davis like him and not like him at the same time: “I gave Davis’s skin the dead-white greenish cast of something crawling from under a rock.” 6 Baldwin conceives of Davis in a way that is monstrous and alien, using horror and science fiction imagery to characterize his viewing position, which speaks not only to the way spectatorship embodies the dual poles of alienation-identification, but also to the way that race itself is imbricated within this relationship. Research into early race cinema and its subject(s) takes on an almost science fiction tone, for the encounter between black populations and film technology in many ways confounds and confuses conventional notions of Western modernity. Not only do Black cultural uses of technology unsettle the association of modernity with whiteness, but film technology allows Black artists to visually and aurally represent culturally and racially specific perspectives – alternatives to the white gaze associated with American mainstream cinema. Fantastic race films, on the part of both spectator and filmmaker, formally articulate differences between white and black gazes, and in the process highlight the material and cultural reasons behind Du Bois’s “double consciousness.” Black Speculative Fiction and Visual Culture Racial or ethnic identity, in the speculative realm, can become an estranged concept, divorced from familiar bodies and locations. Identity’s mutability in the work of 47 speculative authors becomes deployed in a manner that is critical of convention and the status quo, not lost in the postmodern melee and talk of social constructionism that both race and film theorists bemoan. The authors of black speculative fiction, as I mentioned in the previous chapter, often function as critical race theorists in their conscious engagement with race and society (albeit on a narrative level), and their work emphasizes the degree to which identity is a narrativized object, a thing which changes each time it is theorized or hypothesized about, an ephemeral fiction that these authors prove to be real and tangible at the same time. I will begin my exploration of the visual dimension of race, representation and the fantastic by briefly reviewing key authors of black speculative fiction who use a sharp and visionary “gaze” to deconstruct Black identity and treat it as a contested site for the “real” and imagined facets of racial identity. George S. Schuyler’s Black No More is an early example of black speculative fiction that I read through the lens of the fantastic in the previous chapter. Looking closely at Schuyler’s use of visual tropes highlights the ways that his use of science fiction, in its exploration of the possibilities and dangers of science, further estranges blackness from its conventional definitions. In Schuyler’s preface, he mentions news he read about a Japanese doctor who claimed to be able to turn white any member of any race, and the author relates this phenomenon to the growing, profitable science of “chromatic perfection,” including hair straighteners and skin lighteners. Schuyler’s hyperbolic narrative counterpart to this phenomenon is Dr. Crookman’s Black No More treatment, which is described by its creator as “accomplished by electrical nutrition and glandular control.” While seemingly vague, Crookman’s procedure relies firmly on 48 scientific principles, with no magical or otherworldly overtones. It is in the evocation of actual science that the familiar becomes strange, for if Crookman’s treatment is merely an extension of race-changing procedures in the world of beauty, then those actual procedures become alien and bizarre. Consider Schuyler’s description of the procedure: He quailed as he saw the formidable apparatus of sparkling nickel. It resembled a cross between a dentist’s chair and an electric chair. Wires and straps, bars and levers protruded from it and a great nickel headpiece, like the helmet of a knight, hung over it. The room had only a skylight and no sound entered it from the outside. Around the walls were cases of instruments and shelves of bottles filled with strangely colored fluids. He gasped with fright and would have made for the door but the two husky attendants held him firmly, stripped off his robe and bound him in the chair. 7 The chair, the straps, the levers, the fluids and the attendants, recalling some combination of beauty parlor, doctor’s office and death chamber, cast an ominous tone over the procedure, and Schuyler uses his description to evoke the odd and eerie nature of any procedure, beauty or otherwise, that would attempt to change a person in a superficial and purely aesthetic manner. His invocation of science fiction conventions casts the act of race-changing itself in a grotesque light, as does his play with the concepts of seeing and being seen. Max Disher’s initial confusion about his inner blackness and outer whiteness represents the alienation of the subject from his own body, a common theme in science fiction, and the “creation” of white skin creates the same kind of social panic associated with invasion stories such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The invasion of the “normal” by an alien presence – in this case, white skin – challenges the meaning of “normal” and the racial hierarchies that Schuyler’s America has internalized. Black No More lampoons America’s fascination with skin color in the early 20 th century and Schuyler uses science fiction – a genre then in its infancy – to accomplish his 49 critical goals. As science fiction and fantasy genres developed over the rest of the 20 th century, authors of black speculative fiction deployed its conventions more self- consciously, recognizing the ongoing alienating effect the modern world had on its raced citizens. Science fiction and fantasy respond to their more immediate contexts, and authors of black speculative fiction express criticism of cultural alienation through fantastic narratives, characters and settings. In order to understand speculative genres as critical and analytical works, it is therefore crucial to study the environments in which these texts were created. For example, Black No More was written during the Harlem Renaissance, a time commonly associated with growing race consciousness and black cultural production. As Jane Kuenz mentions in her article about Black No More, Schuyler was critical of the essentialist doctrines of racial identity – black and white – emerging during the early 20 th century, and structured his satire around famously race- conscious figures such as Du Bois and Marcus Garvey. But Black No More also incorporates political and economic anxieties from the time period into its fantastic premise; both American colonialism in Asia and increased African-American migration to the North exacerbated concerns around defending definitions of “white” and “American”. In addition, specific aspects of modernity led to an unsettling of racial identity in America; urban industrialization presented a different kind of alienation for the Black labor force and generated tension between class and race concerns, which Schuyler satirizes in his caricatures of race and union leaders and their competing goals. Scientists also began looking into biological specificities of race, leading to “racist arguments” 50 about intelligence, reproduction, and eugenics, 8 the same arguments that would in the next decade morph into horrific forms of experimentation in Germany. Schuyler’s fantasy was a tool for satirizing the intellectual and artistic trends he witnessed around him, but it also mobilized science fiction iconography in response to modernity’s destabilization of racial codes and hierarchies. The use of black speculative genres in the later part of the 20 th century responded even more directly to political contexts, specifically a conservative shift in American politics that economically and culturally disenfranchised Black populations. Octavia Butler’s Kindred, although published in 1979, was set in 1976, the bicentennial anniversary of American independence. It is perhaps fitting that the celebration of American perseverance, which was inextricably tied to black slavery, would be the context for a novel that fantastically links 1976 to antebellum Maryland through the adventures of an African-American woman. Kindred is a time-travel fantasy, and what its narrative conceit suggests is a larger time travel story: the relationship between slavery and contemporary African- American life. As Guy Mark Foster points out in “Do I look like someone you can come home to from where you may be going?: re-mapping interracial anxiety in Octavia Butler’s Kindred,” the work of Octavia Butler is important in the context of post-Civil Rights black writing; Butler and other authors such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison focus on the memory of slavery and its effects on the lives of black women. 9 And in the invocation of memory, fantasy becomes crucial to imagining the relationship between the past and present, and several of these texts oscillate between realist and fantastic conventions in order to depict the complex interaction of memory and lived experience. 51 Kindred tells the story of Dana, a black woman who lives in Los Angeles in 1976. She finds herself randomly transported to antebellum Maryland to repeatedly save the life of one of her white ancestors, Rufus, who will start Dana’s family line with one of his slaves. The irony that Dana must protect a while slave owner in order to ensure her own existence stands alongside a realistic account of the conditions of slavery, and the bodily harm that Dana suffers along the way, the most extreme being the loss of her arm, represents the psychic and social harm that slavery has inflicted upon African-Americans. The convention of time-travel in Butler’s novel depicts the interconnected nature of desire and race, but Kindred also uses the futuristic convention of time travel to deal with and overcome the past, a common narrative device in black speculative fiction. Science fiction and fantasy are used as generic vehicles to alienate black characters from their present in order for them to identify with their collective diasporic pasts. Eight years later, Toni Morrison’s Beloved also returned to ghosts of the past, literally, in a fantastic story about ex-slaves, trauma and confrontation with memory. Beloved is often dissected as a literary attempt to confront the past trauma of slavery through speculative methods; as Barbara Christian says in her article, “Fixing Methodologies: Beloved,” “African-Americanists are examining Beloved from the perspective of its revisioning of the history of American slavery, the way Morrison is able to probe those terrible spaces that nineteenth-century slave narrators could not write about.” 10 Morrison investigates those “terrible spaces” through a combination of fantasy, mysticism, and, ostensibly, the graphic emotional reality of her characters. The fantastic nature of Morrison’s Beloved provides theorist Satya Mohanty with examples of how 52 personal experience can be imagined and “remembered” in different ways, as he analyzes the relationship between Paul and Sethe in light of his theory of cultural identity and lived experience. Mohanty argues that Paul’s renegotiation of morality involves both a “cognitive” and “emotional” effort, and the consideration of black identity (his and Sethe’s) in light of social and historical contexts. Paul must consider how his own identity as a man is insufficient to evaluate Sethe’s position as a woman. Looking at her personal experience he must use her identity as a woman/mother and an ex-slave to come to a more objective understanding of the decision to kill her child. What Mohanty wants to emphasize is that the meaning of identity changes according to experience and context, but it does not have the open-ended nature that the postmodern theorist proposes. Instead, identity must be challenged and tested like a theory, and Morrison’s speculative structure in Beloved allows her to imagine the theoretical possibilities and limits for representing Black identity. The novel’s context must also be scrutinized alongside its theoretical mobilization of identity; Morrison, writing in 1987, was also engaging, on some level, with a conservative shift in American politics away from social justice and issues of race or class, towards a focus on the individual as responsible for his or her own success. Accompanying this divestment of government resources from America’s poorest communities was an influx of new immigrants, a growing black middle class, and ideas about “reverse discrimination” preventing white males from securing jobs. Morrison resurrects slavery’s horrors during a moment when the government was trying to disavow social responsibility and racial inequality in favor of individualist rhetoric, 53 and she centers her fantastic response, remarkably, around an individual who must, for her survival, engage on multiple levels with the cultural weight of slavery’s past. As exemplified by Beloved, I would like to propose that the presence of science fiction and fantastic elements within certain narratives performs the kind of test that Mohanty suggests, an evaluative test of identity’s relevance to historical, social, political conditions. As discussed in the previous chapter, it is the use of a fantastic hesitation in the narrative of Cat Woman that questions the meaning of the category “woman,” particularly in relation to traditional representations of woman on screen and the historical context of 1940s horror films. In a completely different manner, the fluid fantastic form of This Bridge Called My Back uses different writing styles and forms to evaluate the category of “Chicana,” in this case testing that identity against personal experience and historical matrices. If we treat identity as a theory, to be tested against particular conditions in order to judge its relevance, and we consider that the psychoanalytic definition of phantasy is the subject’s play with identity and desire, then perhaps we can understand why science fiction and fantasy conventions and modes offer discursive spaces for the exploration of identity. The genres are defined by the creation of new worlds and beings, so identity takes on a different valence within these alien landscapes; for example, in Schuyler’s speculative world, where blackness is literally displaced from the body, black identity becomes a theoretical construct that is tested against the fictional historical and social conditions of Schuyler’s 1930s America. Although Schuyler’s conclusion about equality regardless of skin color is ultimately conservative, his use of science fiction places the concept of “blackness” under scrutiny, 54 measuring it against politics, biology, and the scientific/industrial boom of the early 20 th century. All of the texts that I have mentioned so far have been written works, but they share a fascination with imagery and visual tropes. The connection between the visual and the fantastic is one that I briefly mentioned in my first chapter in relation to Tom Gunning’s analysis of Cat People and Mark Bould’s work on the contemporary fantastic, and the rest of my project will be a thorough application of the concepts I have explicated – the fantastic, critical race theories, alienation v. identification, and identity as a theory – to visual media. Alienation in Science Fiction Vivian Sobchack encapsulates the twin poles of alienation and identification in her definition of science fiction as a genre: “The SF film is a film genre which emphasizes actual, extrapolative or speculative science and the empirical method, interacting in a society context with the lesser emphasized, but still present, transcendentalism of magic and religion, in an attempt to reconcile man with the unknown.” 11 She dissects a plethora of science fiction films from the 1950s and 1960s in terms of their strangeness and familiarity, drawing connections to film history, science, and politics. In chapter 2 of the book, Sobchack focuses solely on the environment and iconography of the science fiction film, noting its oscillation between the large and the small, progress and regression, paranoia and comfort: “…in every SF film there is a visual tension which exists in such earnestness in no other genre – a tension between those images which strive to totally remove us from a comprehensible and known world 55 into romantic poetry and those images which strive to bring us back into a familiar and prosaic context.” 12 For example, the icon of the spaceship in science fiction films fulfills both requirements of alienation and identification; it can resemble real machinery and function as a mode of transport, but it performs feats generally unknown to the world of science and transports man to places and times far beyond Earth. As Sobchack argues, defamiliarizing the familiar calls the world around us into constant question, not only imbuing film as a medium with a sense of wonder, but also questioning the foundation of science and technology. One of the sections of Tzvetan Todorov’s The Fantastic concerns “themes of the other,” which the author describes as narrative devices and plot details that alienate man from his own desire, making him a stranger to himself. 13 The characters that occupy the strange spaces of science fiction represent these “strangers in a strange land,” for their encounters with the alien introduce unfamiliarity into their relationships to each other and themselves. Sobchack outlines some of the basic elements of the “traditional” alien in the science fiction narrative, again drawing attention to its similarity and difference from its human counterparts. She says eloquently, “To give such imaginative visual realizations voice and function is to make [aliens] comprehensible and reduce their awesome poetry to smaller human dimensions; they exist most potently on the screen in a state of suspension, of pregnant possibility, of potential rather than realized action.” 14 Ranging from the monstrosity of alien figures in films such as Alien (1979) to entirely unremarkable aliens in films such as both versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers 56 (1956, 1978), the figure of the alien stands as an embodiment of alienation and identification for both spectators of and characters in science fiction films. The use of alien figures as deformed versions of humans can be quite evocative in films, generally suggesting paranoid responses to scientific developments, illness, and political or social upheaval. 15 What Sobchack and Scott Bukatman both argue, though, is that in light of genetics, new technology, and the general postmodern celebration of surface over substance, the term “embodiment” has a different valence on and off the science fiction screen. 16 If, as Bukatman and Sobchack (to utopian and dystopian ends, respectively) argue, the body has been rendered fragmented and indistinguishable from technology and science, then identity and consciousness also become theoretically fluid and fractured. If difference in postmodern science fiction is either eradicated or splintered into an all-encompassing heterogeneity, then essentially identification or “sameness” becomes the main component of the spectator’s relationship to the screen. But Sobchack does not address in-depth specific facets of identity, such as race, gender and sexuality; identity considered in these terms casts science fiction texts in a different light. As mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, facets of identity can become “estranged” when introduced into science fiction or fantasy narratives and tested in the manner of Mohanty’s postpositivism, bringing to light the interplay of identification and alienation within identity itself. Alienation, Science Fiction and Marxism Marxist alienation is defined in a variety of ways, most commonly as the alienation of workers from the products they produced. As The Dictionary of Marxist 57 Thought points out, alienation, in its colloquial or psychological meaning, can refer to a disorientation or hostility to the environment. A more complete definition combines both of these aspects and extends the definition into the human being’s relationship to self: There are many forms in which man alienates the products of his activity from himself and makes of them a separate, independent and powerful world of objects to which he is related as a slave, powerless and dependent. However, he not only alienates his own products from himself, he also alienates himself from the very activity through which these products are produced, from the nature in which he lives and from other men. All these kinds of alienation are in the last analysis one; they are different aspects or forms of man’s self-alienation, different forms of the alienation of man from his human ‘essence’ or ‘nature’, from his humanity. 17 Alienation, then, combines economic conditions with identity, claiming that participation in a capitalist society results in an isolation from the products a person has produced, fellow workers, the environment, and, subsequently, a person’s sense of self. The fact that man or woman can somehow be “alienated” from identity complements my application of Todorovian hesitation to issues of race, considering that race or representations of race can be one of the “inimical” forces that assaults the alienated citizen. The concept of Marxist alienation is a useful tool for describing how race can be actively and continuously produced, in political, social, economic and cultural ways. In science fiction, the “alien” often stands as a powerful metaphor for different kinds of disenfranchisement, and considering the way the two definitions complement or supplement each other provides even more support for the use of science fiction and fantasy as “testing grounds” for issues of identity. In fact, as Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. discusses, both Marxism and science fiction, one philosophical/economic and the other generic, are concerned with imagining other, 58 better worlds by altering conditions in the present – a concentrated focus on the concept of “utopia.” Marxist criticism of science fiction took off primarily in the 1970s with the publication of Science Fiction Studies and the work of Marxist sci-fi writer Darko Suvin, and the goal of both the criticism and creation of science fiction was to unearth and examine the “critical utopia” that science fiction presents. Cisicsery-Ronay, Jr. says, “Articulated most fully by Bloch, this utopia is simultaneously a wish-dream of a happy and enlightened social life, and a tool with which to identify and attack the ideological obstacles to achieving utopia.” 18 One of Darko Suvin’s contributions to science fiction theory, as pointed out by the author, is the concept of “novum”: The novum is the historical innovation or novelty in an sf text from which the most important distinctions between the world of the tale from the world of the reader stem…The novum is a product of material processes; it produces effects that can be logically derived from the novum’s causes, in the material and social worlds; and it is plausible in terms of historical logic, whether it be in the history of technoscience or other social institutions. 19 Csicsery-Ronay goes on to explain that sci-fi critics such as Carl Freedman criticize Suvin’s strict categorization of science fiction as that which encourages critical thought, for Suvin’s definition excludes more popular examples of science fiction works. Freedman turns Suvin’s category, which applies to the narrative and form of science fiction, into a more general application of the concept of “utopia.” Csicsery-Ronay explains, “Science fiction in this sense is the genre whose essence is critical utopian imagining, and thus even nonfictional critical theory might be considered a form of sf, thereby extending the conception of sf and science-fictionality beyond the boundaries of literary genre to encompass philosophical theory.” 20 Expanding on Suvin’s strict definition of science allows theorists such as Freedman and Csicsery-Ronay to define 59 Marxist thought and other philosophical works as “science fiction” in that they lay out specific ways to ideologically re-imagine the world. In this sense, critical race theory’s deployment of fantasy and fantastic concepts, as discussed in the previous chapter, is the use of a critical utopia to assess how race functions on social, political and ideological levels. The combination of critical race theory and speculative fiction in collections such as Dark Matter and Derrick Bell’s “The Space Traders” support the idea that some aspects of critical race theory are science fiction in the way they speculate on the future realities of identity. The Brother From Another Planet: A Case Study of Two Kinds of Alienation In The Brother from Another Planet, an alien in the form of an African-American man lands in the Atlantic Ocean, just off the shore of New York City. John Sayles’ film traverses the Harlem landscape through the perspective of Brother, the black alien, who is mute and has a talent for fixing electronics. Brother encounters a variety of characters and situations in his journey, all the while pursued by two men in black who are allegedly Brother’s owners from his home planet. As Bould explains, the alien in most science fiction films represents a threat to and/or the displacement of racial difference onto species difference. Sayles plays with this convention by reversing the direction of this displacement; rather than metaphorically depicting racial conflict as a war between species, the alien in Brother is a black man, from outer space, who compounds his alienation by exploring the unfamiliar landscape of Harlem. 21 Bould argues that The Brother from Another Planet’s main criticism is that commodity culture and the commodification of desire are the foundation of African-American oppression, claiming 60 that the film’s postmodern landscape of “curious and beautiful” trash, which Sobchack claims as lacking effect, is actually a pointed critique of the capitalist condition. The Brother from Another Planet was made in 1984, a date not only associated with Orwellian nightmares, but also situated in the historical and social context of the Reagan-Bush administration, a time considered equally nightmarish for Black Americans, the poor, and inner-city residents. The film’s activation of both urban space and dual notions of alienation speaks to the actual alienation and disenfranchisement of the black community by the government, and, as Mike Davis says, it was the science fiction films of the 80s that recognized the horrific effect of Reagan’s social and economic policies on the city: “Hollywood’s pop apocalypses and pulp science fiction have been more realistic, and politically perceptive, in representing the programmed hardening of the urban surface in the wake of the social polarizations of the Reagan era.” 22 What Davis refers to as the “post-liberal” shift in government policies is a divestment of resources away from welfare and social reform and a focus on punishment and vilification instead; as Davis discusses at length in City of Quartz, the conservative shift of the 1970s and 80s led to a rise in gang membership, which subsequently turned specific Los Angeles neighborhoods into virtual police-states. Tricia Rose specifies these conditions to a postindustrial New York City, describing how rap and hip-hop responded to the cuts in social service spending, housing crises, and shifts to a service economy by incorporating the city into lyrics and beats. She says of media portrayal of New York at this time, “Depictions of black and Hispanic neighborhoods were drained of life, energy and vitality. The message was loud and clear: 61 to be stuck here was to be lost.” 23 Brother’s muteness in the film is evocative when placed against the context of this disenfranchised city, for, as Rose points out, “Telecommunication expansion, coupled with corporate consolidation has dismantled local community networks and has irrevocably changed the means and character of communication.” 24 Rose points to hip-hop as a “voice” that could overcome these new and often silencing shifts in modes of communication, and ironically, Brother’s silent science fiction journey through Harlem achieves a similar kind of articulated critique. Sobchack says of the relationship between aliens and humans: “To maintain not that ‘aliens are like us,’ but rather that ‘aliens are us’ is to assert and dramatize a relation of similitude – one that can be reversibly articulated as ‘We are aliens’.” 25 This shift in the ideology of science fiction films is what Sobchack claims has led to the genre’s recent conservatism. Sobchack’s language recalls Tom Gunning’s discussion of metaphor and the fantastic in Cat People, where the oscillation between “like” and “is” leads to a destabilization of narrative; Gunning says of the monsters of horror films, “Their figurative nature calls into question the everyday and infects fictional narrative with the dangers of poetry or allegory.” 26 Sobchack argues the figurative nature of the alien is removed from contemporary science fiction films, which function on the level of the literal rather than the metaphoric and therefore become decidedly less transgressive than their earlier counterparts. Sobchack’s assessment of contemporary science fiction leaves out the influence of race in The Brother from Another Planet, which adds a different facet to the relationship between “aliens are like us” and “aliens are us.” The film’s narrative supports a reintroduction of the fantastic by oscillating between the various meanings of 62 blackness and alienation; the fact that the Brother is an alien but looks like a black man suggests that blackness is metaphorically alien in the science fiction sense of the word, but literally alien in terms of socioeconomic and cultural ostricization. A Todorovian hesitation therefore infuses the film’s representation of race as the metaphor of the “alien” inscribes itself into Brother’s experience of Harlem and interaction with its residents; the viewer must take a moment to contemplate how different Brother actually is from his human counterparts. Hence Mark Bould’s reading of the film becomes even more poignant in consideration of the main character’s race. Bould reads the last shot of the film as an iconic representation of the forces of capitalist alienation that have led to Brother’s entrapment. Considering the hesitation between Brother’s status as “like” an alien or actually an alien, the film creates new associations between the alienation of capitalism and the alienation of blackness. By activating the liminal space between the “like” and “is,” the character of Brother provides a material basis for the black community’s isolation, suggesting not just that black Americans are affected by alienating capitalist forces, but also that capitalism’s commodity fetishism – in Brother’s case drugs, alcohol, video games and an image-based culture – literally divorces black Americans from society. If we consider the concept of alienation in its Marxist sense, it is the separation of the forces of labor from products; those products circulate throughout society with a life of their own, divorced from the hands, time, sweat and blood that went into their production. Bould’s analysis of Brother’s reaction to the plethora of imagery in modern society suggests that one of the film’s critiques is of the image, which travels through society, unmoored from historical 63 and social contexts; Brother falls in love with Malverne, the nightclub singer, through her images, an act which is directly related to his involvement in the alienating act of sex without intimacy. In a way, Malverne and the other Harlemites function on the same level as these unanchored images, for they circulate in a system where meaning is derived from money. Malverne is merely a pawn in a nightclub circuit controlled by a pimp-like manager, although she alludes to a more meaningful singing career in her past, and the youth that Brother sees ravaged by drugs are also mere pawns in a larger drug circuit controlled by rich white men. Judy Cox quotes Marx’s early writings in her article about alienation, “'The alienation of the worker means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently of him and alien to him, and begins to confront him as an autonomous power; that the life which he has bestowed on the object confronts him as hostile and alien.” 27 In this way, the black Americans of Sayles’ movie have little control over their lives, which are governed by larger forces, and therefore are wholly alienated from society. Without the power to sculpt the world around them, the residents of Harlem in Brother are subject to forces beyond their control and therefore also subject to an alienating and hostile world. 28 By reading a science fiction film through the lens of Marxist alienation, Bould effectively highlights the dual meanings of the word “alien,” and introducing Todorovian figurative language into Bould’s reading emphasizes race and identity as major facets of the “alienation” structuring the film. Brother is an alien from another planet who must be introduced to human society, and he becomes more familiar with his surroundings by a series of sometimes humorous, sometimes tragic events. But as Gunning points out, the 64 play of figurative language in the fantastic makes the film’s narrative develop from the metaphoric to the literal; Brother looks like a black man, suggesting that the black man is like an alien, and he eventually becomes alienated from the isolating factors of his environment. When the fantastic in this film is associated with the relationship between race and the two meanings of alienation, then the narrative goes beyond the flattening effect of late capitalism that Sobchack suggests; Brother is not “as human and as alien as any alien-nated human extraterrestrialized in Harlem.” 29 He is an alien whose resemblance to a black American raises specific and transgressive associations between the black community, alienation and definitions of identity. Alien Bodies and Spaces Throughout Brother, Brother manifests physical characteristics and abilities that distinguish him as alien, particularly a more sophisticated sense of sight, and the film’s thematic use of vision, along with its mise-en-scene, embodies the difference within Du Bois’s “double consciousness” between seeing and being seen. Both Ziuddin Sardar and Sobchack emphasize that the figure of the alien works to familiarize and encourage identification, whether it is through his own traits or through his contrast to surrounding humans. Brother, to some extent, activates some of these structures of identification. On the surface, Brother looks like a young black man, blending well into the Harlem community where he finds himself. And while the viewer knows he is an alien, his experience of Harlem feels like a form of tourism, where a neophyte becomes familiar with a strange land. The viewer understands the phenomenon he encounters – the obsession with imagery and commodity that Bould points out, the devastating effect of 65 drugs, infatuation and desire, and even Brother’s plight as a runaway slave – and that makes his journey through the film identifiable. But small details mark Brother as alien, as well, which makes oscillation between the two meanings of “alien” visually and narratively apparent. Brother loses a leg in the beginning of the film and it hangs as a bloody stump as he emerges onto the New York shore. Bould connects Brother’s loss of limb to the slave narrative alluded to later in the film: “Either he has lost his foot in the crash or, as his later comparison of himself to a picture of a runaway slave implies, he has severed it in order to remove a shackle.” 30 Brother’s injury also recalls the loss of Dana’s arm in Kindred, and as a visual image is an even stronger manifestation of the arduous journey both characters take across physical and metaphoric borders. Unlike Dana’s very human loss of an arm, Brother is able to heal and re-grow his leg using a glowing orange light from his hand, already marking his physicality – black on the surface – as different. His three-toed foot is revealed to be clawlike, and later in the film he reveals the ability to pop out his eye and use it as a camera, splitting his consciousness between two places at the same time. These marks upon Brother’s physicality make him “alien” to the viewer and endow his body with the possibility of being beyond human. Constant close-ups of Brother’s wide- eyed stare along with these “alien” markings characterize his perspective as one that is both familiar – stranger in a stranger land – and unique. The moment when Brother pops out his eye confirms the unsettling nature of his physicality, literally defining his vision and consciousness as expanded, and the association of Brother’s perspective with one that ‘sees more’ both literally and figuratively, makes his gaze at the end of the film even 66 harder to read. Is he staring through the chain link fence as a black man, trapped by the forces of capitalism, or as an alien, enclosed by the strangeness of humanity? Or is it the combination of the two, afforded by his new familiarity with his environment and the realization that his similarity to his surrounding humans is what makes him an alien all over again? Brother’s removal of his eye to watch the black community suggests a modification of Du Bois’s double consciousness, where the use of his alien eye (which oscillates between being “like” and “is” black) gives Brother more insight into the material forces at work within and outside the black community. Being both an alien and black man gives Brother the perspective necessary to help the black community; through a science fiction convention he is afforded insight into, rather than alienation from, black identity. In Brother, for example, the Brother finds a job fixing video game machines, and in one sequence, he looks on as a customer describes her addiction to the fast-paced nature of video games. As she talks, the camera cuts to shots of the game itself, where digitized spaceships and aliens flit across the screen, recalling the initial shots of the film when Brother’s ship malfunctions and falls to Earth. The video game girl is equally estranged from her surroundings as Brother is, which Sayles conveys by alternating screen shots of the game with the wide-eyed stares of both Brother and the game-player. The world becomes similarly topsy-turvy both when Brother takes drugs, and when he notices the poster of Malverne for the first time. Brother stops short in front of a wall covered in advertisements for Malverne’s performance, and the camera uses a repeated shot-reverse-shot between Brother’s gaze and Malverne’s face to convey his growing 67 identification with heterosexual desire. The sequence then develops into a series of sexualized images that Brother notices around him, generally black women in suggestive poses, and while the sequence is recognizable as a standard form of montage, seeing them from Brother’s perspective makes the omnipresence of sexualized imagery overwhelming and alienating. When Brother tries to enter Malverne’s nightclub and is denied entry since he cannot pay the $15 cover charge, he wanders the streets despondently until stumbling upon a young teen’s leftover heroin. After getting high, he travels through a Harlem that glows red, accompanied by a Haitian guide who explains the black community’s problems through an enlightened monologue; the fact that Brother’s guide is an immigrant hints at another kind of journey (not intergalactic) that also results in cultural alienation. This sequence, combined with the sexual montage that preceded it, truly renders the Harlem community as an alien landscape, marked with children stealing a car, prostitutes, and a wildly dancing homeless black man. While Sobchack argues that this kind of “dispersal” of the film’s narrative focus across the urban landscape detracts from the science fiction film’s potential for social commentary, Bould counters that using video games, drugs and sex to represent alienation visually conveys the film’s central criticism of capitalism. I would like to argue, in turn, that this dispersal works both formally and thematically, and rather than negatively affecting the film’s content, the flattening of the mise-en-scene encourages a different kind of reading of cinematic space. Laplanche and Pontalis define the “phantasmatic” as a “mise-en-scene of desire,” 31 bridging the distance between fantasy and fantasizer and attributing the desire associated with fantasy to an active and 68 constantly shifting subject. Perhaps the way to analyze contemporary science fiction and its “excess” of imagery is as a visual manifestation of Laplanche and Pontalis’s phantasmatic, as different points of access for an unstable subject into a film with unstable meanings. Sobchack says, “Being itself is decentered and dispersed, and the identity of both spectators and characters again becomes constituted as ‘terminal’ – flattening residual psychic depth into the visibility of convulsive activity displayed on complex space.” 32 But taking the fantastic depiction of Brother’s alien as a black man into consideration, the spread of imagery across the mise-en-scene allows for the expansion of the representation of both blackness and alienation. Flattening the space leads to an incorporation of the characters into the mise-en-scene, so Brother’s Harlem surroundings as well as his black American/alien form leads to an expanded tableaux for identification. The environment’s fluctuation between the familiar and the strange encourages the occupation of several subject positions at the same time; from digitized blobs to enticing billboards to a red-glowing Harlem, the spectator is not necessarily overwhelmed by the barrage of images, but rather forced to make connections between black identity and commodity culture, technology, sexuality and the urban landscape. The transgressive potential of the film’s science fiction milieu becomes even more apparent when considering the ideological shift of urban spaces during the 1980s. One of the examples of the “post-liberal” ethos in Los Angeles, Mike Davis argues, is the change in the city’s architecture and design, which not-so-subtly destroys public space in the interest of separating rich from poor, suburban from urban, and white from minority: The old liberal paradigm of social control, attempting to balance repression with reform, has long been superseded by a rhetoric of social warfare that calculates 69 the interests of the urban poor and the middle classes as a zero-sum game. In cities like Los Angeles, on the bad edge of postmodernity, one observes an unprecedented tendency to merge urban design, architecture and the police apparatus into a single, comprehensive security unit. 33 Sayles’ reconceptualization of urban space highlights the oscillating inaccessibility of the metropolis, its constant shift between inviting and hostile, by portraying Harlem as a science fiction landscape seen through the eyes of a black alien. Brother’s isolation and fear effectively conveys an experience of being alienated not only by a city’s other occupants, but also by space itself – “psuedo-public” buildings, parks, and neighborhoods. This reading of the postmodern city adds yet another subject position to the expanded tableaux of Brother’s science fiction space, countering Sobchack’s “flattening” of space by resurrecting the harsh boundaries that define the post-liberal, Reagan-era inner city. Recalling Mohanty, I would argue that in Brother, the flattening and fragmenting of the mise-en-scene works with the morphing of the Brother’s body in a manner that tests black identity against this science fiction landscape to suggest new definitions of blackness. The film attacks the viewer with a barrage of images – digital scenes from arcade games, shots of Harlem, and advertisements – and Brother responds to this barrage with confusion, but also with a sense of control. When he wants to monitor the drug trafficking in a neighborhood, he pops out his eye and uses it as a camera; he later presses his eye into the hand of a wealthy businessman to show him the devastating effects of drug trafficking on the inner-city. While the film manifests the connection between alienating commodification – drugs as an extreme case – and black identity, Brother’s ability to expand his vision suggests a solution, albeit simplistic, to the social 70 and institutional forces that are destroying the black community. The film’s suggestion of a new kind of “vision” stands in stark relief to the new kinds of surveillance employed in the 1980s inner-city. As Davis describes in relation to Los Angeles, the use of surveillance technology in the city took on a science-fiction like quality, involving futuristic ground and aerial vehicles, new camera technology, and input from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 34 Vigilance and an expanded perspective, symbolized by Brother’s eye, are offered as measures to protect the community, and using Brother’s eye as a marker of his “difference” connects the theme of vision to the concept of alienation. If Brother and we, as viewers, encounter a fractured and fragmented view of the city, then the film claims that there are ways to overcome this state of alienation and to achieve control over an unfamiliar urban landscape. The fact that the solution involves the alien abilities of a black(ish?) protagonist suggests that social change must come from both inside and outside the community, and that a new cityscape requires a new kind of sight, one that can “see” the effect of outside forces on the structure and functioning of a minority community. The Black Science Fiction Star: Will Smith as Case Study In The Brother from Another Planet, Sayles creates a science fiction world with a lone black protagonist, and that protagonist’s blackness becomes one of the visual signifiers within the film. Sayles’ film is marked by a low-budget aesthetic that makes Brother’s journey through the Harlem landscape even more evocative, particularly considering Sayles’ focus on realism in the rest of his oeuvre. The Brother from Another Planet is a small-budget film, with few known actors, that turns a critical eye on the issue 71 of race in the neoliberal American inner-city. The majority of mainstream science fiction films, particularly in the contemporary era of CGI and digital filmmaking, use expensive special effects to create the elaborate worlds, technology and life forms that the science fiction milieu demands. Both the narrative and critical focus of these films is often on their big budgets or sophisticated special effects, and the depiction of race and identity within these high-concept Hollywood films tends toward the stereotypical and hegemonic. Considering this context, a black protagonist is rare within the genres of Hollywood action or science fiction, but black actor Will Smith has starred in four major science fiction blockbusters of the past 11 years: Independence Day (1997), Men in Black (1998), I, Robot (2004) and the most recent iteration of the “Last Man on Earth” cycle, I Am Legend (2007). Smith, in all of these science fiction/action hybrids, plays a representative of state authority marked by rebelliousness, an everyman who must break the rules in order to save humanity. I would like to consider how issues of alienation and identification play out within a set of science fiction films whose protagonist is identified as black in the off-screen world, yet has his blackness explicitly disavowed in his on- screen performances. In this section, I will examine specifically how I Am Legend deploys race in ways that raise questions of difference in a world where difference has theoretically been erased. In a way, Brother and Smith’s character, Robert Neville, are similar in their isolated states, and while Brother’s gaze is foregrounded because he is an alien, Neville’s perceptions and reactions are equally privileged because he is a scientist. Despite the “stranger in a strange land” narratives of both, I Am Legend is a text that 72 places the black protagonist in tension with the non-human, without explicitly acknowledging the issue of race; on the other hand, Brother offered blackness itself up for inspection. Smith’s unacknowledged blackness, supposedly incidental to the potential utopias/dystopias represented in these science fiction films, actually functions as a key subtext to the film’s focus on technology, science and identity. Smith also adopts, in all of the above films except one, a dislike but grudging acceptance of the role both science and technology play in the worlds he occupies. As I will discuss in later chapters, his characters generally strive for a “realness” against the backdrop of advancing technology (or, in the case of Legend, science gone awry), and a large part of these characters’ authenticity comes from Smith’s rarely-mentioned black masculinity. However, while the film is part of the repressive machinery of Hollywood, its black hero is unable to manage the contradictions he raises within the science fiction landscape. In two of the four science fiction films in which Smith has starred, he has been paired with a white male co-star who takes over part of the role of hero. In Smith’s two most recent science fiction ventures, I, Robot and I Am Legend, he represents more of a stand-alone figure against threatening forces, although in I, Robot he has the grudging eventual support of Dr. Susan Calvin, after the robots’ mal-intents have been confirmed beyond doubt. 35 In I Am Legend, the 2007 adaptation of Richard Matheson’s novel of the same name, Smith’s isolation from society is taken to an extreme, as he is, for the majority of the film, the only human being left after a biological apocalypse. While Smith’s characters in his other films battle the threat of humanity’s destruction, whether 73 through science gone awry or extraterrestrial menaces, Robert Neville of I Am Legend engages with the aftereffects of an already-erased human population. The history of I Am Legend’s 3rd journey to the screen already speaks to the racially-charged nature of this science fiction/horror narrative. Matheson’s original story involves the battle between a scientist, supposedly the last real human on Earth after a biological pandemic, and the leftover zombie-vampire mutants who demand his destruction. There have been two previous screen versions of Matheson’s novel: The Last Man on Earth (1964), starring Vincent Price, and the more famous cult-classic The Omega Man (1971), with Charlton Heston, and in both versions, the lead character – the “last man” – is white. The Last Man on Earth brings the low-budget horror film mythology of Vincent Price to the role of Robert Neville (named Robert Morgan in the film), which adds a campy subtext to the role and emphasizes the use of horror within this predominantly science fiction tale. The Omega Man, made in 1971, has more implications for my analysis of I Am Legend, considering its Los Angeles setting, its year of production, and its contradictory and complex racial politics. The politics of the time period heavily influence the depiction of The Omega Man’s zombies, depicting them as a radical counterculture group, a fitting depiction considering Heston’s highly publicized conservative beliefs. Rather than mindless and animalistic, the zombies become a kind of organized religious cult called “The Family” who band together to destroy books, art and technology in order to bring civilization back to a state of innocence. As Jeff Bond says, “Their Gothic vampire characteristics were largely excised — reduced to a fear and hatred of light, which forces them to stay in the 74 shadows and emerge only at night.” 36 The racial dynamics of the film are as muddled as its politics; the zombies are represented as “extremely white” with chalky faces and white irises. The ringleader of the zombies, Matthias, is always flanked by his right-hand man, Zachary, whose blackness is even more emphasized by the chalky residue used to turn him into a zombie and the white Afro peeking out from under his hood. Zachary states his politics clearly in the beginning of the film, calling Heston’s apartment a “honky paradise,” but Matthias rebukes him and tells him to forget the “old ways” and “old hatreds.” The other predominant black character is Lisa, Heston’s love interest, a militant black woman whose gestures and dialogue speak to the popularity of the blaxsploitation films of the time period. She is stereotypically portrayed as sexy and sassy, and her inclusion, as mentioned by Jeff Bond, was meant to draw black audiences to the film. Beyond a nod to identity politics, though, Lisa’s presence in the film further highlights the film’s confused depictions of race. Lisa becomes a zombie near the end of the film, removing her scarf to reveal a chalky complexion and white eyes. While all the zombies look extremely pale, Zachary and Lisa’s lightened skin looks even more unnatural and forced, drawing the spectator’s attention more to their differences from, rather than similarities to, the rest of the zombie mob. Two discourses of whiteness – heroic and diseased – are mobilized within the narrative of The Omega Man; whiteness is explicitly associated with illness, but it is Heston’s heroic whiteness that is supposed to save the world. The film’s pointed reference to the zombies’ white skin and eyes, as opposed to any other determining features, associates whiteness with both disease and the loss of individuality, factors 75 which are even more apparent when the “disease” affects Lisa, Zachary and Lisa’s brother. At the same time, Heston brings an almost otherwordly whiteness to the film because of his legendary mythic and religious film roles. The film depicts Heston unabashedly as a Christ-like savior within the narrative; his blood is found to be a cure for the zombies’ disease, and in the final shot he lies, arms splayed like Christ on the cross, at the foot of a fountain, having passed on “life” (his blood) unto the surviving children. At one point, Lisa and Neville joke about birth control while in a drugstore, the source of the humor stemming from the fact that it is the few humans left who must repopulate the earth and it will probably begin, out of necessity, with an interracial couple. But while miscegenation does not manifest itself explicitly, aside from a humorous suggestion, the fact that Heston’s blood will be administered to Lisa to “cure” her suggests that white blood will be safely spread without the danger of interracial sexual relations. The association of whiteness with death/illness is a trope that Richard Dyer points out as explicit and even more critical within George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. The original The Last Man on Earth has been compared to Romero’s film and rumored to have been an inspiration, but, as one reviewer of the film remarks, the scenes of zombies gathering outside Morgan’s house are “indifferently handled” compared to Romero’s depiction of amassed undead. 37 Stylistic differences aside, The Omega Man actually shares more similarities with Living Dead than The Last Man on Earth, particularly in the association of whiteness with death. Dyer says about Dead, “In a number of places, the film shows that living whites are like, or can be mistaken for, the dead,” and the film also 76 indicates that the behavior of the white vigilantes – reckless and chaotic – resembles the behavior of the zombies. 38 While The Omega Man does not make this same connection – the zombies appear to be “whiter” than white – there is still an association of pale skin with danger, evil and a deadening of both soul and body. Night of the Living Dead associates blackness, Dyer argues, with “life” in terms of practical skills and survival instincts, both of which Ben, the film’s protagonist, possesses to a greater degree than any of his fairly useless white counterparts. In a similar way, The Omega Man contrasts the tough individuality of the black Lisa with the seeming lifelessness of the whitened Zachary; in a way, Lisa and Neville’s respective methods of survival complement each other, with Lisa lending Neville a necessary aura of “cool” for the time period and Neville protecting Lisa with his heroic whiteness. Dyer also describes typical associations between the “good/bad, white/black, light/darkness antinomies of Western culture” as reversed within the narrative, cinematography and lighting schemes of Dead, and I would argue that his analysis applies even more to the most recent incarnation of Matheson’s novel, the big-budget Will Smith vehicle I Am Legend. Adding to the association of “good” with blackness is Smith’s on and off-screen mythology as the cool and capable black action star, and these associations are tested against a barren and hostile post-apocalyptic landscape. While Price’s version of I Am Legend is slightly campy and involves more conventions of horror, and The Omega Man has more overt political and social overtones, I Am Legend is marked, overall, by a tone of despair and loneliness. The film forms a continuum with I, Robot in terms of Smith’s essentially one-man stance against an invading, inhuman 77 population and associations created between “life” and blackness. I Am Legend reformulates Smith’s persona using the post-apocalyptic trope of the “last man on earth,” turning his narrative arc into one about survival in a deserted urban landscape rather than rescuing humanity from imminent danger. Smith’s action-hero qualities, such as attitude and athleticism, are cast in a new, post apocalyptic light because of a lack of a supporting cast, and his embodiment of Robert Neville depends more on physical environment than other characters. His interactions with his dog Sam and inanimate mannequins at the video store (including a “love interest”) combines the machismo of his action films with more of the comic and likeable persona that Smith adopts in romantic comedies and other lighter fare; much like Tom Hanks in Cast Away (2000), Smith’s one-man performance was praised more than the film itself. Smith’s persona and performance both diffuse the racial implications of white hordes (and white zombie-dogs) chasing a lone black man. Smith’s blackness is further disavowed in relation to Legend’s version of the zombies, the mindless “darkseekers,” who hearken back to the zombies of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead as deadened and soulless creatures who have become completely devoid of human characteristics. Like Romero’s zombies, they lack a language and are seemingly motivated by hunger alone; unlike Romero’s zombies, though, they take full advantage of their CGI visuals and sounds. The zombies in Legend are animalistic, wearing shreds of dirty clothing around their severely muscled bodies, and punctuating their movements with toneless, shrill screams, and they are also marked by a vicious agility and speed that turns Smith into more prey than predator. 39 The spectacular viciousness of the film’s computer animated zombies denies them the 78 capacity for critical thought and shifts the film’s focus onto Neville’s survival; while the imagery of white mobs chasing a sole black man has obvious racial connotations, the animalistic zombies are also part of a monstrous environment testing the limits of the individual. The film is also, in many ways, about Robert Neville’s masculinity, and it includes the fast cars, guns, elaborate survival techniques and requisite shirtless scenes that shore up Heston’s masculinity in The Omega Man. While Ben’s skills are defined mainly as intellectual and practical, and Brother’s skills associated with an otherworldly understanding of technology, Smith’s Neville possesses a bodily strength that associates blackness with physical prowess, an association reinforced by the concentrated focus on Smith’s body throughout most of his films. The “legend” of the novel and the previous adaptations referred to the consideration of Neville himself as a kind of monster to the zombie population; while Smith’s Neville is a worthy opponent of the film’s zombies, his “legendary” status comes more from his role as typical Hollywood male protagonist than from any shift in the very definition of monstrosity. The change of form and nature of the monster in I Am Legend is, on one level, a function of the film’s big-budget attempt to compete in a genre now dominated by continued CGI sophistication (along with the creation of a post-apocalyptic New York). But on another level, in a color reversal similar to that of Night of the Living Dead, the packs of rabid and colorless zombies associate whiteness with fear, danger and darkness. The careful creation of a deserted New York City attempts to drain the story of racial implications, as Matheson’s novel was set in the Compton area of Los Angeles. Written in 1954, after the breakthrough Civil Rights case Brown v. The Board of Education, 79 scholars such as Kathy David Patterson have argued that Matheson’s novel contains racial overtones that speak to the growing anxiety of white citizens towards integration. As Patterson says, “Neville's race is established very early and very directly as Caucasian. Matheson describes him as ‘a tall man, thirty-six, born of English-German stock,’ complete with bright blue eyes (14). By contrast, the vampires have no obvious racial attributes per se. However, in Neville's mind, they are consistently referred to in connection with blackness.” 40 While Patterson draws parallels between Neville’s plight and that of the anxiety-ridden and racially plagued white citizen, she does not augment her argument with the crucial fact that Matheson set his novel in Compton, Los Angeles, an area which was beginning to racially diversify in the 1950s and an area which has implications for post-Watts adaptations such as The Omega Man and I Am Legend. 41 According to Akiva Goldsman, one of Legend’s screenwriters, the choice of New York City was logistical: “It’s hard to make Los Angeles feel empty,” 42 yet Compton’s current associations with racial unrest suggests that the racial, social and political implications of a Los Angeles setting could overwhelm both the film and its black protagonist. Smith’s townhome in Washington Park, along with flashbacks indicating his prestigious position as government scientist, associates Smith instead with an upper-middle class urbanity that sets him, along with his comic asides and intelligent and rugged survival instincts, even further apart from the crazed and bloodthirsty white zombie mobs. Smith’s Neville is also part of the military, an institution connected with the brutalization of the black inner- city population in the late 70s and 80s; his blackness, rather than being contradictory to his position of power, reinforces the film’s neoliberal Hollywood context – its emphasis 80 on the individual’s responsibility for success, regardless of social, economic, or (in this case) environmental disenfranchisement. While the change of setting and Neville’s characterization reflects a desire to shy away from racial themes, one aspect of the film’s narrative supplements a racially- specific analysis of Smith’s portrayal of Neville and his battle against the colorless zombies. The inclusion of Bob Marley’s music as both motif and theme adds an Afro- Caribbean dimension to the film and associates Smith with Marley himself – a sole revolutionary who survives against the odds. The “legend” in Matheson’s novel comes from Neville’s realization that to a future population of hybrid vampire/humans, he is as much monstrous legend to them as they were to him. The “legend” in the 2007 film is less complicated and directly correlates with Neville’s heroism, rather than his monstrosity, a connection that is compounded by an association with Marley’s 1984 Legend collection. Michelle Stephens addresses the symbolic and material effects of Marley’s circulation in the United States, arguing that both his mysticism and association with “the real” affect his continuing mythic status. She says, “On the one hand his black body represents everything concerned with reggae and a primitive Caribbean. On the other, Marley’s ‘natural blackness’ unites in one body a vision of racial harmony built on simple universalist ideals mystically removed from the history of race relations in the United States, Marley offers an image of blackness that has helped to preserve a North American identity built on the integration of racial differences into one unified national body politic.” 43 The tension between racial revolutionary and peace-keeper plays out within I Am Legend, as Smith uses violent means to survive, yet is ultimately cast as a 81 healer and mankind’s savior. Legend itself, as an album, distilled the revolutionary aspects of Marley’s persona: “The Legend release drew from an untapped archive of images in order to humanize the performer and make him more accessible to an audience initially intimidated by the revolutionary aspects of Third World music in the 1970s.” 44 Marley’s history is often told as a progression from revolutionary to racial pacifist, and as Stephens points out, black music in general has been described in terms of its ability to bring people together as “one nation under a groove”: “‘One nation under a groove’ is a specifically American national myth of liberal pluralism and multiculturalism that often ignores the history of racial conflict and divisiveness in the United States.” 45 Marley is connotatively linked to Robert Neville as a black revolutionary whose blackness and radical nature are muted in order to restore harmony in the world; on another level, Marley’s sanitized image suggests that Smith’s star power also depends on the circulation of “safe” black imagery as commodity. The conflation of Marley with Robert Neville/Will Smith brings a mystical universalism into the post-apocalyptic world of I Am Legend to accomplish the same utopic (and commercially viable) end – associating “revolution” with racial harmony rather than the more challenging notion of racial unrest. The end of the film confirms its attempt to assure the audience not only of humanity’s future, but also of humanity’s multicultural future. At the end of all versions of I Am Legend, Robert Neville dies, and in both The Omega Man and 2007’s I Am Legend, Neville passes on humanity’s salvation, which is his virus-resistant blood. The Omega Man’s Neville calls attention to the Christ-like qualities of the character with Heston’s blatant last pose, arms and legs splayed, but the sacrifice of Smith’s Neville is 82 accomplished more gracefully as he gives himself over to the zombie mobs and urges Anna and Ethan to save themselves. Anna, played by Brazilian actress Alice Braga, is marked as ambiguously Hispanic, while her travelling companion, Ethan, is a young white boy, and the multi-ethnic makeup of this survivor’s team (Neville, Anna, Ethan) suggests optimistically a similarly multi-ethnic future. After Neville hands them his blood and hands himself over to the zombies, the two escape and eventually make their way to a “survivor’s camp” in Vermont. The camp is depicted as a quintessential American small town, complete with a church steeple, and the last shot is of Anna handing over the vial of Neville’s blood; the film’s focus on Neville as a hero and savior obscures the deeper implications of the moment – that humanity will be saved by the blood of a black man. But rather than tap into fears of miscegenation that generally prevented mixed-race coupling in big budget Hollywood films, the careful construction of Smith’s “legend” as both authentically “black” and universally “human” works to incorporate the use of Neville’s blood into the film’s overall suggestion of an ideal multicultural future: all races as one race, which eventually becomes no race. The sub-text of blackness and consumption is also animated by the use of Neville’s blood for humanity’s restoration, for Neville’s sacrifice can be read also as Smith’s sacrifice; Neville passes on his Black blood for a utopic un-raced future, and Smith spills metaphoric Black blood in order to be a marketable star in Hollywood. Earlier in the film, when Neville is being chased by zombie hoards, the fantastic representation of white masses chasing a black man raises a hesitation around the division between literal and metaphoric consumptions of blackness, posing a possible 83 criticism of how commodified black imagery can lead to actual material disenfranchisement for black populations – the same argument put forth by The Brother from Another Planet’s science fiction premise. Considering that before the infection, Neville was an upper middle-class member of the military who presumably was not focused on Black subjugation and alienation, his subsequent status as black prey suggests an introduction of double consciousness into his perspective. He is forced by his post- apocalyptic circumstances to consider himself as black, isolated and persecuted, and perhaps Smith himself had to face the racial connotations of this violent consumption of blackness. But by the end of the film, the potentially critical sub-text has been subsumed, ironically, by Legend’s very own literal consumption of blackness – Neville’s blood – in exchange for a multicultural ideal that metaphorically consumes blackness for a happy and hopeful Hollywood ending. Consider the use of Marley’s song “Three Little Birds,” which Neville plays and sings along with during the film. The well-known lyrics assure Neville and the viewers (and Marley’s 1977 audience) “don’t worry, about a thing…every little thing is gonna be all right,” and the implied comfort seems incongruous considering the horror that Neville must face from both his isolation and rabid, contagious zombies. The incongruity of Marley’s song, and even the misplacement of Marley as an icon of peace, suggests that there is more to “worry” about in terms of Neville’s/Smith’s survival as a threatened black man. The subsequent tension raised by this stylistic mis-match reinforces the unease created by the film’s competing narratives of Neville as world savior and Smith as black sacrificial lamb, an unease that is neatly resolved by the end of the film with Neville’s death and multicultural resurrection. 84 Conclusion There is no extraterrestrial in I Am Legend, but its story is based on the concept of science gone awry. In The Brother from Another Planet, Brother’s status as an alien – an outsider – made a pointed critique of black racial and capitalist alienation, but Robert Neville is a human who is unquestionably invested in the survival and continuation of humanity. His alienation in the original novel comes mainly from being set apart from a community of humans-turned-monsters who fear and loathe him, and the pessimistic redefinition of “legend” in Matheson’s novel and the first two adaptations challenges our notions of the “heroic” within science fiction and fantasy narratives. Alienation in The Omega Man also relates to the film’s allusion to the 60s and 70s counterculture, resulting in a confused racial politics that castigates conformity by making the zombies, regardless of race, “turn white,” but also reinforces the power of the white male through the near- religious heroics of Charlton Heston. In 2007’s I Am Legend, though, the concept of alienation is neither as challenging or politically charged as it is in the novel and the 1971 film. Despite the potential for racial commentary already present in the lone black action hero fighting mindless white hordes in a deserted metropolis, Legend consciously disavows racial implications by emphasizing the monstrosity of the zombies and the individualized masculinity of its star. Will Smith is portrayed as a family man, scientific genius, muscled action hero, and military leader, but only subtly as “black” through his mannerisms, body and dialogue, all of which have already been carefully constructed through a cool and savvy off-screen persona. The environment is alien to Neville, but the creation of a deserted New York 85 City created more buzz for the technology and budget required to raze New York than for the social or political implications of the film’s setting. Alienation, in the Marxist and racial implications of the term, inevitably enters the film’s science fiction milieu, though, with the addition of a racially-charged facet to the “Legend” of the film’s title. The film uses Bob Marley’s music as both soundtrack and narrative thread to emphasize the film’s multicultural promise for humanity’s future and aligns the revolutionary-turned- peacemaker depiction of Marley with Will Smith’s role as Robert Neville. Key to both Marley’s popularity and the effectiveness of Neville, though, is the mysticism often associated with Marley’s music and persona, a stereotypical mysticism that is closely tied to the “unknowability” and mysterious nature of blackness. Blackness is used as alienation both within Marley’s image and I Am Legend, then, but only to be recuperated as part of a conservative move to sell multiculturalism and racial harmony as commodities. The Brother from Another Planet used “the alien” to critique the effects of alienation, while Legend and its Hollywood context make racial alienation an “alienated” product itself, an image of “safe” blackness that circulates without referencing the real, complex and difficult conditions which produced it. 86 Chapter 1 Endnotes 1 Mark Bould, “Fantasizing the real: The Secret of Roan Inish,” Film International 4:6 (2006): 30. 2 Samuel R. Delany, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (New York: Berkley Publishing, 1977) 29. 3 Thomas Holt says in “The Political Uses of Alienation: W.E.B. Du Bois on Politics, Race, and Culture, 1903-1940,” “Blacks are the builders of the economic infrastructure, yet dispossessed of its fruits; creators of one of its truly original native cultures, in story and song, yet culturally demeaned and maligned; faithful adherents to the nation’s basic ideals and values, yet shunned, abused and stigmatized as if an alien people” (303, italics mine). In American Quarterly, 42:2 (1990): 301-323. 4 Samuel R. Delany,“Racism and Science Fiction,” Dark Matter : A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora , ed. Sheree R. Thomas ( New York: Warner Books, 2000) 393. 5 Jane Gaines, Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001)12. 6 Baldwin, quoted in Gaines, 32. 7 George S. Schuyler, Black No More (New York, NY: Modern Library, 1999): 23. 8 Jane Kuenz, “American Racial Discourse, 1900-1939: Schuyler’s Black No More”, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 30:2(1997) 170-192, JSTOR, 10 October 2008. 9 Guy Mark Foster, “‘Do I look like someone you can come home to from where you may be going?’: re- mapping interracial anxiety in Octavia Butler's Kindred,” African-American Review 41.1 (Spring 2007), Biography Resource Center (Gale), University of Southern California Libraries, Los Angeles, CA. 10 Barbara Christian, “Fixing Methodologies: Beloved,” Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, eds. Barbara Christian, Elizabeth Abel, and Helene Moglen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) 364. 11 Vivian Sobchack, Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987) 63. 12 Ibid., 89. 13 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975) 124-139. 14 Sobchack, Screening Space, 92. 15 See Eric Greene’s Planet of the Apes as American Myth for a more detailed analysis of the use of costuming and makeup to define and highlight racial differences and hierarchies. 16 Scott Bukatman’s Terminal Identity is essentially a meditation on the subject of subjecthood in postmodern science fiction: “Terminal Identity: an unmistakeably doubled articulation in which we find both the end of the subject and a new subjectivity constructed at the computer station or television screen”(9). Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993). 87 17 Tom Bottomore, ed. The Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983) 12. 18 Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr, “Marxist theory and science fiction,” In The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction ed. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)118. 19 Ibid., 118-119. 20 Ibid., 120. 21 Mark Bould, “The False Salvation of the Here and Now: Aliens, Images, and the Commodification of Desire in Brother from Another Planet, in Sayles Talk: New Perspectives on Independent Filmmaker John Sayles, ed. Diane Carson and Heidi Kenaga (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2006) 87. 22 Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Verso, 2006) 223. 23 Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1994) 33. 24 Ibid., 30. 25 Sobchack, 297. 26 Tom Gunning, “Like Unto a Leopard: Figurative Discourse in Cat People (1942) and Todorov’s The Fantastic,” Wide Angle 10.3 (1988): 38. 27 Judy Cox, “An Introduction to Marx’s Theory of Alienation,” International Socialism (quarterly journal of the Socialist Workers’ Party) 79 (1998) <http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj79/cox.htm> 28 Kodwo Eshun says that the original alienation of slavery, according to scholar Greg Tate, has led to contemporary conditions where “Afrodiasporic subjects live the estrangement that science-fiction writers envision. Black existence and science fiction are one and the same” (298). In “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism,” in CR: The New Centennial Review 3:2 (2003): 298. <http://muse.jhu.edu> 29 Sobchack, 299. 30 Bould, “The False Salvation,” 82. 31 Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W.W. Norton, 1974) 318. 32 Sobchack, 270. 33 Davis, 224. 34 Ibid., 251-253. 35 In 2008’s summer blockbuster Hancock, Smith will again play a lone superhuman crimefighter. 36 Jeff Bond, Cinefantastique 35:1 (Feb/Mar 2003): 57. 37 Steve Biodrowski, “Film Review: The Last Man on Earth (1964),” Cinefantastique (online version) (January 29, 2008) 17 April 2008 <www.cinefantastiqueonline.com> 88 38 Richard Dyer, “White,” Screen 29.4 (1988): 45-64. 39 The film’s alternate ending gave the zombies a degree of humanity. Neville captures a female zombie to test his various cures for the virus, and as the survivors are chased by the zombie mob, the zombie leader reveals through a drawing that he merely wants his companion back. Once Neville hands over the female zombie, he, Anna and Ethan escape and begin driving into the unknown. 40 Kathy Davis Patterson, “Echoes of Dracula: Racial Politics and the Failure of Segregated Spaces in Richard Matheson's I Am Legend,” The Journal of Dracula Studies 7 (2005): 19-27. 28 April 2008 <http://redscreamvampyres.squarespace.com/red-scream-diaries/echoes-of-dracula-racial-politics-and-the- failure-of-segrega-1.html> 41 As Albert M. Camarillo describes, “Realtors and homeowners alike largely kept blacks from penetrating Compton city boundaries until the 1950s. Although a small Mexican American barrio had formed in the northcentral section of the city during the first decades of the 1900s adjacent to the unincorporated areas of Watts and Willowbrook, the systematic use of restrictive racial covenants by the 1920s ensured that blacks from South Central Los Angeles and new black migrants from the South were shut out of the so-called “hub city.” However, by the 1950s hundreds of black families began to move into the northwestern neighborhoods of the city, as realtors, both black and white, engaged in “block busting” practices that created opportunities for middle-class black homeowners to purchase relatively new tract homes in Compton (10-11).” Albert M. Camarillo, “Cities of Color: The New Racial Frontier in California’s Minority-Majority Cities,” Pacific Historical Review 76.1 (2007): 1-28. Research Library Core. ProQuest. University of Southern California Libraries, Los Angeles, CA. 28 Apr. 2008 <http://www.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/> 42 Lewis Beale, “A Variation on Vampire Lore That Won’t Die,” The New York Times 14 January 2007 <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/14/movies/14beal.html?_r=1&oref=slogin> 43 Michelle A. Stephens, “Babylon’s ‘Natural Mystic’: The North American Music Industry, The Legend of Bob Marley, and the Incorporation of Transnationalism,” Cultural Studies 12:2: 142. 44 Ibid., 148. 45 Ibid., 153. 89 Chapter 2: The Fantastic Avant-Garde In his 2002 essay, “Sexual Avant-Gardes and the Performance of Utopia,” Jose Esteban Muñoz explores a term established by CLR James, called “dialectic utopianism.” Quite simply, this term refers to the existence of the future within the present, glimpses of utopian formations within the mundane. While James applied this Hegelian formation to the presence of socialist tendencies among factory workers, Muñoz uses the term to define the presence of alternative sexualities within New York City, arguing for a “queer future within a repressive heteronormative present.” 1 Muñoz explores the dialectical nature of the future and the present in the realms of live performance among queer communities, identifying the ways that the “futures” of identity – a recognition of sexual identity’s fluidity and a utopian embrace of all sexualities – can be located within the performance of queerness, both on a theatrical and everyday level, in the present. Munoz uses performance as a kind of social and cultural time machine, and his use of speculative language suggests the ways that the “avant-garde” of art can be related to utopian, progressive, and radical politics. In this chapter I raise the question of what “moving forward” means in relation to both film aesthetics and identity politics. The question of alienation and identification within my analysis of science fiction films involved a close investigation of the various meanings of “alienation,” in relation to spectatorship, science fiction as a genre, and Marxism. I raised the issue of Todorovian hesitation within science fiction as it related to the representation of race, and I would like to expand my analysis to include a more thorough investigation of what might constitute the “fantastic film.” Todorov’s definition of the fantastic is limited to literature, 90 defining the genre as one that introduces the supernatural into reality, producing a hesitation in readers and characters, who cannot process the juxtaposition of the unknown and the known. While Todorov is focused on the reader’s response, my goal in this chapter is to define how the fantastic plays out in the multi-sensory medium of film, where representation occurs on visual and aural, as well as narrative, levels. To return to questions raised from the beginning of this project, how does the interplay of reality and fantasy in a fantastic text correspond to the previous question of the reality/fantasy of race? How do various visual media render the concrete and abstract facets of identity, and how does the use of the fantastic –with its disruption of conventional cinematic and narrative notions of time and space – affirm or re-create definitions and representations of identity? In an attempt to find what the fantastic looks like visually, I turn to avant-garde films that make a conscious effort to displace conventional notions of film form and representation. The avant-garde is a site of experimentation, similar to science fiction, where the fundamental narrative and formal characteristics of film are tested and challenged. In ways akin to science fiction, Marxism, and anthropology, as mentioned in Chapter 2, the avant-garde also forms a testing ground for theories about art and film, raising ideological queries often unaddressed by mainstream filmmaking. Methodologically I propose to consider both the avant-garde and science fiction under the umbrella of speculative fiction, a stance upheld by several theorists of both the avant- garde and science fiction; the connections between the avant-garde and science fiction. While keeping their vast institutional and generic differences in mind, an emphasis on the 91 connections between the avant-garde and science fiction reveals that in both kinds of films fantastic modes of representation intersect with representations of identity. In this chapter I will begin by addressing the intersections between the avant- garde and science fiction, with a focus on how the alienation-identification dichotomy raised in Chapter 1 can be applied to the avant-garde and the significance of their respective “marginal” statuses within film production and theory. From there I will explore the issue of self-representation within the avant-garde, which will highlight the ways in which identity is theorized within the medium of film itself, and how various tools of filmmaking are used to represent the “self” in both fantastic and realistic ways. I argue that the avant-garde represents a speculative site where conventional cinematic representation is subverted and reveals both the tangible and imagined facets of identity. Finally, I will do an in-depth textual analysis of two films that explicitly use the fantastic to re-create political and personal history. In both of the cases analyzed, representing the “self” involves filmmaking that addresses social and political contexts, while creatively denying conventional modes of representation. An avant-garde representation of ethnicity or race involves a formal practice akin to the theory of the fantastic, a constant interrogation of the concept of “reality” and questioning the authenticity of images and narratives. The Avant-Garde and Science Fiction Bill Nichols takes a revisionist look at the intertwined history of the avant-garde and documentary in “Documentary Film and Avant-Garde,” discussing the ways that modernist aesthetics informed early documentary practice. Early film – the “cinema of 92 attractions” as described by Tom Gunning – both captured reality with new scientific precision and marveled at its wonders: “The modernist avant-garde contributed something quite vital to the appearance of documentary film; it imaginatively reconstructed the world with images, or shots, taken of this world.” 2 Nichols’ arguments about the avant-garde’s propensity to turn reality into abstraction suggests a basic connection between science fiction and the avant-garde; both engage in an aesthetic and thematic interrogation and expansion of reality. Nichols points out that the surrealists were fascinated by the abstraction within science, and science fiction filmmakers profess a similar interest in the aesthetic potential of science. “As the surrealists were eager to demonstrate, the language of sensationalism could also readily insinuate itself into the protocols of science.” 3 Filmmaking technology, related to the growing interest in science and modernity in the early 20 th century, also contributed to the blurred lines between abstraction and realism and the subsequent tensions between filmmaker as artist versus filmmaker as technician. In his essay entitled “There’s Always Tomorrowland,” Scott Bukatman links the motion picture camera to the technologically dominated spaces of modernity: “The cinema has thus produced coincident analogues of subjective interiority and technological exteriority. Cinema is a cyborg apparatus – part human, part machine.” 4 The treatment and use of the camera within avant-garde film upholds Bukatman’s science fiction definition of film, as avant-garde film consciously experiments with film’s technologies, including the camera, the editing process, projection, and so on, to not only produce unique worlds within the films themselves but also to create new and challenging conditions for viewing. 93 Vivian Sobchack argues in Screening Space that science fiction films purposefully use visual abstraction to alienate the viewer from the science-fiction mise- en-scene, but this abstraction is never “total” and does not enter the realm of the avant- garde. The essential difference between science fiction and the avant-garde is that the former must rely on “meaning,” coming from narratives that combine the alien and familiar, while the latter is geared toward the “abstract inexplicability of being.” 5 But the abstraction present within the avant-garde arts, while not often enmeshed in traditional, linear narratives, is still linked to stories, whether they are about art, identity, memory, and so on. Sobchack seems to argue that avant-garde film’s total abstraction leads to a disorienting freefall through cinematic space, but the avant-garde’s radical strength comes from its response to conventional narrative and filmic forms; abstract films, much like science fiction, often anchor themselves to known and familiar images in order to produce meaning. Another facet of the technological link between science fiction and the avant- garde is highlighted by Catherine Russell in Experimental Ethnography. Russell defines “experimental ethnography” as “work in which formal experimentation is brought to bear on social representation.” 6 The use of avant-garde film practice to capture the nuances of personal, political, and ethnic identity is, Russell argues, a use of film technology that is an alternative form of science fiction: “The mandate of the avant-garde might thus be refigured as a discourse of science fiction that remains grounded in experience and memory.” 7 Earlier anthropological practices often involved documenting marginal populations by inscribing primitivist fantasies unto the representation of the exotic Other, 94 and what Russell attempts to do in her work is examine the intersection of imaginary and real spaces within ethnography in the age of video, “to combine textual analysis with representation, to be able to represent culture (ethnography) from within culture (experimental film).” 8 Even in the description of experimental ethnography, Russell evokes the fantastic idea of the time machine, as combining ethnographic studies with experimental film practices involves simultaneously moving forward and backward in time. The concept of representation existing in different temporalities and modalities recalls the psychoanalytic definition of phantasy; the use of avant-garde film techniques with ethnographic footage allows for a variety of subject positions for both filmmaker and viewer. In my Introduction, I mentioned David Eng’s analysis of Freud, highlighting the author’s emphasis on Freud’s fantastic depiction of sexual development for the native and the homosexual occurring in different dimensions than white, heterosexual people of European descent. Russell’s conflation of science-fiction and the avant-garde allows for a re-imagining of historically racist conceptions of cultural development in anthropology and history. Instead of locating Western and non-Western worlds on unequal temporal planes, anthropological study within avant-garde film moves both linearly and circularly through time and questions the absolutism of “modernity” and “progress.” Critical works of science fiction thus accomplish similar ideological critiques, and the question is what critical and analytical perspective is provided by a reconsideration of the avant-garde in light of science fiction, and vice versa. In a way, another facet to the word “alienation” is added to the previous definitions, for the viewer of experimental films is consciously alienated from conventional forms and themes, and along with the 95 social and political critique offered by science fiction, the viewer’s alienation from the film form adds a critique of the process of film viewing as well. Can the avant-garde make us see science fiction in a new formal and aesthetic light, and can science fiction help us understand the complicated treatment of representation occurring in the avant- garde? Considering the latter part of this question, another potential intersection of the two fields is structural film. One of foundational concerns of early cinema was its definition as a technology, and science fiction remains a venue where film technicians can exploit the possibilities of film technology. The four characteristics that P. Adams Sitney assigns to structural film are: “its fixed camera position (fixed frame from the viewer’s perspective), the flicker effect, loop printing, and rephotography off the screen.” 9 Structural films are films of the “mind,” argues Sitney, that function as strict, almost mathematical systems; a hyper-focus on the film form and apparatus turns filmmaking into a scientific exercise in perception. At the same time, structural film involves an ontological consideration of the act of viewing; Sitney says of the structural film, contrasting its intent with the later work of Warhol (who Sitney positions as the pre- cursor of the structural film), “In the work of Michael Snow and Ernie Gehr, the camera is fixed in a mystical contemplation of a portion of space.” 10 Perhaps the fantasy in structural film lies within the very manipulation of camera, light and space and the subsequent effect on the film frame; by experimenting with cuts and zooms, the filmmaker imagines the material reality of the camera and of what is being filmed in 96 different ways. In its combination of technology and imagination, perhaps structural film is an almost literalization of the term “science fiction.” 11 THX 1138 One of the fascinating intersections of science fiction and the avant-garde comes from the unlikely figure of George Lucas, who, in his early years as a filmmaker, was interested in avant-garde and documentary filmmaking. His short film THX 1138, about a man’s escape from a technological dystopia, was eventually turned into a feature film by the same name, starring Robert Duvall, and represented, as David James argues, the distillation of avant-garde sensibilities into the mainstream and popular cinema that defined the “New Hollywood.” 12 Arguing for the feature film’s avant-garde nature, Sobchack actually mentions THX 1138 as an example of near-total abstraction within the science fiction film: “Composition in the frame is just as disorienting; the wide screen is used like a canvas on which human forms are placed at vast distances and disturbing angles from each other.” 13 The dual placement of the film as both an example of avant- garde’s absorption into the mainstream and as a pure avant-garde film suggests the blurry distinction between the avant-garde and science fiction. Instead of placing THX 1138 on one side of the avant-garde/mainstream divide, perhaps it is more helpful to consider how and why the science fiction milieu of the film allowed for a degree of abstraction not usually present in Hollywood features, and Lucas’s use of two marginal cinemas – the avant-garde and science fiction – to create a film about man’s loss of identity in a technologically dominant world. The issue of technology in the film’s narrative and production also raises the previously mentioned idea of film as a kind of science-fiction 97 technology in itself, which leads to the potential problem of reifying and exploiting technology without a critical edge. James argues that this took a hyperbolic turn in Luca’s work: “..even as [THX 1138] appears to raise a technophobic warning against an administered, scientifically-controlled future, its own success is predicated on a euphoric manipulation of the same technology, soon to be the core of [Lucas’s] consolidated narcotic mass-culture empire.” 14 The abstract qualities of the film – close-ups of computer screens and digital imagery, absurd dialogue, and stark use of color – reinforce its narrative about state control and repression. The citizens of THX 1138 are confined by the antiseptic, unidentifiable whiteness of their surroundings, along with a slavish reliance to a cryptically mechanized world of numbers. The mise-en-scene of THX 1138 is not only white in terms of color scheme, but also in terms of its population; the only two moments of blackness in the film happen on the holographic television and during THX’s escape to freedom. The pointed use of blackness within a film defined by various facets of “whiteness” demands a deeper look, particularly in the context of Lucas’s use of both avant-garde aesthetics and a science fiction premise. In the first moment, THX watches holographic television in the apartment/cell he shares with his mate, LUH, and masturbates to the image of a black woman dancing wildly to tribal-like music. She and her dancing stand in stark contrast to the rigidity of the surroundings, and she is clearly provided as an outlet for the society’s sexually and emotionally repressed citizens. While on one level, blackness and its African connotations are used to suggest a kind of exoticized freedom in contrast to the 98 oppressive whiteness, on a different level the woman functions as an another abstraction within the film’s milieu. In fact, all of the black characters in THX appear only, at first, on the holographic television as newscasters and comedians. Blackness, along with constantly induced sedation and total surveillance, is presented as one of the tools for totalitarian control. Somehow black bodies are considered different enough to provide the illusion of freedom to citizens, yet “safe” enough to not stimulate those citizens into a loss of control. The only “real” object within the film is the love between THX and LUH (and perhaps the madness of the film’s “felons”), while everything else is deemed artificial and mechanical. The inclusion of the dancing woman among the film’s other empty icons of control creates a tension between her suggested artificiality and the rawness of her dancing and naked body, raising the question of the place of race within the abstracted environment of the avant-garde and within the technologically dominated environment of science fiction. When the line between the avant-garde and science fiction is blurred as it is in THX 1138, blackness becomes coded as abstract, alien and stereotypically “authentic” at the same time. In the second “moment” of blackness, THX and SEN meet a black man, SRT, while lost within the endless white space where they have been held captive. SRT leads them to the “freedom” of their society, where SEN gets lost in the crowd. THX then finds out that SRT is actually a hologram who got tired of the world of circuitry; he says simply, “I’m not real.” As SRT and THX attempt to escape, SRT’s ability to infiltrate the mechanical bowels of this society marks a malfunction, in both a technological and 99 metaphysical sense; the hologram is walking amidst the technology that created him. Not only is blackness in this instance ironically associated with freedom from slavery, but SRT also represents something gone awry – a radical break – in this meticulously controlled society. From a Marxist perspective, the commodity – the consumed black body of SRT – takes on a life of his own and attempts to escape his technologically determined existence. By setting up a contrast between a blackness associated with bodily and mental freedom and a mise-en-scene marked by sharply controlled abstraction, the film inadvertently critiques representations of blackness as commodified images. THX 1138 stands as a unique example of science-fiction abstraction, or abstract science fiction, and its mobilization of blackness reveals the ways codes of racial representation can be rendered ambiguous and concrete at the same time. The Autobiographical Avant-Garde Surrealism If science fiction acts as an anthropological testing ground for political and social issues, then Russell’s arguments about science fiction and the avant-garde provide us with a way to think of the avant-garde as a kind of testing ground for formal film conventions and representation. One of the main theoretical concerns of avant-garde film, as it has been defined by both scholars and filmmakers, is a keen interest in issues of self, and how to define “self” through the medium-specific qualities of film. As I will show, avant-garde filmmakers have used fantasy and fantastic techniques to reproduce, reconstruct, and re-imagine identities in film-specific ways, lending further insight into identity as a theoretical (fantastic?) construct. Film depicts its narratives through visuals 100 and sound, and aesthetic choices – from choice of actor, use of light, and editing techniques – all affect the ways identity is pieced together and developed on screen. I will also show how the avant-garde adds another level to Todorov’s fantastic, and, to a different degree than science fiction, complicates fantasy’s relationship to the real through the manipulation of images and sound. Philosophically, the visual is associated with reason and truth, and film theorists have lauded the camera for its ability to magnify and intensify the visual, therefore magnifying reality itself. In the two subsequent examples of avant-garde cinema, the structure of dreams and fantasy are used to represent/create/investigate gender and sexual identity, and I use them to exemplify how the formal aspects of the avant-garde were used to generate new approaches to representation, where hesitation around structure – is it or is it not a dream? – and the filmmaker’s/protagonist’s point(s) of view highlight the role of fantasy in creating and re-creating identity. Maya Deren, a founding filmmaker and theorist of the American avant-garde, suggested a different approach to the medium in both her theoretical and practical work. Deren’s work, perhaps epitomized by her most shown and theorized film, Meshes of the Afternoon, was engaged with a Surrealist exploration of the body, its movement, and the fluidity of its location against a variety of landscapes and interiors. Looking specifically at the issue of identity within Deren’s film work, she consistently and publicly disavowed any relationship to feminism (as well as Surrealism) as a movement or theory. But according to Lauren Rabinowitz, Meshes responds to the conventions of film noir and female melodrama, particularly the formal qualities of exaggerated lighting and claustrophobic spaces, but uses these conventions to 101 explore the subjectivity of the female protagonist. The use of a dream structure within the film – the multiplication of the protagonist, the repetition and variation of the events – introduces a hesitation into the film’s structure around the protagonist’s agency: “The transition into the subjective or dream experience expresses cinematic ambivalence between the ‘alienated’ world of female objectification and the ‘imaginary’ one of female subjectivity.” 15 The oscillation between these two worlds generates the tension between “like” and “is” that Tom Gunning theorized in Cat People: is Deren’s experience in the film a dream, or merely like a dream? Gunning says, “The fantastic transforms metaphor and simile from figures of speech to narrative strategies”; 16 I would argue that the fantastic in this case transforms the figurative language of the “dream” into the formal strategies of experimental film. The fact that the film’s formal qualities create an ambiguous relationship to reality also affects the female protagonist’s identity as a woman – can the viewer identify with the protagonist as a woman threatened by the violence of everyday spaces and objects, or as merely a character caught in a nightmare world? The film places its protagonist in an unstable relationship to reality – in this case the “reality” created by classical film conventions such as continuity editing – and considering the protagonist’s identity as a woman adds new valences to the spaces, objects and formal techniques the film engages. Another filmmaker of the American avant-garde, Kenneth Anger, also used the nonsensical logic and language of dreams, which is able to bridge past, present and future in ways that expresses the complexities of an artist’s vision and identity. The difference between the films of Deren and Anger comes from a deeper recognition on Anger’s part 102 of the cultural contexts of the 50s and 60s; in his films and his writings (the tabloid-like Hollywood Babylon), Anger turned Hollywood into a mythological fantasy that revealed both his enchantment with and disgust for the industry, what David James calls Anger’s “queering” of Hollywood. 17 The use of the word “queer” is crucial to understanding the role of fantasy in Anger’s self-representation; fantasy, myth and Hollywood iconography were Anger’s tools in creating a mise-en-scene of desire in each of his films, a tableaux that represented the fluidity of sexual identity between icons of masculinity, the allure of Hollywood, and the rebelliousness of the counterculture. The formal qualities of Anger’s films carry out this fantastic “queering” of Hollywood by using sound and light ironically. While Meshes used editing and mise-en-scene to convey the violence of the woman’s psyche, Anger adds another level of meaning to his avant-garde films by simultaneously celebrating and critiquing Hollywood iconography. In Scorpio Rising, Anger uses popular music ironically and humorously to contrast and comment on the violence and perversity of his images. The lyrics of these popular rock songs, detailing the ups and downs of heterosexual love, offer the viewer a kind of ironic heterosexual lens through which to view the activities of these gay bikers, and in doing so, create another position for the subject to interpret the film’s gamut of sexual identities and representations. In both Scorpio Rising and the subsequent Kustom Kar Kommandos, Anger also uses light to cast an uncanny glow to his fascination with both motorcycles and cars. A meditation on light not only calls attention to the film form, but it also turns the film’s world into one of wonder and terror, providing insight into Anger’s fascination with utopia and nightmare. 103 Race, Ethnicity, and Fantasy in the Avant-Garde While Deren and Anger were responding to mainstream film in challenging and ironic ways, the rebel filmmaking tactics of minority filmmakers take on Hollywood and its propagation of negative imagery directly and intensely. Social and historical contexts for Black, Latino, Asian and Native American experimental filmmakers are crucial to understanding the tools these filmmakers use to dismantle the “master’s house,” or address stereotypes and create new forms of representation. For example, Catherine Russell delves deeper into the surrealist project by analyzing the way surrealism’s dream structure and formal experimentation can be applied directly to ethnography. The author says of the blurring of the avant-garde with ethnographic filmmaking in the early 20 th century: “Its disruptive potential is both a reorientation of the avant-garde toward everyday life and a reorientation of ethnography toward cultural pluralism and hybridity.” 18 The formal subversions of surrealism, similar to science fiction, act as an anthropological testing ground for the process of ethnography, highlighting the way that film can create identity while documenting it. Russell’s analysis begins with Luis Bunuel’s surrealist documentary, Las Hurdes (1932), which blatantly uses the marginality of the Spanish Hurdanos to create a fantastical and horrific portrait of a population; it is Russell’s second analysis, about Tracy Moffat’s Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy, that applies surrealist techniques to contemporary experimental film and unearths the potential of fantasy for representing ethnicity. Russell’s arguments about Moffat’s film echo the use of memory and fantasy in Morrison’s Beloved, and provide a filmic example of phantasy as a kind of mise-en-scene 104 of desire. Night Cries borrows from the conventions of horror and female melodrama to tell the story of an aboriginal girl caring for her dying white adoptive mother. While the film artificially re-stages the Australian outdoors in a set and leaves out dialogue, Russell argues that it accurately represents postcolonial identity through “affect”: “Its surrealist strategies are techniques of mobilizing a subject position within the traumatic landscape of colonial culture.” 19 Russell argues that the short film deploys performance and an exaggerated theatricality to re-tell history through complex connections between film history, memory, and fantasy, and I would argue that Morrison’s Beloved employs structures of fantasy and memory to narrate Sethe’s post-slavery identity in a similar way. The use of cinema, in Moffat’s case, draws another connection to the history of the visual; referring to melodrama and horror calls attention to the film’s artifice, and in doing so, “dissolves the present into a fantastic scenario linking past and future.” 20 I use Russell’s arguments about Night Cries to show the pointed use of surrealism to represent identity is a cinematic evocation of Laplanche and Pontalis’s phantasmatic where subject positions are defined through theatrical and cinematic mise-en-scenes. Moffat’s use of surrealism is what Stuart Hall points out in “Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation “ as an “act of imaginative re-discovery.” 21 In the article, Hall argues that cultural identity in diasporic populations is not something that must be recovered, but rather it is a constantly re-created, re-constructed set of identities that is fed by a constantly changing past and an unpredictable future. In order to access this fluid and unsteady tableaux of identities, Hall turns to cultural production as a solution, calling on artists to “imaginatively” use artwork to turn away from essentialized notions 105 and imagery: “[Identity] is not once and for all. It is not a fixed origin to which we can make some final and absolute return.” 22 Hall’s arguments are not for a turn to complete fantasy, though, for, as he says, “[Identity] is not a mere phantasm, either. It is something – not a mere trick of the imagination. It has its histories – and histories have their real, material and symbolic effects.” 23 The avant-garde is in a unique position to respond to Hall’s suggestion for cultural production that addresses the “real, material” aspects of minority identity, but at the same time can imagine identity’s speculative potential and possibilities. In this next section, I will briefly examine specific cases of filmmaking from the margins, continuing to address the issue of representing the “self.” One of the unique factors of minority experimental filmmaking is the minority group’s doubly marginalized position – outside society and outside of the mainstream industry. As David James points out in his recent work, Los Angeles played a crucial part in the organization and development of minority cinemas; the social structure of the city and its relationship to Hollywood provided impetus for the cultural production of marginalized groups. In a way, the relationship between the film industry and ethnic experimental film engages yet another facet of Marxist alienation that I expanded upon in the Chapter 2. The mainstream film industry alienates minorities in terms of both the industry and representation, and both the production of avant-garde film by minorities and increased minority presence in Hollywood were ways of ways ameliorating this alienation, ways of taking control of the production and circulation of their own images. 106 Chicano Filmmaking Subjugated and isolated within American boundaries, Chicanos are often considered an internally colonized people and can trace their history to their indigenous roots, the invasion of the Spanish, the creation and development of Mexico, and the move back to the United States. The Chicano “homeland” is a place that exists only in the collective imaginary, and it is created and re-created within the realm of cultural production. As Chon Noriega points out, films such as I Am Joaquin (1969), Entelequia (1978), Chicana (1979) and Mi Otro Yo (1988) attempt to create a Chicano history and homeland in nationalist, parodic, feminist or cross-cultural terms, using “Chicano poetic consciousness” to narrate their stories. 24 He says, “Poetry became the discursive arena within which the movement defined itself and its ‘appropriate’ subjects, providing a language with which to name and narrate the self as a profoundly social act.” 25 The very use of the term “Chicano” to define a political, social and aesthetic movement calls for the act of creating the fantasy of a “home,” and maintaining the fantasy through artistic practice. Questioning when “Chicanos” began as a people – “Did it begin in 1492 or 1942?” – Noriega states, “Drawing from Mexican nationalism, Chicanos become the product of violence between male and female, Spaniard and Indian, conqueror and conquered, resulting in a ‘cosmic race’ both national and universal.” 26 One of the speculative elements of the Chicano cultural movement, used as an attempt to unite the various disparate groups who took on the mantle of “Chicano,” was a return to a mythical, pre-Columbian past; Luis Valdez’s I Am Joaquin exemplifies the interweaving of this past into the present and future by creating a historically epic visual 107 poem about Mexican and Mexican-American identity. The poem’s main character is the malleable Joaquin, who assumes various roles throughout the poem’s historical survey – pre-Columbian peoples, colonized and colonizer, Mexican revolutionaries, Indian, farmer, among others. 27 The poem is a literalization of the various subject positions offered by fantasy, although its exploration of identity is mitigated by the patriarchal thrust of its nationalist foundation. Eliud Martinez does a close formal analysis of the film, noting that its use of still photographs and paintings and innovative camerawork generates a deep sense of identification for the viewer. 28 While the poem and film appeal to a national collective identity, I would argue that the oscillation between photograph and painting, the stylized language of the poem, and its varied sound effects actually emphasizes the distinction between the tangible and imagined facets of Chicano history. An invocation of the material conditions of history – labor, conquest, violence – and the appeal to a transcendent “poetic consciousness” exemplify the way identity is positioned in a nexus of experience and imagination. This early example of Chicano filmmaking foregrounds its rough and amateur production techniques – known as the rasquache style of production, or “underdog aesthetics” – resulting in a cultural product that embraces and celebrates its methods of production. 29 While the aforementioned films represent material existence with an appeal to mythical and spiritual collective forces, contemporary Hispanic avant-garde films appeal less to a mythic past and more to the way identity is constantly re-defined and re-created in contemporary life. As Rosa Linda Fregoso points out about the revision of “essentialist accounts of identity,” “In contrast, an alternative explication of cultural 108 identity privileges the concepts of becoming, rather than of being, of process as opposed to structure, and of production instead of rediscovery of archeology.” 30 Fregoso’s analysis of Luis Valdez’s Zoot Suit (1981) exemplifies the creative denial of an “original” or “essential” Chicano identity through the use of fantastic techniques; while the film is a mainstream, studio-produced feature, it is marked by experimental formal techniques directly related to the representation of identity. For one, the staging of the action – the Sleepy Lagoon Trial of 1942 – happens in front of a diegetic audience, which self-reflexively acknowledges that cultural productions of identity and history are not just fantasies created for the screen, but are fantasies actively produced and engaged in by the audience. Second, the main character’s unconscious is exteriorized as the Pachuco, who functions also as the narrator who addresses the film’s fictional and real audiences. Fregroso links the use of the Pachuco to Valdez’s study of Mayan and Aztec mysticism, “particularly the Mayan religious principle of In Lak’ech, which roughly translates as ‘you are my other self.’” 31 The use of a character to represent the presence of the “Other” within the self is, I would argue, a cinematic representation of fantastic hesitation within identity, a denaturalization of the way identity is created and maintained by a combination of social, historical and fantastic forces. The Pachuco acts as both fantastic construct and as a part of the film’s play with fantasy: “Through the Pachuco’s agency, Hank’s accessibility to the past or to the future takes concrete actualization. Given Zoot Suit’s re-construction of the relation between the self/Hank (the identity with the referent) and the other/Pachuco (the construct of the unconscious) as non-homologous, as 109 disruptive, the film self-reflexively reveals the mechanism by which cultural identity is produced.” 32 Fregoso goes on in the article to critique Zoot Suit’s overall masculine point-of- view, arguing that the film’s use of Mayan and Aztec mysticism works to authenticate only male Chicano subjectivity and desire. The author says, “Thus, the film’s reversal of the negative Chicano subject, imbuing it with male-content, offers an essential Chicano cultural identity with masculine attributes.” 33 Feminist criticisms of films as diverse as I Am Joaquin and Zoot Suit resulted in a move to address the Chicana perspective, and films such as Sylvia Morales’ Chicana (1979) attempted to fill the lacunae of female history and experience in Chicano patriarchal narratives. The documentary and experimental filmmaker Lourdes Portillo has rejected the label of “feminist” filmmaker, but Fregoso locates her feminist intervention in Chicano cinema in “feminism honed in the trenches” – a feminism less of theory and more of practice. Fregoso argues that Portillo’s privileging of female points-of-view in her documentaries constitutes an active feminist perspective in her works; the more innovative part of Fregoso’s argument, though, and the one more related to my analysis of fantasy in the avant-garde is the author’s discussion of “love” within Portillo’s films and filmmaking practices. Fregoso locates what she calls the “heart center” or “politics of love” in Portillo’s work in Portillo’s compassionate and respectful treatment of her subject matter. I would argue that the appeal to emotion, rather than intellect, that Fregoso highlights in Portillo’s work (and argues for in revolutionary consciousness, as well) allows Portillo to create a variety of subject positions in relation to what she is filming. The traditional documentarian- 110 subject relationship, based on objectivity, is widened to include the subjectivity of the filmmaker, those being filmed, and the audience. Black Avant-Garde Filmmaking Black filmmakers had created an alternative to mainstream movies from the beginning of the American film industry, including films that responded to negative stereotypes and attempted to address the specific problems faced by the Black American population. In the 1960s, though, because of the various consciousness movements of the Civil Rights Movement, Black artists sought representation through non-mainstream forms and aesthetics. As David James describes the Black Arts Movement: “… the Black Arts Movement was an Afro-centric cultural initiative premised on the need for self-determination and an autonomous nationhood for Americans of African ancestry, and accordingly on the rejection of European-derived aesthetic forms and the alienated social relations they engendered.” 34 While Chicano filmmakers appealed to the pre- Columbian lands of myth to create a sense of ethnic unity, Black artists, authors and filmmakers often turned to Africa for inspiration and enlightenment; considering that slavery was the original point of alienation for the Black American population, returning to Africa, both metaphorically and literally, was a way of reclaiming that lost identity. Part of the growth of several ethnic and minority cinemas in the 1960s and 70s was the flourishing of film schools, which provided both the environment and the tools for burgeoning ethnic cinemas. UCLA’s Ethno-Communications Program also facilitated a revolutionary consciousness through the Third World Film Club, organized by scholar Teshome Gabriel, who introduced the filmmakers to Third World radical filmmaking and 111 post-colonial theory, “figuring the chief axiom informing the films produced [at UCLA]: a pan-Third World, Afrocentric cultural nationalism.” 35 And, as David James argues in The Most Typical Avant-Garde, several of the revolutionary formal qualities of the films produced by the likes of Larry Clark, Haile Gerima and Charles Burnett came from a jazz aesthetic. The speculative potential of these films, which are generally marked by a raw realism, lies in this jazz aesthetic; fractured, de-centered narratives, shaky camera movements, and a unique use of non-diegetic Black music turn Black life into an uncanny landscape, one that speculates and re-imagines the Black lived experience with the spontaneity, abstraction and warmth of jazz. Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason (1967) is one example of an uncanny portrayal of black subjectivity; as a documentary portrait of its black subject, Aaron Payne, it is a seemingly unlikely place to locate the use of fantasy. Paul Arthur’s A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film Since 1965 examines the importance of portraiture within the avant-garde, and Arthur’s stylistic investigation of the way the avant-garde represents the human figure serves as a strong starting point for examining how the avant-garde incorporates identity in general. The author says, “To expressively render the world of any portrait subject, and to embed in that display a gestural shadow of oneself and one’s aesthetic project, is in some sense to conceded the gaping existential chasm at the heart of all human consciousness.” 36 Arthur argues that the act of portraiture, in contrast to biography or documentary, emphasizes self-reflexivity in the interaction between camera and performer, constantly calling into question the “reality” of the moment due to the camera’s intervention. Arthur mentions Portrait of Jason as an example of portraiture and 112 performance, but what Arthur fails to acknowledge, and this holds true for his book in general, is the way race functions in Clarke’s film. Jason, also known as Aaron Payne, tells stories about his life as a performer and constantly calls into question the veracity of his words and gestures by rapidly changing mood and expression. In doing so, Jason, African-American and gay, challenges the camera’s ability to truly “capture” someone, emphasizing that racial and sexual identity in front of the camera slides constantly between reality and performative fantasy; what is remarkable about Clarke’s film is that she registers this ambiguity with no fantastic imagery – only Jason – which turns the viewer’s attention back to the ambiguity of the camera itself. Melissa Anderson argues this point in “The vagaries of verities: On Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason,” claiming that criticisms of the film’s exploitation of Jason are tempered by the way the film reveals the performative nature of sexuality and race. Anderson’s comments on the film’s blurring of documentary and fiction exemplify its active use and display of phantasy: “Ultimately, there are no ‘truths’ revealed about Jason; what is disclosed instead is the theatricality of both Jason’s performance in front of the camera and of the film itself.” 37 The viewer of the film experiences hesitation between Jason’s actual and performed selves, ultimately questioning whether the two exist separately at all, and the hesitation between Jason as a person and Jason as a character subsequently leads to a consideration of how race and sexuality can be performed, documented and ultimately naturalized. Afrofuturism and John Akomfrah Another avenue of the Black avant-garde that relies heavily on both musical and science fiction tropes is Afro-futurism: “Afrofuturism studies the appeals that black 113 artists, musicians, critics and writers have made to the future, in moments where any future was made difficult for them to imagine.” 38 The “looking forward” implied by the term “avant-garde” occurs on two levels in Afrofuturism – aesthetic and political – and implies a reconsideration of the past and the present at the same time. Referring back to Munoz’s invocation of the “future in the present,” Kodwo Eshun argues that Afrofuturism as a movement embeds appeals to the future within “everyday forms of the mainstream of black vernacular expression.” 39 Examples of Afrofuturism within popular culture include the music and imagery of both Sun Ra and George Clinton, who used space imagery to create a philosophical statement about Black alienation. But Eshun claims that the “future” has been co-opted in contemporary times as a commodity, a utopia of commercial opportunities rather than the more radical utopias offered by Marxism and the avant-garde. Calling this investment in the future “SF Capital,” Eshun suggests a reapplication of science fiction tropes – moving away from Africa as dystopic and crisis-ridden (and therefore perfect for a utopian marketplace) and more towards the radical aesthetic and political possibilities offered by the “future” as an idea. One of the radical moves of Afrofuturism is the unsettling of “modernity” as a definition and temporal category. As Eshun says, “By creating temporal complications and anachronistic episodes that disturb the linear time of progress, these futurisms adjust the temporal logics that condemned black subjects to prehistory.” 40 As I will explain further within my chapter about race, technology and new media, the use of contemporary sound recording in popular music, as analyzed by Alexander Weheliye, is one example of “future” moments that (re)define modernity in Black terms. In terms of 114 avant-garde film, the lens of Afrofuturism lends a different perspective not only to films that incorporate jazz and funk into their visuals and soundtracks, but also to films that reflect on mythology and ritual within Black American culture. Consider Barbara McCullough’s 1980 film Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification, which locates ritual, the body and Africa within South Central Los Angeles. As David James points out, the film’s sole character reclaims her desolate environment through the use of both her body and rituals involving “fragments of the detritus of the ruined urban environment,” ultimately invoking a hope in the future of African-American cinema and culture, “the cynosure of a previously unimaginable autonomous and magical African- American cinema that might flower among the ashes.” 41 The film’s protagonist seems to exist in three time frames at once, calling forth pre-history with her rituals, the present with the urban environment, and the future in a kind of post-apocalyptic landscape. Eshun says, “[Extraterrestriality] should be understood not so much as escapism, but rather as an identification with the potentiality of space and distance within the high- pressure zone of perpetual racial hostility.” 42 I would argue that the “potentiality of space and distance” can be extended to apply to cinematic space, where the alienating techniques of the avant-garde can be used to also approximate the alienation expressed within black cultural work and thought. John Akomfrah’s documentary The Last Angel of History, referenced extensively by Eshun, exists in a similar multi-dimensionality; it is not only a history of Afrofuturism and its science fiction tropes, but is also an Afrofuturistic work itself. Akomfrah himself is an interesting figure, born in Ghana and raised primarily in London during the 60s and 115 70s. He acts as filmmaker, writer and theorist, focusing particularly on issues of African diaspora, African film, and Black British cultural production. He was one of the co- founders of the Black Audio Film Collective, a Black British filmmaking collective that attempted to address the social and political complexities of black identity and representation on film. Akomfrah’s first film, Handsworth Songs (1986), was an experimental documentary centering on the 1981 and 1985 riots by mostly Indian and Caribbean immigrants in the Handsworth neighborhood of Birmingham, England. The film’s avant-garde format, splicing together footage from the riots along with photographs and films from earlier moments of Indian and Black migration to Britain, expresses the anger and alienation felt by minority groups under Thatcher’s administration through the narrative and aesthetic violence of its experimental form. In a way, black filmmakers during the 70s and 80s were doubly alienated; one, by the conservatism and racism of the Thatcher administration, and two, by a lack of adequate representation within the film and television industries. Prime Minister Thatcher’s tenure in England (1979-1990) represented a return to economic and social conservatism; David Harvey links her attempts to “curb trade union power and put an end to the miserable inflationary stagnation that had enveloped the country for the preceding decade” to similar movements in the Reagan administration and in Den Xioaping’s China. 43 The valorization of the free market results in a de-investment in the ideals of community and organization that protect the lower and working classes and instead celebrates the individual’s ability to succeed without state intervention. As Andrew Higson says in his study of spectacle in British heritage films, “The privatising ethics of 116 popular capitalism shifted the emphasis from community values and notions of consensus and collective identity to the values of individual enterprise and the marketplace.” 44 What complicated Thatcher’s attempt to patch together both a nostaglic return to “Britishness” and laissez-faire market policies was an influx of immigrants into England; national identity was questioned and challenged by a gamut of ethnic identities and class positions. The fragmentation of British society led to divergent film trends in the 1980s; along with the cycle of Heritage films attempting to recapture a sense of English grandeur were pockets of independent and experimental cinemas that spoke to immigrant and working class populations. Manthia Diawara characterizes this moment in Black British cinema to be pivotal in terms of changing film aesthetics and the politics of representation. Akomfrah’s manifesto for the Black Audio Film Collective involved moving away from either “bad” or “good” representations of blackness in the media, exploring the complex matrix of forces that determine and are determined by black representation, and focusing on collective filmmaking. 45 In Handsworth Songs, Akomfrah uses archival footage to document the Handsworth Riots, but his mode of documentation creates a fragmented, rather than unified, narrative of the reasons for and results of the riots. By juxtaposing images from different eras alongside footage of the riots, Akomfrah expresses the underlying violence of civil unrest through images that force the viewer to connect disparate points of view, encouraging an understanding of the conflict through various narratives. Consider the opening sequence of images and sounds – archival footage of a black uniformed guard, 117 shots of vultures gathering in trees, and riot footage inter-cut with close-ups of a mechanical clown’s face. The sequence is underscored by the distorted and nearly unintelligible sounds of a newscaster describing the riots, and the effect of the entire sequence is disorienting and ominous. Akomfrah introduces several perspectives – that of the black guard, the vultures waiting for their meals, the person documenting the riots, and the clown – and establishes different access points into both the film and its events. The black guard sees the riots through the lens of the intertwined histories of immigration and industrialization, the vultures wait patiently for the opportunity to benefit from the violence, the documentarian watches the chaos unfold in front of him, and the clown establishes a sense of absurdity underlying the chaos. The sounds of the riot and the distorted newscaster add, in a way, another perspective to the sequence – that of a damaged authority, suggesting that dominant narratives of the riots have begun to fall apart. The film, through its fragmented perspective, acts as a visual representation of phantasy as a mise-en-scene, and evokes both the fantasies and nightmares of British minority identity through its alienating visual and aural aesthetics. We can link Thatcherism then to the previous discussion of Reaganomics, where we read The Brother from Another Planet as a hyperbolic representation of the alienation felt by America’s inner city and lower class populations. Akomfrah’s film does not involve extraterrestrials, but it does perform a time-machine-like function of removing past footage from its original contexts and forcing past and present to confront each other. In fact, “the historical referents of the found footage are described as ‘ghosts’ who haunt the present, as the film’s most evocative slogal implies: ‘There are no stories in the 118 riots, only the ghosts of other stories.’” 46 As several theorists have argued, the combination of archival footage of these ‘ghosts,’ along with newsreels from the actual riots, points to the ideological underpinnings of the “official” media coverage of the riots. Interviews with various members of the Asian and Caribbean community reveals a sense of outrage towards the government’s treatment of minorities, while the mainstream media fails to locate the riots within a history of oppression, suggesting a reinforcement of Thatcher’s individualist neoliberal state. Stuart Hall’s essay, “The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism among the Theorists,” attempts to apply a Marxist interpretation to the popularity of Thatcherism, “especially among those sectors of the society whose interests it cannot possibly be said to represent in any conventional sense of the term,” 47 what he calls the “problem of explaining the popular consent to Thatcherism.” 48 I would argue that Akomfrah’s film, in its fractured aesthetic, attempts to expose the fractures within Thatcherism’s mystifying hold on the working class. As Hall says: And since the social institutions most directly implicated in [social distribution of knowledge’s] formation and transmission – the family/school/media triplet – are grounded in and structured by the class relations that surround them, the distribution of available codes with which to decode or unscramble the meaning of events in the world, and the languages we use to construct interests, are bound to reflect the unequal relations of power that obtain in the area of symbolic production as in other spheres. 49 In a way, Akomfrah reverses the power dynamic that Hall reads into the “codes” which we use to understand the world by dismantling the way that dominant narratives frame race and class; instead, the filmmaker uses documentary “evidence” to create new ways of imagining identity. Akomfrah’s 1995 film, The Last Angel of History, practices a similarly fractured aesthetic to express a different point of view on history. Thematically, Akomfrah 119 investigates the appeal of science fiction narratives and imagery to funk artists of the past and techno artists of the present, along with authors such as Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler; aesthetically, his film exhibits an Afrofuturistic investment in cinematic technology, race and modernity. Akomfrah’s documentary is structured as a kind of journey through acoustic and visual history, as our narrator, “The Data Thief,” investigates the relationships between science fiction iconography and black popular culture. The “Data Thief” is positioned as the “last angel” of Benjamin’s theory of historical progress, who is being driven relentlessly into the future while wanting to “piece together what has been smashed,” i.e. the materialist past. 50 In a way, we could consider the Data Thief, a kind of investigative reporter, as the potential architect of Handsworth Songs, where the progressive notion of history is disrupted to understand immigrants’ mistreatment by the British state. The Last Angel similarly provokes a criticism of historical linearity, but it does so in an aesthetically self-conscious manner, recognizing the way that both experimental film and Afrofuturism use the “future” as a tool for interrogating the past. The Last Angel incorporates “talking head” interviews with figures such as George Clinton, Derrick May, Kodwo Eshun, and Nichelle Nichols, but the interviews are consistently interrupted by flashes of digitized imagery or photographs. While Handsworth Songs used the techniques of interruption and distortion to question authority, The Last Angel uses disruptive blips to link its authority figures – scholars, critics, musicians, an astronaut, and an actor – to alternative methods of conveying information. The blips include photographs, scrolling texts, and digitized images of what seem to be ancient icons, and while they appear too quickly to study, their 120 existence suggests a dialectical relationship to the histories told by the interviewees, particularly the ways those histories are connected to both the distant past and future. Akomfrah explores the idea of displaced temporality through his use of various platforms in the film, particularly the projection of both digital and archival footage onto computer screens and the futuristic glasses of the Data Thief. Two or three computer screens are set up in a room, and footage has been super-imposed on the screens; occasionally what looks like blue paint stains a corner of the frame. The avant-garde mise-en-scene also functions as a “phantastic” mise-en-scene, where access points into different temporalities exist in the same cinematic space. Archival footage of Africa on the computer screens visually suggests what the Data Thief discovers – that Africa is an important site for black past, present and future – and the splotch of blue reminds the viewer of the filmmaker’s hand in the construction of the work. Cinematic temporality is also questioned as Akomfrah, throughout the documentary, shows a series of still images in time with the film frames. As various techno artists discuss the intersections between music, technology, and science fiction, Akomfrah accomplishes his own kind of “sampling” by flipping images across the screen, seemingly to the rhythms of celluloid, perhaps commenting on the notion of “progression” within film itself. His aesthetic intervention reveals that the rhythms we assume as “natural” – the motion of the film frame and projector, or the digital beats of music production – are already burdened by particularly ideologies and must be released by new ways of presenting images and sound. Considering that history in mainstream films follows progressive arcs, Akomfrah challenges conceptions of history on and off-screen by literally manipulating the 121 materials of cinematic production; his disruption of time and space as an avant-garde documentarian begins to piece together the “rubble” in the Last Angel’s wishful backwards gaze. The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs and Tribulation 99: Fantasies of War My chapter thus far has been an exploration of the ways different facets of “self” are represented in the avant-garde, focusing specifically on the use of fantasy and fantastic techniques within specific periods and movements. As my brief survey of avant-garde history has shown, fantasy is used with surrealism, documentary, and performance to create and represent identity through cinematic experimentation and play. In the work of Deren and Anger, the dream world is integrated into the cinematic world to depict the horror and humor involved in gender and sexual identity, where Hollywood acts as a powerful foundation for fantasies of identity and as an object of both inspiration and disgust. The filmmakers and theorists of the Chicano and Black avant-gardes also recognize Hollywood as an institution and locate its fantasies within specific social, historical and political contexts; their experimental films use fantasy to deconstruct the way that images reproduce identity in injurious or stereotypical ways. The filmmakers of the Los Angeles School, Lourdes Portillo and Marlon Riggs take back the alienated images of their race or culture and, through a combination of formal experimentation and documentary strategies, produce narratives of identity that express the dynamic intersections between lived experience and fantastic representation. Shirley Clarke uses the documentary format to examine a Black American performer and reveals the fantasies involved in capturing subjectivity and performance, and John Akomfrah creates a kind of 122 fantastic documentary to re-tell an overlooked history of future visions whose fantasies relate directly to a material present. The last section of this chapter will explore issues of history and fantasy even further with a detailed look at two very different avant-garde films about war: Craig Baldwin’s Tribulation 99 (1992) and Walid Ra’ad’s The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs (1999). While one is told through archival footage and the other through fabricated images, both films attempt to “narrate” the essentially “un-narratable” event of war. While the films I have focused on so far have engaged in issues of representing identity, both films in this section address identity as a facet within larger issues of documenting modern history within a world already awash with media imagery. The aforementioned minority filmmakers revealed the fantastic aspects of identity through formal cinematic innovations that played with film’s dual abilities to capture and manipulate reality, and the two following films, in their challenge of history, reveal the fantasy involved in the act of documentation itself. Artist Walid Ra’ad, in a piece of performance art staged as a fake lecture to the Middle Eastern Students Association of CUNY, about the Lebanese Civil War, said to his increasingly frustrated audience (frustrated because of learning that certain parts of the presentation were falsified), “How do we approach the fact of war?” 51 The word fact rings with implications of “truth” and “evidence,” and, as these two artists explore in their works, the “fact” of war, with all its traumas and horrors, is actually a complex mixture of history and hyberbole. The structure and content of the two films also translate several aspects of Todorov’s fantastic 123 into the cinematic realm, and my analysis will highlight these theoretical similarities in order to further an understanding of a “fantastic film.” Tribulation 99 Craig Baldwin’s work is centered on a recontextualization of archival footage, and Tribuation 99 is a veritable patchwork of science fiction imagery and political satire. The incorporation of older fantasies of the future into a science fiction re-telling of historical conflict leads to a kind of fantastic meta-text, which compounds the absurdity of history with an equally absurd visual and aural narrative. As Catherine Russell describes in Experimental Ethnography, “….Tribulation 99 is a palimpsest of floating signifiers that subsume history in an impossible network of metonymic relations.” 52 The narrative structuring this palimpsest is that the U.S. military presence in Latin America is motivated by alien invasion. The plethora of images comes from science fiction films, instructional videos, newsreel footage and still images, and while they loosely match up with the text, they do so in tangential ways, calling upon the viewer to make multiple readings – between the text and the image, of the image itself, the image’s position to other images, and, finally, the text and image’s relations to history. Russell discusses the importance of Tribulation 99 in terms of its use of found footage, claiming that the “crisis of representation” involved in telling the story of Third World peoples is transcended by Baldwin’s use of arbitrary images and an apocalyptic narrative. The “random-access memory of American Cold War culture,” 53 according to Russell, represents the inability to articulate American fear of cultural and social invasion and the inability to accurately depict this fear through images. She says, “Fiction and 124 myth are constructed as arbitrary linkages in which the oppressed and the colonized are produced as threats to both American security and realist representation.” 54 Russell’s project with this film, which extends throughout the book, is to establish and explore how the ethnographic, in the form of found footage, affects the avant-garde, and she uses Tribulation 99 in this capacity, attributing its plethora of imagery to “deliberately rendering the history incoherent.” 55 It is here that Russell invokes the fantastic without referring to it as such, echoing Todorov’s evocation of the fantastic as a form of disguised transgression. If we look closely at the structure and themes of Baldwin’s film, we sense that the modes of the fantastic are being used to produce an alternative history, rather than conceal an existing one. The film’s use of found footage, as Russell argues, disrupts connections between the past and present, but the images themselves and their relationship to the narrative further this disruption in specific ways. The fantastic becomes a mode of re-telling the history of the United States presence in Latin America, and fantastic imagery is used to cast light on both the history of American foreign policy and the history of film. Todorov’s themes of the self produce alternative perceptions of time, and his themes of the other create hyperbolic expressions for the insidiousness of foreign policy. Finally, adding Muñoz’s concept of the future within the present to further complicate Russell’s argument, a film like Tribulation 99 imagines possibilities for ethnic representation in the future, doing so by invoking the very idea of the future through science fiction imagery. In Todorov’s strict definition, he claims that the fantastic must produce a hesitation in the reader with regards to the “reality” of events in the narrative. Being an 125 avant-garde film and an imaginary survey of history, Baldwin’s film does not fulfill Todorov’s other requirement – the hesitation must be experienced by a character in the story. But as mentioned my Introduction, Todorov explains that the genre has changed – this second characteristic is moot – and in contemporary literature, entire worlds are founded on bizarre and imaginary principles, and characters must adapt quickly to the absurdity rather than question its nature. 56 I will proceed from this concluding statement of Todorov’s by arguing that Baldwin’s text seamlessly intertwines science fiction mishmash and textbook history, creating hesitation on the part of the viewer but not in the narrative itself. The film’s narrative drops the names of actual historical figures and refers to actual historical events, reinforcing these names and events with pictures and newsreel footage, but is also rife with outlandish claims, conspiracy theories, monsters, aliens and a lot of atomic waste. As the film oscillates between the real and the imaginary, the viewer is called upon to make distinctions between the two and understand the implications of these differences. Where Tribulation 99 succeeds is not only littering the world we know with unfamiliar elements, but also using its narrative to cast familiar events in an uncanny light. A simple example is the film’s claim that the CIA was created to intercept alien commands; while the agency does not protect the world from alien invasion, it remains shrouded in some degree of secrecy, answering to – but ostensibly protected by – the government. While linking U.S. covert operations to stopping the alien threat, embodied at one point by a replicant Castro, Baldwin alludes to the disavowed history of the CIA’s involvement in assassinations, in particular the creation of Operation 40, an assassination 126 team in charge of killing political figures such as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara; the names linked to this team are mentioned frequently by Baldwin (Luis Posada, Chichi Quintero, etc). The barrage of information, both fact and fiction, that we encounter while watching Baldwin’s film does not lead to an incoherence, as Russell posits, but rather a productive space to re-think the history that we think we know. Todorov says in his final chapter, “The literature of the fantastic leaves us with two notions: that of reality and that of literature, each as unsatisfactory as the other,” 57 arguing that the introduction of fantastic elements stands in relief against the supposedly “realistic” background of the work, ultimately rendering both unstable. While the CIA may not be involved in stopping alien invasion, its very secrecy is over-emphasized by Baldwin’s eerie suggestions, creating a warranted sense of unease about American foreign policy. In terms of the depiction of Latin America, the hyperbolic use of the word alien attains a particular resonance when referring to this proclaimed “Other” of Baldwin’s film. Just as transgressive sexuality is represented by supernatural forces in the works of Todorov’s study, the word “alien” emphasizes the impermeability of America’s borders by using the monstrous and otherworldly to reiterate America’s deep fear of the foreign. While the viewer oscillates between the blurry lines of real and fantastic, the authority of American institutions and policies is deflated, criticized and held in question. The film’s rapid-fire integration of real and imaginary produces alternative histories, rather than rendering the history itself untellable; in a way, Baldwin’s film imagines a representative utopia while creating a narrative dystopia. 127 Also participating in this very detailed and conscious re-telling of American-Latin American foreign relations is the imagery itself, which Russell characterizes as an “image bank” of “floating signifiers,” disregarding the time and effort Baldwin invested in the construction of his 48-minute montage. 58 Like the carefully constructed narrative, the images are not merely meant to flood the viewer’s senses, but are significant in themselves and in their relation to each other. Their relationship is best defined by what Todorov refers to as “pan-determinism,” the establishing of new causality within fantastic works. Likening this facet of the fantastic to the experience of both drugs and madness, Todorov explains that the destruction of traditional, known causality infuses the entire world of the narrative with meaning. Events and objects always have the possibility of significance, no matter how random or inconsequential they seem. 59 With this explanation in mind, an application of the fantastic to Baldwin’s imagery forms a counter-argument to Russell’s description of the film. In Baldwin’s disrupted, fantastic world, the imagery and the connections between images are anything but random, demanding several readings of their multiple, layered meanings. The inclusion of newsreel footage, instructional videos and documentaries furthers a disjunction between the real and the imaginary, linking these “real” depictions to a fantastic narrative, and their clearly dated nature encourages a similar attitude towards textbook history; as Baldwin mocks the images of the past, he also criticizes standard versions of this past. Continuing the twisting of “perception-consciousness” through the use of particular imagery, Baldwin also uses old science-fiction and horror films that depict fear of the unknown in seemingly clumsy and artificial ways. But when re-purposed in Baldwin’s 128 film, visions of alien visitation, futuristic worlds, a post-apocalyptic Earth, and varieties of grossly deformed creatures become meaningful in a different way. While the gentle mocking of the images seems to empty them of potential significance, their juxtapositions with other images and Baldwin’s ominous narrative infuse them with a new horror. Implied in Baldwin’s use of the imagery is a warning of sorts – if foreign policy can approach the lunacy of alien invasion, then the absurdity of science fiction imagery becomes frightening rather than insignificant. Depicting foreign forces as “aliens,” Fidel Castro as a replicant, and Latin American gunmen as stars in Mexican horror films, Baldwin does not suggest the possibility of these events, but rather the more terrifying possibilities of their representation. Fear, as we know, distorts perception, and Baldwin activates this notion by deftly mixing together already distorted perceptions of the future, replacing a fear of the unknown with the fear of an untold past. The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs Walid Ra’ad’s second film, The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs, also plays with past and present, and, as with Tribulation 99, attempts to narrate a history that is rarely told. Using ideas of transitivity and permanence, Ra’ad’s fantastic mini-narratives depict the devastation of war by investigating the myriad relationships between history and its representation. Ra’ad, who was born in Lebanon and grew up in both Beirut and the United States, attempts to narrate “the history of the history” of the 12-year Lebanese Civil War, which wreaked infinitely complex havoc on the country’s infrastructure and society. 60 Ra’ad project goes beyond just the film and involves photography, archives, and the Atlas Group, a foundation that toes the tenuous line between fact and fiction by 129 being an actual historical foundation and a fictional artists’ collective (only involving Ra’ad). As Janet Kaplan says in her analysis of Ra’ad’s work, “And the contradictions inherent in the work of a "group" that is really done by one individual underscore the problematic conjunction of fact and fiction that is a central strategy in much of his work, which he presents in various public forms including mixed-medium installations, single- channel screenings and lecture/performances.” 61 The tangibility of Ra’ad’s work – his use of photographs, data, written works, and even staged technical problems during lectures – is what makes his play with fact and fiction all the more striking. Ra’ad’s artistic process also reveals aspects of his own identity as a Lebanese-American within a Westernized art world. Michéle Cohen Hadria argues that Ra’ad’s work, among other contemporary Middle Eastern artists, responds to the chaos of political conflicts and their media representation within both the United States and the Middle East. With a plethora of false media coverage and conflicting and controlling stories spread by particular governments and militias, the state of information itself within divided or war-torn countries is marked by absurdity and fantasy, and the artists that Hadria analyzes respond to the state of informational disarray with their own fantastic representations. Hadria says, “Ra’ad reinvests [symptomatic collective amnesias] in a collection of random archives ‘in progress’ named ‘Atlas Group’; a phantasmagorical legacy, mixing true and false, probable and improbable, through which he inoculates the body of a diseased reality with an antidote of invention, the denial, the return, the subversion, in brief, the escape towards the fiction at the root of the massive blockage of the collective psyche.” 62 For Hadria, Ra’ad’s play with fact and fiction is a 130 representation of a larger conflict within the Arab art world between a-historical abstraction and accountability to political and social issues; Ra’ad’s experimental innovations do not reject history or render it abstract, but rather involve a deconstruction of notions of truth and evidence which are directly related to the historical turmoil he attempts to address. 63 The first section of Ra’ad’s film – Missing Lebanese War in 3 Parts – is inspired by the diaries of the wife of a Lebanese Civil War historian – Dr. Fadl Fakhouri – and describes her husband’s visits to the race tracks, her subsequent departure from Lebanon, and her husband’s exile in Lebanon. Male and female voices read out snippets of the imaginary narrative constructed from the diary, repeating particular phrases, and the voice over is accompanied by a series of still images. As descriptions of Ra’ad’s piece have emphasized, he works to personalize the experience of the civil war, re-scripting the past in a way that imagines the personal as nestled very deeply in the political. While articulating the way a war entrenches on home life, Ra’ad also invokes the idea of history through the image. The first episode of this section describes the historian’s participation in illegal betting, where he and other historians would bet on the final photograph of the winning horse – whether it was taken before, after or during the moment the horse crossed the finish line. The concept of a group of historians being wholly invested in a mere moment and dependent on the photograph of that moment seizes power away from the concept of history, suggesting, to refer back to Russell, the incoherence of history juxtaposed with the clarity of a single moment in the present. The discontinuity between past and present continues in the next segment, where Dr. Fakhouri’s wife leaves 131 Lebanon, taking with her only six objects from her house – those objects appear in photographs taken on the day of her departure. Her sense of the past is dictated only by the photographic image, creating a tenuous connection to the past, related to the fleeting present and objects rather than family or national history. Presumably these six objects are all that remain of the family heritage, for the last segment describes the last days of Dr. Fakhouri, spent in exile in a hotel room. Alone, he listens to his own lectures and rearranges the bullets in his son’s collection; the historian – and history, by proxy – literally goes crazy, involved in neither the past nor the present, but only the temporality of his mind. To fictionalize the onset of madness for a famous historian goes back to Todorov’s discussion of the themes of the self, where the lines between mind and matter are blurred. This is a situation which Todorov likens to drugs or madness; the author claims, “Psychiatrists generally posited that the ‘normal man’ possessed several contexts of reference and attached each fact to only one among them. The psychotic, on the contrary, was incapable of distinguishing these different contexts and confused the perceived with the imaginary.” 64 In the case of Dead Weight, Dr. Fakhouri’s distorted perspective of the world is reflected in both the blurred image of the empty hotel room and the fuzzy recordings that overlay it. The historian’s exile and mental breakdown stand in for a world gone awry, where the backbone of history provides no answers or support. The 2 nd section of Ra’ad’s film is called Secrets in the Open Sea, and it continues the connections between history and the image, this time expanding the film beyond just the personal. The narration explains over footage of the ocean and city images that blue 132 photographic prints were found in an abandoned militia building from 1975-1990, and in 1995, 10 of these prints were sent to the U.S. for analysis. The prints were revealed to be black and white group photographs of militia members, who all died in an ocean-related matter. Ra’ad ends the segment by saying that the additional prints are still being analyzed, as a series of blue rectangles flits across the screen. Engaging in both the abstract and the fantastic, the imaginary recovery connects the photographic to the anonymity of war and the idea of loss. The photographs are found and identified, but only within the imagined world of Ra’ad’s film. They appear on screen, grainy and indiscernible, leading to a hesitation regarding their source that takes the question of “who died” beyond the film’s parameters, into history itself. The series of blue rectangles that ends the segment suggests that identity – and history – are ultimately masked and rendered abstract; the invocation of the ocean throughout the segment gives their anonymity a sort of tragic inconsequence. The final section of the film is called Miraculous Beginnings in Two Parts, and it primarily engages in the years after the war. The first section describes the fictional activity of Lebanese President Sarkis, who would expose one frame of film each time he thought the war was over. In the story Ra’ad constructs, the reel of the film was discovered after the president’s death, and it appears on screen – a rapid succession of random images of both people and places. The idea of the president capturing his hope for the war’s end poetically continues the film’s intersections between history and image; the series of unrelated images also imagines the connection between the detailed chaos of 133 war – a jumble of buildings, offices, faces and landscapes – and the memory of an official figure. While the first part captures the desperate hope of a country in the midst of collapse, the second and last part of this section engages in the hope that comes after the war – a hope characterized less by desperation and more by melancholy. It describes, this time with written text rather than voiceover, a rebel security camera man who, instead of filming Beirut’s most popular boardwalk, spends a part of each day filming the sunset. He is eventually fired and his footage confiscated, except a few minutes, which are the final images of the film. Completely silent, the film ends on a series of sunsets, each one closer than the next, until the setting sun consumes a large portion of the screen. The story and the images themselves are beautifully haunting, and they also highlight and support Ra’ad’s project. Again, a man invests himself in image and image alone, creating a rough chronology that represents both days passing and his minor rebellion, and contains nothing specifically related to history itself. As Janet Kaplan says of the corresponding photo-text exhibit of this film, “By addressing the volatile spectacle of the Middle East and Lebanon's civil wars through what we might otherwise conclude are unremarkable tourist photos, Ra’ad similarly directs our attention away from the grand gestures and cataclysmic events that are the expected subjects of war documentation.” 65 The fact that the entire segment is silent reiterates the importance of the photographic and filmic images, to both the cameraman and Ra’ad himself, and the series of sunsets suggests a rejection of the past, present and future and a reification of an eternal emblem – the sun – which rises and sets regardless of the day’s events. But again, the fact that 134 this symbol of the eternal and unchanging is represented by filmed and transitory images questions the very notion of eternity; as with the entire film, the image, a mere representation, both stands the test of time and represents time itself. Dead Weight empties history of its significance and suggests, to return to Stuart Hall, that representation involves several acts of “imaginative rediscovery.” 66 Janet Kaplan describes the hesitation Ra’ad invokes as a kind of “flirtation:” “Enacting a flirtation with the real, he invents fictions that hover near facts, offering alternative sources for the "evidence" that becomes history.” 67 To return to the question Ra’ad asked of his irritated audience, “How do we approach the fact of the war?,” Dead Weight provides a dizzying array of answers that points not only to the futility of war, but also to the futile efforts to accurately document war’s effect on a country and its people. Ra’ad, like Baldwin, produces a hesitation on the part of the viewer, invoking the historical event of the Lebanese Civil War and actual historical figures, but imagining its unfolding in different ways. On the one hand, Baldwin uses found footage to re-script the past, and his imagery sustains a particular resonance between past and future due to the contexts and sources of the images themselves. Baldwin forges links between textbook and media history, using a hyperbolic narrative and over-the-top imagery to approach the absurd. Ra’ad, on the other hand, uses photographs and films that he created, which have no direct connection to the historical past or present, but are completely intertwined in his imaginary narratives. I would argue that Ra’ad’s film goes one step further than Baldwin’s by employing the fantastic to equate history with image. 135 Conclusion Tribulation 99 and Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs utilize the fantastic to approach their alternative histories; if this is the only recourse for unique representation, the question arises whether these films are avoiding reality and escaping into fantasy. I would argue, though, that considering the phrase “avant-garde” closely suggests that rather than seeing these films as “fantasy,” we can look at them as pieces of James’ “future in the present” – moments when experimental and forward-looking aesthetics can disrupt conventional narratives about racial, cultural, and national identity. The idea of the “future” that is suggested by the avant-garde also points to an overlap between science fiction and the avant-garde, and as my analysis of THX 1138 indicates, such an overlap can lend new insight into the ways in which racial identity is abstracted within both the formally innovative and technologically sophisticated realms of the avant-garde and science fiction. Finally, we can consider the avant-garde as a kind of science fiction in itself – as the manipulation and unique use of film and digital technologies to create new worlds – and we can use the study of the avant-garde as a way to generate a critical Todorovian hesitation towards representations of history and identity. As Handsworth Songs, The Last Angel of History, The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs, and Tribulation 99 indicate, the science-fiction-esque displacement of time and place within avant-garde film does not only encourage viewers to ask “is this real or not,” but also to question the way we use images and sounds to create and naturalize “real” identities and histories. 136 Chapter 2 Endnotes 1 Jose Esteban Muñoz, “The Future in the Present: Sexual Avant-Gardes and the Performance of Utopia,” The Futures of American Studies, eds. Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002) 108. 2 Bill Nichols, “Documentary Film and the Avant-Garde,” Critical Inquiry 27.4 (Summer 2001): 596. 3 Ibid., 586. 4 Scott Bukatman, “There’s Always Tomorrowland: Disney and the Hypercinematic Experience,” October 57 (Summer 1991): 55-78, 74. 5 Vivian Sobchack, Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987) 104. 6 Catherine Russell, Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999) 1. 7 Ibid., 21. 8 Ibid., 24. 9 P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) 348. 10 Ibid., 350. 11 Animation is closely related to the structural film in its contemplation of form and film technology, and Jordan Belson’s work perhaps best represents the total abstraction that Sobchack mentions in Screening Space. Influenced by Eastern philosophy and a painting background, Belson’s films were meditations in line, shape and color, ultimately attempting to help the viewer (and Belson) to reach a new level of consciousness. As Sitney says, “His personal cinema delineates the mechanics of transcendence in the rhetoric of abstractionism.” (260) 12 David James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) 212. 13 Sobchack, 98. 14 James, 211. 15 Lauren Rabinowitz, Points of Resistance: Women, Power & Politics in the New York Avant-garde Cinema, 1943-71 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003) 62. 16 Tom Gunning,“Like Unto a Leopard: Figurative Discourse in Cat People (1942) and Todorov’s The Fantastic,” Wide Angle 10.3 (1988), 36. 17 James, 40. 18 Russell, 28. 19 Russell, 46-47. 137 20 Ibid.,47. 21 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation,” Framework 36 (1989): 70. 22 Ibid., 71-72. 23 Ibid., 72. 24 Chon Noriega, Shot in America: Television, the State and the Rise of Chicano Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000) 3. 25 Ibid., 2. 26 Ibid., xxvi. 27 Eliud Martinez, “I Am Joaquin as Poem and Film: Two Modes of Chicano Expression,” Journal of Popular Culture 13:3 (1980: Spring): 508-509. 28 Ibid., 512-513. 29 Noriega, 6. 30 Rosa Linda Fregoso. “The Representation of Cultural Identity in ‘Zoot Suit’ (1981),” Theory and Society 22.5 (1993): 664. 31 Fregroso, 667. 32 Ibid., 668. 33 Fregoso, “Zoot Suit,” 670. 34 James, 321. 35 Ibid., 328. 36 Paul Arthur, A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film Since 1965 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005) 36. 37 Melissa Anderson. “The vagaries of verities: On Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason,” Film Comment, 35.6 (Nov/Dec 1999): 58. Research Library Core, University of Southern California Libraries. 38 Kodwo Eshun, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3.2 (2003): 294. 39 Ibid., 293. 40 Ibid., 297. 41 James, 335. 42 Eshun, 299. 43 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) 1. 138 44 Andrew Higson. “Re-presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film,” Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism, ed. Lester D. Friedman (London: Wallflower Press, 2006) 107. 45 “John Akomfrah,” BFI Screen Online, http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/467761/, accessed on 19 September 2008. 46 Russell, 265. 47 Stuart Hall, “The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism among the Theorists,” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988) 41. 48 Ibid., 48. 49 Ibid., 45. 50 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” Gesammelten Schriften I:2. Suhrkamp Verlag. Frankfurt am Main, 1974. 51 Janet A Kaplan,"Flirtations with Evidence," Art in America 92.9 (2004): 134-139,169. Research Library Core. ProQuest. University of Southern California Libraries, Los Angeles, CA. 7 Jul. 2008. 52 Russell, 260. 53 Ibid., 261-262. 54 Ibid., 261. 55 Ibid., 262. 56 See Todorov, 157-175. 57 Ibid., 168. 58 Russell, 261 & 263 59 Todorov, 112-113. 60 Kaplan. 61 Ibid. 62 Michéle Cohen Hadria, “Nothing New Under the Western Sun: Or the Rise of the Arab Experimental Documentary,” Third Text 19.1 (January 2005): 35. 63 Similar conflicts surrounding abstraction in avant-garde film were addressed in a famous 1971 article by Annette Michelson in Artforum entitled “Camera Lucida/Camera Obscura,” specifically about Stan Brakhage’s lack of political and social engagement in his films. 64 Todorov, 115. 65 Kaplan. 66 Hall, 70. 139 67 Kaplan, “Flirtation.” 140 Chapter 3: Television and Fantasies of Migration In order to further complicate the relationships between narrative, identity and fantasy, my next step is to move the concept of narrative beyond the film screen. Laplanche and Pontalis’s definition of fantasy involves a mise-en-scene of desire, and so far I have considered the “mise-en-scene” in relation to the subject and to the film screen. What happens to the psychoanalytic definition of “f/phantasy”, representation, and identification when the mise-en-scene includes multiple screens? Or, in the case of television, a smaller screen and serial narratives? Can the concept of a network, in a new media and institutional sense, contribute to an understanding of the fantasy at work within race and identity? How can the Todorovian concept of the fantastic contribute to the study of race and identity within television and new media? I will try to answer these questions by closely examining two science fiction programs and their engagement with issues of identity, The X-Files (1993-2002) and Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009). Critical Race Theory is crucial to the study of representation because it moves a discussion of race beyond the image and into the institutions and power dynamics that create, reinforce, and are affected by the image. In the television industry, there is no question that institutions such as studios and advertisers affect images and representation, but to attribute the imagery and narratives of television solely to their commercial contexts is to ignore the complexity of the medium. Perhaps one way to approach questions of television, race and representation is to consider how race and identity operate on multiple levels in the television industry, from the network to the advertisers to the viewers to representation itself. In a way, this multi-level approach is a 141 literalization of the concept of phantasy as multiple sites of access; it is less about representation of the fantastic aspects of identity and more about the ways in which viewer, image and author participate in the production of the fantastic narratives that constitute identity. Michael Curtin and Lynn Spigel explore this concept further in their collection The Revolution Wasn’t Televised, focusing on the way television in the 1960s engaged with the social conflicts of the time. The 1960s are an interesting era to focus on in relationship to both critical race theory and the television industry, considering the era led to both identity-based civil rights movements and the continued sophistication of the television industry. Some of the binary debates that Spigel and Curtin attempt to explode in Revolution about the 1960s television industry are strikingly similar to debates about identity raised within critical race theory, suggesting that CRT can work as a kind of conceptual lens through which to go beyond the issue of representation on screen. For example, as Spigel and Curtin explain, the 60s are often viewed through the lens of counter-culture v. culture, and debates within identity-based politics often follow these radical v. status quo binaries in relation to social action and institutional and government policies. The authors attempt to complicate this binary by detailed analyses of how television institutions and radical social movements affected each other equally, rather than the more common view that television institutions somehow suppressed radicalism in favor of a consumerist status quo. Similarly, one of the central debates within identity- based movements has been whether to assimilate to or reject mainstream institutions, to develop radicalism by working with “the master’s tools” or by rejecting them altogether. 142 Using a more “dialectical” approach to the divide between institution and culture, both within television history and CRT, is helpful to studying representation of race and ethnicity on and beyond the small screen. 1 As Spigel and Curtin say, “In this regard, [the authors of this collection] continue with traditions in Cultural Studies that move away from thinking about texts as mere ‘reflections’ on the social order, and instead think about texts as sites where meaning is made in their interaction with their various publics.” 2 In a similar way, in the previous three chapters I have attempted to consider identity as a complex “text” or “site” that is defined and created through the forces of media, institutions, and social contexts, attempting to describe the way these “texts” incorporate both fantasy and lived experience. Considering the conflicts outlined by Spigel and Curtin in their study of the 1960s, a study of how identity is managed on television is yet another way to explore the intersection of American social institutions, corporations, various social movements and race and ethnicity. Lynne Joyrich expands on a similar model of television studies in Re-viewing Reception: Television, Gender and Postmodern Culture, analyzing the structural and theoretical similarities between gender studies and television studies: “For disputes over the gendered subject – women’s place in the public and private spheres – have been complemented by similar disputes over the subject of reception – woman’s place within the discourses of and about television.” 3 Joyrich’s formulations about the de-centered subject in postmodern television and post-feminist discourse are a helpful way of thinking about “phantasy” in relationship to television and identity. Rather than 143 assuming that televisual fantasies seduce a passively receptive audience, Joyrich proposes analyzing both the television text and the audience – through the lens of gender – as fluid subjects that actively and constantly construct each other. Joyrich’s work in Re-viewing Reception also provides insight into how television as a structure manages difference, focusing “on the articulations of gender in televisual discourses and on the way in which these discourses, textual formations, and social apparatuses themselves engender and articulate social and sexual subjects.” 4 The conflict between corporation and content is also applicable, in a different way, to the presence of science fiction on television. As a genre which generally constructs, reveals and maintains the uncanny, its broadcast on television already indicates a challenge to the medium’s allegedly mundane and domestic nature. As Jeff Sconce argues in “The ‘Outer Limits’ of Oblivion,” for example, “As the most ‘domestic’ of entertainment, television has always posed difficulties in accommodating horror, a genre objectionable not only to watchful parents but also to squeamish advertisers.” 5 Not only a risky venture for advertisers, science fiction television must also avoid over- familiarization that would lead to a dampening of its estranging visuals, narratives, and elaborately constructed worlds. According to Jan Johnson-Smith, “In contrast to mundane drama, sf also needs to formulate strategies within its narratives that challenge the domestic and familiar framework associated with television.” 6 Johnson-Smith’s survey of American science fiction television does the important task of explaining why and how science fiction has continued to succeed on commercial television; she argues that while the earlier aesthetics and structure of television resisted the conventions of the 144 science fiction genre, technology and stylistic innovations since the 1980s have turned television into an ideal site for science fiction’s complex narratives and visuals. One of the concepts that Johnson-Smith relates to the success of science fiction on television is John Caldwell’s notion of televisuality, or the focus on style over content that revolutionized television aesthetics in the 1980s. As Caldwell points out, the economic crises of the 1980s encouraged TV producers to think of innovative ways to re- engage the audience. The use of graphics and effects turned the television itself into a science fiction object, but also paved the way for hyper-active science fiction series like Max Headroom (1987-1988) which took full advantage of what Caldwell calls the “videographic guise.” 7 The shows I will analyze in this chapter do not use excessive, over-the-top graphics, but they do fall into the category of “quality” television, with high production values that guaranteed them critical attention. As I will discuss later in this chapter, the “conservative” 8 style of the two shows in question somewhat “domesticized” the genre on television, and in doing so created a unique mise-en-scene – combining both alienation and identification – for the representation of race and ethnicity. In a way, Caldwell’s definition of televisuality also suggests science fiction’s invocation of the future, not only in terms of the business of television – an expectation of attracting viewers through stylized aesthetics – but also in terms of its technological underpinnings. From the videographic to special effects to sophisticated cinematic visuals, televisuality displays its obsession with a technologically driven future in its style, making science fiction television a site of collision between technologically-imaged futures and technologically-determined realities. In previous chapters I have investigated 145 the concept of the “future” in relationship to identity, science fiction as a genre, and the avant-garde as artistic practice, and in this chapter I will explore the way the idea of the “future” is incorporated into representations of identity in science fiction television. In the first instance, I will examine how fear of the future infuses Chris Carter’s cult television show The X-Files, particularly how the psychoanalytic concepts of paranoia and hysteria can be effective tools for understanding how television manifests a schizophrenic love and dread of multiculturalism at the same time. Secondly, I examine the way the most recent iteration of Battlestar Galactica, on the SciFi cable network, invokes the future through the traditional iconography of space travel, yet at the same time projects a conflicted idea of identity’s future through its depiction of the “post- human” and a carefully constructed multicultural cast. Both shows engage in the concept of “seriality” to different degrees, which raises the related question of how science fiction television can “repeat” the future through the structure of seriality; in the words of Laplanche and Pontalis, what happens when we, as subjects, return again and again to the ph/fantastic mise-en-scene? The X-Files and Battlestar Galactica aired during two distinct moments in recent history, and contextualizing them historically, socially and politically will help interrogate their respective visions of identity’s future(s). In particular, the episodes and narrative arcs that I analyze express specific anxieties around issues of migration and alienation. Like the stories of displacement I examined in the work of Craig Baldwin, Walid Ra’ad, and The Brother from Another Planet, these televisual narratives respond to cultural concerns about raced bodies crossing boundaries and occupying spaces where 146 they are not welcome. In the case of The X-Files, responses to Mexican and Asian migration in the recent history of the United States helps understand the show’s use of paranoia in the early 1990s. Battlestar Galactica engages with paranoia in a different way that is specific to a post-911 cultural and political context and evokes a post-race and post-human milieu to raise questions about race and nation. These programs’ use of science fiction to tell these stories lends insight into the fantastic nature of the migrant’s story itself. The story of Brother’s drop from the sky into the New York harbor does not seem as literally out-of-this-world as it seems, for the history of migration focuses less on the journey of the migrant from one place to another and more on the migrant’s struggles for assimilation and acceptance. A journey to a new land is of course a staple of the science fiction genre, but other aspects of contemporary migrancy, particularly that of the migrant’s identity, evoke elements of fantasy and the fantastic. In the current global economy, the movement of human bodies from nation to nation occurs at an increasingly rapid pace, and sociologists and cultural critics alike have called this lack of identification with nation-states “transnationalism.” In David Gutierrez and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo’s introduction to American Quarterly’s special “Nation and Migration” issue, the authors define “transnational spaces” as “multisited ‘imagined communities’ whose boundaries stretch across the borders of two or more nation-states.” 9 The very concept of transnationalism, then, is rooted in a fantasy space that transcends geography, and I would argue that the elements of science fiction and horror employed by The X-Files and Battlestar Galactica in depicting migrancy speak to 147 the fantastic nature of being between countries, of occupying a liminal, transnational space, of lacking that defining feature of identity. Another aspect of fantasy that migrancy evokes, and one that is central to both of the television shows in question, is paranoia, or the fear of threatening and often unseen forces that is rooted in specific cultural anxieties. The X-Files in particular was centered on a very basic understanding of paranoia as a fear of conspiracy and persecution, and what was radical about the X-Files’ use of fear was that it was directed towards American institutions like the government and science. Yet the creation and maintenance of a paranoid structure also affected the show’s representation of aliens, who were revealed to not necessarily come from outer space, but rather to reside much closer to home. Paranoia within the show’s narrative arcs ultimately questioned the soundness of the American nation-state and its potential to be attacked from both outside and within its borders; the anxiety around borders structures the two episodes of my analysis, which both reflect similar anxieties about labor, migrancy and borders in the American cultural consciousness. In the case of Battlestar Galactica, all of humanity is forced into migrancy when their planet is destroyed; humanity is confined to military battle stations that float through space, looking towards the mythical planet Earth for salvation. The humans of Battlestar Galactica are transnational in a literal sense, and therefore the show’s engagement with paranoia, on the surface, has less to do with national borders and more to do with the borders or limitations of the human – what is human and what is not. Yet upon closer inspection, the show’s blatant parallels to the war in Iraq, as well as its representation of a 148 post-race utopia, suggest nationalist anxieties rooted within the show’s transnational premise. The humans’ search for home, as well as the representation of the rebel robot Cylons, suggests that the migrant is in many ways “inhuman,” and therefore a constant threat to the post-race vision of humanity’s future that the show puts forth. The X-Files: The Truth is In Here Running on the Fox network from 1993 to 2002 and resulting in two feature films, in 1998 and 2008, The X-Files was a hybrid of supernatural, science fiction, detective and noir elements, featuring a pair of FBI agents who investigate paranormal activity. From an industrial perspective, the show was critically acclaimed and financially successful, although the departure of star David Duchovny in the series’ last two seasons somewhat upset of the show’s established narratives and aesthetics. The show has also been paid a fair amount of scholarly attention, particularly for its high production values and open criticism of institutions such as the government and science through the incorporation of conspiracy theories into its various narrative arcs. The main push behind the series – the “truth” of the show’s mantra that “the truth is out there” – was an elaborate government conspiracy involving the existence of alien life forms, what creator Chris Carter referred to as the show’s “mythology.” The show alternated between suggesting that alien life forms were an elaborately constructed government ruse to suggesting that aliens and secret government cabals were working together to eventually take over the world. While narrative arcs about the existence of aliens, the government, and their relationship to Detectives Mulder and Scully comprised some episodes every season, the series also featured “stand-alone” episodes that investigated various 149 paranormal phenomena. As critics and scholars have pointed out, what this televisual environment creates is an underlying, continuing anxiety about the unknown, along with the more immediate and tangible terrors of science fiction and horror. 10 What scholars disagree on to varying extents, though, is the degree to which The X-Files functions as a consistent and effective critique of dominant ideology. Part of the disagreement stems from television’s status as a primarily commercial enterprise, where content is ultimately mitigated by the demands of networks and advertisers. The complexity and radical potential of television texts is constantly debated in light of the medium’s political, economic and industrial conditions, and the X-Files energized those debates with its pointed critique of dominant institutions and the powerlessness of citizens. As John Edward Campbell points out, “within the series, discourses critical of governmental authority and the military–industrial complex exist in a perpetual struggle with the dominant discourses of late capitalism, reflected in the tension between representations of quite probable governmental abuses of power (Scully’s position) and impossibly fantastic conspiracy theories (Mulder’s position).” 11 The tension that Campbell refers to is what Newcombe and Hirsch have deemed the “cultural forum” facet of television: “Our most traditional views, those that are repressive and reactionary, as well as those that are subversive and emancipatory, are upheld, examined, maintained and transformed.” 12 I would argue that the indeterminacy afforded both the television medium and its effects is actually the perfect environment in which to examine the representation of identity, considering that a nebulous variety of forces are also at work in the creation and narration of identities within society. Identity is as much of a “cultural 150 forum” as television in that identity as a construct also responds to and reflects a range of social and political contexts, subjectivities and points-of-view, and perhaps analysis of how the medium represents and constructs identity will illuminate the processes involved in narrating identity within society. The X-Files exhibited a remarkable amount of narrative and character complexity for a network series, and, as Christy Burns and John Campbell argue, “aliens” and “alienation” were both text and subtext within the series’ milieu. While Campbell debates the radical potential of the alien figure, Burns goes further into the concept of alienation and links it to the psychoanalytic concept of paranoia: Paranoiacs symptomatically insist on their individuality and perceive a conspiratorial world to help them consolidate their imaginary, psychic boundaries, and in US culture the multicultural other as "alien" (illegal or otherwise) serves as the negative double that both threatens and then affirms (as a locus of negative identification) the paranoiac's identity. The X-Files simultaneously plays on this oscillation in American identity while also triggering an implicit cultural- psychological analysis of its more oppressive constructions of racial and cultural "others.” 13 Burns argues that the show’s use of both conspiracy theories and the generic elements of noir/detective stories, usually centered around white detectives and racialized criminals, reveals American culture’s fascination and revulsion with marginalized cultural and ethnic “alien” groups: “The program's various narratives eke out an understanding of these resistances to insensitivity and oppression within the contemporary culture of urban alienation, and in that sense, this very postmodern show sympathizes with those marginalized by American normative society and potentially erased in the name of technological advances.” 14 One of the series’ main tools is a mobilization of the concept of paranoia, which Burns defines in terms of Lacanian 151 psychoanalysis, where the subject fails to realize his or her own “internal alienation” (split between ego and super-ego) and maintains individuality by creating an external, hostile world. The subject of paranoia is helpful in forming links between the individual, the cultural zeitgeist, and cultural texts, for both Freud and Lacan incorporate “paranoia” into the development of the individual and his or her relationship to the outside world. While Freudian psychoanalysis defines paranoia in pathological terms 15 , Mark Bould points out that Lacanian psychoanalysis incorporates paranoia into the foundations of identity- formation. Bould draws upon Carl Freedman’s theorizations of paranoia and science fiction within his article; Freedman interprets Lacan’s use of paranoia as “structurally crucial to the way that we, as ordinary subjects of bourgeois hegemony, represent ourselves to ourselves and embark on the Cartesian project of acquiring empiricist knowledge.” 16 Similarly, “For SF, far more than mundane fiction, requires what seems to be the fictional creation of a new world, one whose assumptions are radically at variance with those of everyday life.” 17 Paranoia, defined as a building of hermetically-sealed worlds, can function as a structural link between identity-formation and the creation of science fiction mise-en-scenes and, as discussed by Burns, can be a helpful term for theorizing the way anxiety about the Other is incorporated into both identity and science fiction. As Freedman’s reading of Lacan indicates, paranoia is a basic component of the structure of identity, and recognizing the forms paranoia takes in different historical moments is crucial to understanding the relationship of paranoia to raced and ethnic 152 Others. As Mark Bould notes of Cyndy Hendershot’s use of Lacan, Lacan considers “ego-formation as a paranoid process,” and if we are to consider Lacan’s formulation in mainstream white society, the formation of an “I” and a “not-I” will be identified as “white” and “not-white.” 18 In a way, then, fear of the racial or ethnic Other is built into subject formation itself, and that fear will correspond to various moments in history when a specific Other has been designated in cultural consciousness. Bould says, “Hendershot argues that if Lacan is correct in identifying ego-formation as a paranoid process, then ‘taking one’s place in the Symbolic Order means living in a paranoid system that is culturally sanctioned.’” 19 Burns, Bould and Freedman would argue that the formation of subjectivity itself is paranoid, but more importantly, the fear and alienation these authors refer to will respond to specific cultural environments. Frantz Fanon addresses the raced dimensions of Lacanian psychoanalysis and paranoia in Black Skins/White Masks as he is deconstructing the subjectivities of both colonizers and the colonized; Fanon says, “At the extreme, I should say that the Negro, because of his body, impedes the closing of the postural schema of the white man – at the point, naturally, at which the black man makes his entry into the phenomenal world of the white man.” 20 What this means is that during the natural process of ego formation in Lacan, Fanon argues that the subject cannot fool himself or herself into claiming a unified self because of the existence of the black man in his or her perceptual world; the fear and alienation the subject subsequently feels will be associated with blackness. Fanon continues, ““When one has grasped the mechanism described by Lacan, one can have no further doubt that the real Other for the white man is and will continue to be the black man.” 21 153 The X-Files was structured around a range of paranoia(s) rooted in cultural anxieties specific to the 1990s, particularly doubts about scientific and government authority, fears about information technologies, and concerns about the meanings of “human” and “alien.” The show’s engagement with aliens and paranoia, when coupled with the narratives of episodes about racial or cultural politics, raised questions about the relationship between race, paranoia and American television. The racial and political contexts of the two episodes I will analyze reveal, along the lines of Fanon’s argument, the function of race and identity in American paranoia. Burns argues that The X-Files subverts the traditional structure of paranoia: When the paranoiac externalizes all negative shards of identity onto the "alien" other, she, he, or it (some larger institution or race) is designated as the clear enemy, one who plots toward the subject's (and the culture's) demise. Yet in the early X-Files episodes, classic paranoid aggression against the other is doubly reversed, so that paranoid cultural displacement of anxieties about race onto aliens from outer space is no longer masked but consciously exposed; moreover, the paranormal or alien is most often characterized in the series as the victim rather than the just locus of cultural angst. 22 Burns argues that one of the tactics the show uses to encourage identification with the “alien” is the use of counter-histories, replacing or subverting well-known historical narratives with supernatural or mystical explanations, and memory. The example she uses is an episode of the series I mentioned in a previous chapter, “El Mundo Gira,” where a migrant worker becomes the sickly spreader of a deadly disease among his fellow workers, leading his community to label him as the mythical “El Chupacabra.” The reason for El Chupacabra’s illness is attributed either to the folk stories of the Mexican workers, to extraterrestrial influence, or to the scientific reasons suggested by 154 Scully, and the indeterminacy of his (and other migrants) story reflects the general tendency within postmodernism to shy against totalizing narratives. The tension between the paranoiac drive to create impenetrable worlds that demarcate the Other stands in tension with The X-Files’ embrace of postmodern uncertainty, and it is this tension that Burns argues makes the show an effective critique of contemporary cultural politics. 23 Considering “El Mundo Gira” 24 against the background of migrant history and politics, The X-Files episode seems to both reinforce and challenge the fantasies and projections of both the immigrants it portrays and the authority figures who investigate. For one, the story of the Chupacabra taps into larger historical and social narratives of Latin America and is often associated with the paranoid projections of migrants. As the Los Angeles Times reported in 1996, after a wave of Chupacabra sightings appeared to hit Southern California, “Local issues about aliens, border patrol incidents, Proposition 187, and the potential demise of affirmative action worry the Latino community. Projecting fears onto a blood-sucking creature is a safe way to air concerns.” 25 In fact, stories from the LA Times about the Chupacabra during this time period seem to echo X- Files narratives in style and content, invoking the eerie uncertainty that always surrounds urban and rural legends, but ultimately the mainstream news discounted such tales as merely being paranoid visions. Note, for example, this Times author’s use of skeptical language to describe Chupacabra panic in Mexico, “A few miles away from his family's mountainside home, in a sophisticated Mexican capital bristling with skyscrapers, satellite dishes and computer links, the creature has become the hottest conversation topic everywhere from street-corner kiosks to suburban mansions.” 26 Popular opinion in the 155 United States of such stories used Chupacabra tales to discount the fear and anxiety of the country’s Mexican migrants as backwoods superstitions, and while “El Mundo Gira” engages in these attitudes, on the one hand, on the other hand the episode examines these fantasies more by associating the Chupacabra myth with both disease and extraterrestrials. I would argue that the most effective commentary evoked by the Chupacabra’s representation in “El Mundo Gira” is the fact that the migrant worker, Eladio Buentes, is afflicted with what seems to be a deadly and highly contagious disease. As I discuss below, The X-Files’ fascination with and depiction of disease is part of the show’s overall science fiction premise and high production values, but in this particular episode, the conflation of disease and monstrosity seems to comment on discourses about the migrant body in American society. In Fit to Be Citizens: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939, Natalia Molina examines the health policies of the city of Los Angeles in relation to Chinese, Japanese and Mexican migrant populations. The author argues that norms of health and cleanliness were used by officials to be “arbiters of the meanings of race and racial identities” as well as “people’s sense of social membership” and “relation to the nation-state.” 27 Molina argues that the “scientific authority” bestowed upon state and city health officials fostered general public opinions about migrants being dirty and posing risks to the general health of the city (and, by proxy, the American state), and I would argue that “El Mundo Gira” takes these popular views and challenges them by associating Eladio’s affliction with literal and metaphoric alienation. With the show’s detectives naturally divided along superstitious (Mulder) and scientific 156 (Scully) lines, the scientific marking of Eladio’s body as contagious and unclean is considered as viable as his possible infection from an extraterrestrial virus. On another level, Eladio’s growing monstrosity also functions as a symbol of his own social alienation and the trauma of living in a community that is considered marginal, infectious, and parasitic to American society, which the episode also references throughout its narrative. The question remains, though, despite “El Mundo Gira”’s challenge to the institutions of science and government, does the episode enact an effective critique of American paranoia and migrant bodies? In the continuing analysis that follows, I will argue that while the episode raises questions about the structuring presence of the migrant in American paranoia, it cannot fully answer those questions because of the limitations of commercial television. The tension between The X-Files’ use of postmodern uncertainty and its questioning of the Other within American cultural consciousness can potentially be explained by this tension’s similarity to debates within Critical Race Theory about the definition of identity. As I pointed out in the first chapter, Critical Race Theory has often been explained through the dichotomy of identity as essential versus identity as constructed, and in this project I have been attempting to move away from this dichotomy, towards an investigation of how narratives of race and ethnicity are constructed. Postmodern dialogue about identity leads towards an indeterminacy – identity can be anything, for anyone, at any time – that activists and critics bemoan, and as I have indicated, contemporary theories of identity such as Postpositivist Realism attempt to locate identity at the nexus of the real world and the theoretical. The X-Files 157 engages the tension within contemporary culture towards identity’s lack of definition and narrativizes the intersection of Self and Other through a variety of speculative scenarios that combine historical fact with supernatural fiction. To return to issues specific to the medium of television, the work The X-Files does as a speculative text must be considered in light of its presence on a commercial network. Burns engages the show on an aesthetic level by the end of her article, noting how the series’ slick visuals and stylized soundtrack “seduce” the viewer into consumption at the same time as it critiques America’s social, political and cultural infrastructure. I would like to argue, along with Burns and Douglas Kellner, that the commercial nature of the series, along with its accompanying fragmented structure, actually complicates (not simplifies) its representation and interrogation of identity. Kellner claims The X-Files as a text that is not postmodern in the Jamesonian sense, but rather deploys icons from history and film in a more critical and self-conscious manner. For example, while the series “quotes” liberally from the conventions of horror and science fiction films, particularly the monster, Kellner argues that the series’ narratives challenge those conventions as well: “…The X-Files often shows monstrosity to be a creation of social forces, of societal evils, and not incomprehensible forces of nature.” 28 According to Kellner, the combination of the show’s high-cult aesthetics and its dual narratives – the complex narrative arc of government-alien conspiracy along with the “monster-of-the-week” independent episodes – generates a series which has capitalized on its televisual format to consistently challenge and confront its weekly audience, employing Lyotard’s concept of the “postmodern sublime.” 29 While Kellner 158 rescues The X-Files from being grouped with various other “postmodern” shows of the 90s, he does not reconcile the unique aesthetics of the show, along with its accompanying politics, with its commercial nature. How do the visual codes analyzed by Kellner, specific to television, relate to the overall visual stylization happening in television after 1980, as discussed by Caldwell? Can The X-Files’ visual sophistication be attributed to the Fox network’s need to distinguish itself in the market, and its radical stance a way to maintain “edginess” in a postmodern context? If so, how can representation and identity be reconsidered in light of the show’s nature as a commodity? As Christy Burns discussed in her article, the visual sophistication of the series – its play with lighting and its realistically rendered monsters and scientific perversions – encourages the viewer’s immersion, and one way to complicate the show’s visual slickness is to consider how themes of “sight” and “seeing” are implicated along with reason, scientific principles, and institutional authority in the course of Mulder and Scully’s investigations. The theme of “sight” is also one of the foundational facets of theories of identity; consider, for example, Du Bois’s definition of his black identity through the “eyes” of others along with his own self-perception. The X-Files questions “sight” as a problematic tool for sorting through the Self-Other divide in an environment where the Other is difficult to both locate and define, on a medium where visual aesthetics are essential to conveying meaning. Consider the role of “sight” in television in general, where the size of the screen results in a privileging of certain aspects of the mise-en- scene; in the era of CSI, Bones, and other forensically and medically motivated series, “sight” is often associated with scientific accuracy and truth. 30 In melodramas, close-ups 159 are used to encourage emotional identification with characters and are well-suited to television’s small screens and multi-camera set-ups. The X-Files’ thematization of sight results in not only a questioning of sight as a mode of acquiring information, but also deconstructs the way sight functions with identification and representation on television. Consider the previously discussed episode about the monstrous migrant worker, “El Mundo Gira,” which opens with a group of women talking loudly. One woman interrupts them and claims loudly that she knows what happened, “I saw it with my own eyes.” The scene then cuts to the past, to the migrant camps where the fantastic incidents of the episode take place. The opening scene already claims the events of the episode as part of the memory of the woman, a member of the camp, and as she tells it to the other women, it becomes a part of the collective memory of this migrant community. While the image of collective storytelling is often stereotypically associated with women and “native” peoples, the privileging of this woman’s “sight” as the official narrative, juxtaposed with the uncertainty of other official bodies (FBI, INS) involved, already raises a question about how sight and seeing differs across majority and minority cultures. And yet another kind of sight introduces itself into the episode after the flashback begins, for as soon as the episode’s main characters are introduced and the strange yellow rain has fallen, the opening credits begin to play. The ominous graphics, Mark Snow’s eerie soundtrack, the show’s title, and its famous catchphrase “The Truth is Out There” remind viewers of the industrial and creative contexts of the episode; while not only locating the episode within the show’s paranoid milieu, the opening credits also add the “vision” of the creators and writers to the episode’s range of perspectives. I 160 would argue that the show’s commodity status does not overshadow the “vision” of the migrant woman in the beginning of the episode, but rather raises the issue of competing narratives of representation – commercial v. non-commercial, inauthentic v. authentic, mainstream v. marginal. Within the episode, various gazes are parlayed in order to generate suspense and empathy for the characters. As always, the respective gazes of Mulder and Scully structure the episode; as FBI agents, their role is primarily to find and solve the mystery at hand. But, as Christy Burns argued, one of the structuring themes of the show is the erasure, and this applies to the agents’ accumulation of evidence as well. The evidence that they gather throughout the episode is either unreliable or inconclusive, and their own diverging theories for what is afflicting Eladio Buentes (Mulder- aliens, Scully – a deadly new enzyme) creates more questions than solutions for the mystery at hand. When Agent Mulder asks INS Agent Lozano why Eladio keeps “eluding” them, Lozano’s explanation is that migrant workers like Eladio are “invisible” and therefore can move with ease under the radar. The discourse of cultural and racial invisibility, amply explored within critical race theory, prevents Mulder and Scully from gathering the evidence they need. Burns says, “The FBI's world of ratiocination is additionally revealed to erase (by ignoring) the plight of America's poor working class,” but I would argue that it is not the FBI which erases, but the inexplicable and intangible narrative of the migrant worker just cannot conform to or co-exist with the government's explanation. The episode investigates the circulation of narratives from different cultural points of view and casts the issue of the migrant’s perspective into relief. When Agent Lozano 161 tells Mulder, “So you have your own stories, too,” he is not only defining science as a “story,” but also reminding the viewer that the migrant’s story defies conventional narratives about citizenship and the nation. The migrant population of the episode lives on both a literal border, between the United States and Mexico, as well as a metaphoric border between citizen and alien. In Briggs, McCormick and Way’s analysis of the concept of “transnationalism,” the authors explicate the paradoxical relationship of race to the nation-state: “But each of these examples simultaneously points to racial difference as constitutively inside the nation and also indicates that certain racial formations exceed the nation.” 31 The Mexican migrants portrayed in “El Mundo Gira” illustrate the authors’ points in terms of labor; illegal immigrants constitute a high percentage of the American labor force yet remain invisible, marginal, and undetected in American society. Conventional notions of the American Dream tell us that America was founded on hard work, yet the story of the migrant defies such markers of “nationhood” because the migrant is a backbone to this nation, yet cannot be recognized as a citizen, casting the very definition of “America” into murky territory. In a way, we can consider Fanon’s reworking of Lacanian psychoanalysis in terms of migrants in the American labor force. If Fanon argues that the presence of blackness in the white phenomenal world prevents the formation of a “normal” subjectivity, then we could argue that the presence of the migrant on the fringes of the American cultural consciousness similarly fractures any notion of “unified” citizenship and casts the migrant as the racialized Other within a paranoid world view. Mulder and Scully’s investigation into Eladio’s illness is not only confounded by the existence of multiple and competing narratives, but also by the fact 162 that Eladio’s basic existence, along with the other migrants in the community, mystifies popular definitions of nation and citizenship. “El Mundo Gira” aired in 1997, a few years after the infamous Proposition 187 threw California voters into heated debates about Mexican immigrants and citizenship, particularly what rights should or should not be granted to illegal immigrants. While the debates raged about borders, state resources, and legal technicalities, the deeper questions that arose centered around the relationship of humans (not just citizens) to state and national institutions and the history of the “immigrant story” itself in relation to America. 32 While on the surface the law denied basic rights to illegal immigrants, it also seemed to be denying the importance of those immigrants to American history and the American economy, a disavowal that was met with incredulity from other states and the rest of the world during the 1994 election season. “El Mundo Gira” and its use of the Chupacabra myth must be considered in light of Proposition 187’s cultural fallout, where Eladio Buentes’ monstrosity – an inability to call him human due to science, superstition or outer space - stands as a paranoid representation of an inability to define, or “speak”, the migrant in American society. While the episode engages the invisibility associated with cultural alienation, the visible is equally privileged through the scientific gaze of Scully, who discovers that Eladio is producing an enzyme which causes rapid fungus growth in whomever he touches. The X-Files was one of the first shows in the age of televisuality to exploit the spectacular nature of science; before the boom of forensic science detective shows of today, the series turned the camera into a microscope and explored the equally alien world of the infinitesimal. The show relished the tangible and gross perversities 163 associated with monstrosity, disease, and disfiguration, and explored the alien and uncontainable nature of the human body. In “El Mundo Gira,” Scully discovers early within the episode that whatever malady affecting those in Eladio’s path is fungal and extremely contagious, although the origin of the disease remains a question. Shots of the fungus under a microscope introduce the scientific slant of the episode, and the elaborate make-up and surrounding sets of Eladio’s victims, teeming and grotesque fungal colonies, turn the scientific into the monstrous. The realistic and horrific effects of the episode underscore the series’ high production values, but at the same time generate tension with the mythic and intangible aspects of these migrant workers’ stories. The spaces that Eladio Buentes invades are supposedly “clean” spaces, like a water cooler and a supermarket, his presence marked by rapidly growing fungal colonies, and the portrayal Eladio’s infection of a clean, American environment like the fluorescent-lit supermarket recalls Natalia Molina’s arguments about the “polluting” influence of immigrants. But unlike the scientifically sanctioned narratives that have circulated about immigrant health in America, scientific authority – explanations of disease and infection – is not allowed to be the only deciding factor of Eladio’s affliction. In fact, when Agent Lozano hears Scully’s attempted scientific explanations, he remarks to Mulder, “So you have your own stories, too.” His comment questions of the authority of scientific narratives, which we claim as objective, and calls attention to the fact that the tangible effects seen by the viewer are just that – effects – that have been created for this specific science-fiction mise-en-scene. Along with the other “stories” circulating within the episode, Agent 164 Lozano reminds us that we too are participating in the televisual narratives of the episode and the series as a whole. The use of various points of view in the episode also calls into question how the viewer is positioned in relation to the migrant’s perspective. On the one hand, the story is told mainly by women providing information to Mulder and Scully, including the initial narrator and Eladio’s brother’s hysterical girlfriend. The use of these points of view limits the paranoid fantasies to the migrant (and female) communities, reinforcing the aforementioned attitudes of American society towards migrant communities and their beliefs. On the other hand, the entire narrative arc of the show is structured around uncertainty, suggesting that the episode could be encouraging the viewer to occupy the position of the migrant him/herself, where the Chupacabra fantastically represents the very real fears of the U.S. government, of border patrol, and of failing to survive on the margins of society. “El Mundo Gira” seems to fall somewhere in-between these two arguments. The X-Files’ foundation in paranoia and conspiracy theories aims an accusatory finger at the government and American society’s part in facilitating the migrant’s nightmare, but ultimately the episode relies heavily on the narration and explanations of the migrant women who, in true telenovela style, tell the Chupacabra story as a romantic melodrama, relegating a potentially disruptive political allegory to the more stereotypical realms of migrant fantasy and female exaggeration. As my analysis of “El Mudno Gira” indicates, The X-Files’ narrative incorporation of ethnicity and race often leads to both a reconsideration of identity in light of fantasy and a romanticizing of the ethnic Other as the location of a mysterious 165 and unknown power. Adding to the complicated interplay of the show’s cultural criticism and its commodity status, I would argue that re-examining the specifically televisual styles of particular episodes highlights the ways the analysis of television can lead to insights into the psychoanalytic definitions of identity. Considering the ways in which the show indulges in special effects in order to produce fantastic versions of the Other’s body is a way of analyzing, in line with Kellner, representations of difference in a postmodern television landscape. A helpful tool for conceptualizing the show’s representation of trauma and the Other is through the psychoanalytic concept of “hysteria” – what David Eng, quoting Slavoj Zizek, calls the “failed interpellation” of racialized subjects. In The X-Files, as Burns points out, the paranoid structure is reversed by emphasizing the victimization and subjectivity of the Other, and one method of accomplishing this subject positioning is through the show’s visual representation of “hysteria” – disfigured Othered bodies – in reaction to emotional and cultural alienation. In Eng’s Racial Castration, he applies the Freudian definition of hysteria to the representation of Asian-American masculinity in literature, reading the physical and mental failings of Asian-American protagonists as symptoms of a hysterical reaction to racial alienation: “…I would like to focus on hysteria’s double-edged status – on its ambiguity and the production potential of this ambiguity.” 33 Considering the ways that Eladio Buentes’ body erupted into alien form in “El Mundo Gira,” applying the “productive potential” of hysteria allows us to read The X-Files even more as a televisual text that is speculative in form and content and in representations of identity; the show’s generic science fiction and horror characteristics, along with its invocation of a paranoid 166 Other, results in a representation of that Other through exaggerated monstrous or alien characteristics. Eng quotes Marita Sturken about reading the trauma on veteran’s bodies: “ ‘These veteran bodies, dressed in fatigues, scarred and disabled, contaminated by toxins, refuse to let certain narratives of completion stand. Memories of war have been deeply encoded in these bodies, marked literally and figuratively in their flesh.’” 34 In a similar way, I would argue that the show’s use of bodily disfiguration, morphing, and trauma, while being part of its high production values and “quality television” status, also write narratives of the Other, of migration, and of failed citizenship in specifically televisual ways. For example, Episode 19 of Season 3, “Hell Money,” specifically addresses the Asian male hysteria of Eng’s study. Mulder and Scully investigate a string of strange deaths of Chinese male immigrants in San Francisco’s Chinatown, deaths subsequently revealed to be related to an organ harvesting ring. The organ harvesting is masked by an illegal gambling operation where Chinese men sacrifice their organs for the chance of winning a pot of money; the detectives’ investigation is juxtaposed with the story of a resident of Chinatown, Mr. Sen, and his attempt to win this money for his sick daughter. The Chinese detective helping Mulder and Scully is actually in on the harvesting and gambling and offers protection to its organizers, adding his own story of racial confusion and anxiety to the episode with his connections to the Asian community as well as the San Francisco Police Department. The “insider” to San Francisco’s Chinatown proves to be “in” on the illegal activities as well, yet his own racially divided identity prevents him from being a reliable source of knowledge to the detectives. 167 The episode follows the conventional X-Files structure, alternating between Scully and Mulder following leads and the more melodramatic narrative arc of Mr. Sen’s domestic and financial struggles, and I would argue that the futility of both the detectives’ search and Mr. Sen’s story associates the hysteria of the migrant Other with despair. Reinforcing the melodrama of cultural alienation is the way that the collective hysteria of Asian male immigrants is displaced onto bodily disfiguration and trauma, where the Asian male body is literally (self) sacrificed in exchange for some semblance of the American dream. The issue of organ harvesting is inscribed within both the supernatural aspects of Chinese ancestor-worship and the social and emotional horrors associated with cultural assimilation, leading to an oscillation between different types of “haunting”; Mr. Sen and the other immigrant men are haunted by their pasts, by crime lords, and, supposedly, by actual ghosts. While the Other established by the show’s paranoid structure seems to be the organ-stealing spirits, the focus on the damaged subjectivities and mutilated bodies of the Asian immigrants reveals the true Other to be cultural alienation; the hesitation between supernatural, social and scientific reasons behind the deaths of these men interrogates the association between cultural displacement, assimilation and trauma. I would argue that part of this hesitation stems from the structure of the show itself, its fragmentation into alternating segments of investigation and discovery, along with its foundation in uncertainty and criticism of dominant institutions. I would also argue that the collision of the genres of horror, family melodrama, and the detective story renders the hysteria presented by Asian-American bodies uncontainable by the structure of a television drama. By the end of the episode – 168 in a show about detectives – nothing ostensibly has been solved, but the images of mutilation and the literal exchange of bodies remains a powerful metaphoric representation of immigrant alienation in America. The X-Files tried to manage the paranoia and hysteria associated with the Other within the structure of a detective show that alternated between continuous story-arcs and stand-alone episodes. The connecting thread between the show’s continuing “mythology” and its “monster of the week” episodes was the generic conventions of melodrama; the use of family conflicts, romantic entanglements, and the sexual tension between Mulder and Scully provided moments of emotional excess that complemented the show’s anxiety about power, information and institutions. As several television and feminist scholars have argued, television’s relationship to the home and gender – both in the placement of the sets and in narrative content – has made it a medium well-suited to melodrama’s exploration of domestic spaces and their inhabitants. Lynne Joyrich argues that melodrama – beginning from its cinematic manifestations in the 1950s – has become integral to the television landscape, which subsequently “diffused” the “ ‘feminine’ connotations traditional associated with melodrama…onto a general audience, opening up contradictions of spectatorship and sexual difference(s) in the TV melodrama which invite further investigation.” 35 Joyrich’s explanation of melodrama and its relationship to television suggests questions about connections between melodrama, television and representation of identity – questions helpful to analyzing The X-Files and Battlestar Galactica’s domestication of the Other. Joyrich explains melodrama as a generic form that defines clear lines between 169 good and evil and truth and lies in a postmodern media landscape where “meaning” has been lost and “reality” is fragmented: “Melodrama is thus an ideal form for postmodern culture and for television – a form which arises from a fragmented network of space and time yet still seems to offer a sense of wholeness, reality, and living history.” 36 In Joyrich’s view, the use and theorization of melodrama in television has the dangerous tendency of simplifying subjectivity and turning (specifically female) identity into commodity. But I would like to draw out those aspects of Joyrich’s argument which actually highlight how melodrama’s emotional excess, combined with science fiction, can actually destabilize meaning on television in a phantasmatic manner. For one, as Joyrich mentions, melodrama’s exteriorization of subjectivity leads to a collapse of interiority for characters: “Depth is replaced by multiple surfaces across which codes play and flow.” 37 These “multiple surfaces” in the case of television refers to multiple characters, re-runs of episodes, constant use of new styles, aesthetics and technology, and the omnipresence of commercials and advertisements, and I would argue that the displacement of meaning onto to these various surfaces also suggests the “mise-en-scene” of desire as defined by phantasy. As I discussed previously with The X-Files, the fragmentation of the episode into credits, segments and commercials suggests various kinds of “vision,” and the displacement of meaning onto these “multiple surfaces” also suggests different access points into identity, further complicating the show’s blurring of human and alien boundaries. In a way, the multiple surfaces that mark the television landscape also seem evocative of migration. A broken and disrupted narrative, the use of history and memory, 170 the positioning of the viewer both inside and outside narratives and communities – the traits that mark commercial television in some way also mark the stories of migrants in American history. Another facet of these “multiple surfaces” of Joyrich’s argument is melodrama’s manipulation of time, a contraction and expansion of narrative time that can ignore or recreate past and future according to the demands of writers, networks and advertisers: “Invoking history and memory even as they refuse historical grounding, TV melodramas disrupt traditional notions of coherent time, position, and identity, manipulating the televisual past in order to encourage continued consumption.” 38 While Joyrich argues that the melodrama’s manipulation of time is part of television’s commodity status, I would argue that both melodrama’s and science fiction’s play with time in many ways echoes the disjunctive temporality of the migrant’s experiences. As the episodes I analyzed reveal, the migrant experience is characterized by unreliable spaces and bodies – spaces that are marked by belonging or a lack of belonging, and bodies that are either monstrous or incomplete. I would argue that time for the migrant undergoes a similar perversion; it seems to proceed straightforwardly as a journey from place to place, but it is marked by interruption, contraction and expansion. Migrants spend a great deal of time waiting, like the members of the migrant communities in “El Mundo Gira” and “Hell Money,” and that waiting is represented as interminable and indefinable in terms of the rhythms of the American work day. Television is similarly organized around its own sense of time and rhythm, and its fractured temporality – split between different channels, different networks, different ways of organizing televisual time – seem to evoke the fractured spaces and times that characterize the migrant 171 experience. Television is similarly transnational in its commercial and technological make-up – its network spans the globe but its content is often localized – and we can potentially conceive of television itself as a kind of large migrant that both challenges and is limited by certain boundaries. Briggs et. al say of the transnational nature of the contemporary family, “Notwithstanding all the ways that the family as a social institution is asked to stand for the nation and so underpins subjective identity,…the family is as flexibly trans/national a space as any other.” 39 Similarly, television’s characterization as “domestic” belies its relationship to larger forces that govern its form and content, and perhaps looking closely at both television structure as well as the migrant experience will reveal new ways of thinking about the multiple surfaces and screens that characterize both television and migrancy. Battlestar Galactica: The Truth Might be Out There One year after The X-Files ended its run on Fox, a renewed version of the science fiction television show Battlestar Galactica appeared on the SciFi channel and quickly gained a cult following. BSG gained popularity and critical praise because of its well- written characters and dialogue, but also primarily because of its direct relevance to America’s involvement in Iraq. In fact, on March 17, 2009, the creators of the show and Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell, two of the show’s main characters, attended a United Nations panel about the show’s relevance to “child soldiers, terrorism, human rights and religious extremism.” 40 The event was moderated by Whoopi Goldberg, which was only one strange facet of the even stranger collision of entertainment and current events, ultimately suggesting that both Battlestar Galactica and the United Nations are 172 legitimate spaces for airing out world conflicts. What is also interesting about the event is that an American show with primarily American actors, which represents a universal and intergalactic war, could be considered a staging ground for the world’s international conflicts, an indication that American television in the age of globalization forms a helpful model for understanding America’s neocolonial influence in contemporary foreign affairs. While Battlestar Galactica seems to challenge its audience to imagine a state of permanent migrancy and a truly transnational universe, it ultimately reinforces a faith in Western Empire and the importance of borders. While The X-Files manifested a fear of the future through paranoia, Battlestar Galactica is, for all intents and purposes, set in the future. The future that the newest iteration of Battlestar Galactica envisions is one where Earth has become a mythical place for humans, who have now become permanent migrants, inhabiting spaceships and other planets. As the opening credits inform the viewers, an intelligent technology, known as the Cylons, are engaged in an ongoing war to wipe out the human population, and our protagonists – the military crew of the Galactica – must battle the Cylons while constantly searching for a mythical Earth. There are no aliens in Battlestar, but the Cylons, who can appear, act and often feel as humans, set up a constant tension between human and machine, raising questions about the categorization of both and suggesting allusions to current political, social and cultural conflicts. In this way, BSG is more “pure” science fiction than The X-Files, as it uses a technological future gone awry to comment on our present. As Lynne Joyrich points out in her introduction to FlowTV’s special BSG issue, the show, despite (because of?) its science fiction genre, comes the 173 closest to embodying the specific anxieties of living in a post-9/11 world, referring in particular to fears of genocide, religious conflict, bio-terrorism, and an overall anxiety about borders and boundaries. 41 Interestingly enough, while the show is centered around a fear of losing human identity in a technologically dominated world, the exceptionally multicultural and diverse cast gets no attention within the show’s diegesis. The X-Files represented cultural anxiety towards the Other through the use of aliens, yet BSG displaces its anxiety about Otherness unto the tensions between human and machine and uses a nostalgic search for origins to diffuse these tensions. BSG visually creates a utopian, multicultural, post-identity future, yet at the same time worries incessantly through its narrative arcs about “difference,” the definition of “human,” and the need for humans to belong somewhere. In a way, then, BSG televisually represents the post-race ideal espoused by contemporary Critical Race Theorists, but at the same contains the contradictions and complexities of these ideals within a conservative, melodramatic representation of human-machine conflict and an overall concern with borders and belonging. In order to frame a discussion of Battlestar Galactica, the concept of paranoia must be readdressed in a post-9/11 context. Paranoia after 9/11 took on specific and more targeted subjects, fueled by reactions to an actual attack on American soil and incredulity that America’s borders were not impermeable. The stories of the masterminds and the elaborate and stealth processes they went through to carry out the attack were repeated endlessly to underscore the fact that something of this nature could have happened to anyone, at anytime, anywhere. To describe the feelings that abounded 174 in the United States as paranoia is not enough, as the psychoanalytic definition of paranoia demands an Other, and in the case of 9/11, the Other became not only those of Middle Eastern descent, but also anyone who posed any kind of threat to American borders. The very notion of “borders” was also called into question, as the Internet and digital technologies seemingly allowed unparalleled access into the private lives of American citizens. As Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues in Control and Freedom, “The end of the Cold War has not dispelled paranoia but rather spread it everywhere: invisibility and uncertainty – of the enemy, of technology – has invalidated deterrence and moved paranoia from the pathological to the logical.” 42 The post-9/11 context was apparent not only in the war being fought on the show, but also by the fact that this war was being waged against a technology which had somehow overtaken its human creators. The paranoia woven into the show’s narratives focused on the discovery and destruction of hidden Others, and those Others came from the misuse or perversion of technology. As Erika Johnson-Lewis argues in her comparison of BSG to the War on Terror, the language used to describe the Cylons and the terrorists who made up the vague enemy of the Bush administration was eerily similar. She quotes Judith Butler: “[Terrorists] are something less than human, and yet – somehow – they assume a human form. They represent, as it were, an equivocation of the human, which forms the basis for some of the skepticism about the applicability of legal entitlements and protections.” 43 The Cylons are responsible for humanity’s annihilation in their initial attack on the planet Caprica, a razing of the planet that recalls the images of destruction and collapse of the Twin Towers, and the conflation of Cylon and terrorist echoes the parallel 175 fears of terrorist and technology that mark the post-9/11 cultural consciousness. The characterization of both terrorists and Cylons as somewhere between human and non- human also recalls previous discussions of transnationalism. As mentioned in relation to The X-Files and the history of laws such as Proposition 187, migrants are often characterized as barely human because of their undefined or illegal relationship to the state; the lack of identification with a country and its resources seems to cast migrants in a state of perpetual human limbo, where citizenship seems to be the only guaranteed ticket to humanity. Battlestar Galactica takes the idea of transnationalism and carries to a futuristic extreme, as the floating ships that make up human civilization have no national, let alone planetary, ties. The narratives do address the various regions that the characters are from, yet ultimately human survival comes before any identification with regions; to add to the characters’ statelessness, it is revealed throughout the show that several key characters are only programmed to think they are human and have backgrounds, when they are actually sleeper agent robots. Several critics, including Erika Johnson-Lewis, argue that the creation of a completely “de-territorialized” human population is one way the show tries to provoke criticism of American politics, 44 and I would argue that the science fiction premise does allow for more direct cultural and political critique than other television programs. That said, I would also argue that the show’s unacknowledged racial diversity – the presence of different kinds of human bodies within this floating civilization – along with the questions of the Cylons’ humanity, suggest an underlying anxiety about the ramifications of a post-race, post-nation society. By creating a completely migrant human population, 176 BSG attempts to critique American politics without involving either nation or race, but closer analysis reveals the way the show uses both nation and race in order to create its supposedly post-race and post-nation universe. For a science fiction show, BSG shows a remarkable amount of racial diversity in its cast. The commander of the Galactica is played by veteran actor Edward James Olmos, who brings his history of playing mostly Latino characters to the role of weathered ship commander Adama. His crew consists mostly of white members, scattered with minorities such as Sharon (Asian), Deanna (Black) and Gaeta (vaguely Hispanic). The president of the colonies, Laura Roslin, is flanked by her right-hand woman, Tory, who is East Indian, and there are two minorities, a black man and Asian woman, represented within the Cylon models. Yet race in its conventional forms is never acknowledged within BSG’s diegesis, which is part of the series’ overall attempts to create a totally alien environment by leaving out and replacing references to the “real” world. Food, alcohol, sports, entertainment, political organization, cultural history, religion, and even swear words – all are specific to the world of Galactica. Much like other science fiction film and television texts, our familiarity with this world’s customs grows over the course of episodes and seasons, creating a viewing experience marked by a combination of insularity, comfort, and the uncanny nature of alien ways. A focus on culture – where a person comes from – is the series’ only differentiation of its various populations, and, like the worlds of other fantastic and science fiction works, different planets, ships and colonies carry their own associations and stereotypes. 177 Biologically-speaking, the show’s focus on difference centers on the human- Cylon divide and reflects an overall concern with the borders of the human. Because Cylons can appear human, and because not all Cylon models have been discovered, a paranoia surrounding human-Cylon differences informs the entire series. The show’s attempts to blur the distinctions between humans and machines – by focusing on the organic-looking “machinery” of the Cylon ship and Raiders and by revealing the very “human” qualities of the Cylon models – result in the show’s ambiguous stance on technology’s power and development. David Bering-Porter argues that the show’s representation of technology is in fact a representation of desire, particularly the way that technology structures and is structured by desire: As living embodiments of technology, the Cylons represent the fears of the excess potential that may be unleashed by the super-productive capabilities of rapidly evolving technological forms; at the same time, they give us an example of the paranoid logic inherent in a suspicion that some form of an independently- desiring technology might deliberately stand between us and the objects to which we are drawn. 45 Bering-Porter’s arguments complement those made by the other contributors to FlowTV’s Battlestar issue about the series’ timeliness, particularly because the intertwining fear and fascination with technology is a specific marker of “9/11 fears of a networked world, in which terrorist cells might ‘abuse’ the ‘freedom of information’ granted on the internet to co-ordinate attacks against the United States.” 46 I would argue that the way the show confounds biological-machine and organic-inorganic binaries also speaks to anxieties specific to post-9/11, particularly the interaction of human and machine that has defined the war on terror. As technological warfare becomes more sophisticated and takes its toll on human life, BSG tries to humanize technology with 178 life-like, sentient robots with the capacity for higher thought and religious organization, encouraging a critical view of technology as merely an offshoot of human engineering. The Todorovian hesitation encouraged within the series towards the human- machine divide – is she or he actually human, and what does that even mean? – therefore assumes a critical commentary on the ways we have been re-thinking human in society as a whole in a post-9/11 world. As the contributors to the FlowTV issue argue, the series’ obsession with the definition of “human” reflects similar concerns surrounding specific 21 st century issues such as torture or suicide bombing, issues that raise questions about the value of human life in times of conflict. Yet those contemporary issues that BSG both obliquely and directly refers to also engage in racial and cultural politics, where the concept of “human” is intertwined with ethnic and national signifiers related to the war in the Middle East. While the show calls attention to current political and social issues – even the issue of difference – its racially diverse cast and narrative omission of race suggests a perplexing simultaneous recognition and disavowal of the place of race within American politics. Perhaps there is another argument at work in the show’s representation of identity, then, where the show’s lack of reference to its multi-hued cast along with its focus on the human-machine divide suggests that race, unlike “human,” is no longer subject to debate and prone to conflict. The Cylons confound the categorizations of human and machine, which implies that – along the same lines as the postmodernists and social constructionists – any definitions we proscribe to identity are solely based on culture and not on essential characteristics. The unacknowledged racial diversity of the cast, projected into BSG’s fantastic future, could therefore act as the 179 show’s silent argument about the futility of racial categories within a technologically sophisticated society where even the label of “human” remains questionable. But if we consider the racial implications of the “cyborg” in American popular culture, then BSG’s suggestion of a post-race society becomes problematic. As I mentioned in previous chapters, Donna Haraway’s use of Chicana identity to explain the revolutionary potential of the cyborg bothered Critical Race Theorists in its disregard for social, political and cultural contexts. LeiLani Nishime argues for a return of those contexts in considering the cinematic cyborg as a metaphor for racial mixing, and her arguments, when applied to the Cylon in BSG, suggest that the show’s use of human- machine mixing belies a liberal humanist (and ultimately white American) attitude toward racial, cultural and national identity. The Cylons, according to more technical science fiction definitions, are actually androids, who Nishime identifies as pure mechanical entities who acquire intelligence and emotions. She asks about the android’s challenge to the definition of human: Does the definition go beyond biology? Does it reside in the spirit or the soul? Can those ineffable but defining qualities exist in machines? In the same way, when one “passes” for white, all racial categories come into question. If race is biological, a matter of hair and skin, then what happens when one’s physical characteristics most closely resemble those of the members of another race? 47 BSG begs these same questions in its representation of the Cylons as “passing” for humans and generating anxiety about the mixing and mix-up of human and machine races. But, as Nishime goes on to argue about her cinematic cyborgs, most Hollywood films do not use the cyborg/android’s challenge to identity to explore racial implications and instead resort to nostalgia to narratively resolve the cyborg’s identity dilemmas. 180 BSG’s representation of the Cylons, throughout the series and in its resolution, resorts to a similarly nostalgic concern for “history and origin” in the fleet’s ongoing search for Earth and in the series’ investment in defining human identity. As Nishime says, “The anxiety created by the destabilization of categories creates a void into which rushes a nostalgia for certainty and the real.” 48 The potentially radical use of the human-machine divide in the representation of the Cylons is replaced with a more conservative concern for defining human identity and origins, a concern that displaces racial anxieties in favor of “humanness/whiteness” as “a central organizing principle.” 49 I would add to Nishime’s argument the idea of “Americanness” as another facet of the liberal humanist outlook of BSG and other cyborg narratives, where the show’s anxiety about the borders between human and machine represents larger concerns about national boundaries and notions of citizenship. The human-machine identity crisis is overshadowed by the show’s origins story, and its racially diverse cast appears to be part of its liberal humanist stance towards contemporary foreign policy; race doesn’t matter, the show argues, as long as we have a permanent place in the universe, land to call our own, and a strong sense of our own history, phrases that suggest the ideology of American nationalism. I would argue, therefore, that BSG’s racial politics fall somewhere between “post- race” and social constructionist theories of identity which poses conceptual problems for its alleged representation of American politics and the Middle East. In “After Race: Ethnography, race and post-race theory,” Anoop Nayak discusses the two theories in relation to each other in light of ethnographic practice; what is helpful about his formulation is that it highlights the subtle, but important, differences between the two. 50 181 As I discussed in my introduction, social constructionism posits that racial identity is a product of culture, while its critics claim that discussing it as fabricated or constructed further reifies racial categories. Post-race theory, which Nayak identifies with the recent work of Paul Gilroy, claims that race is “over” and any discussion or recognition of it is meaningless and unproductive. BSG’s simultaneous focus on identity and unacknowledged racial diversity suggests a manifestation of post-race ideals, on the one hand, and on the other, a social constructionist approach to identity through the Cylon- human political conflicts. BSG’s identity politics have a two-fold effect. One, its futuristic post-race idealism suggests that while racial diversity can be exhibited on screen, it does not need to be explained or justified because society has finally moved “beyond” race. What Nayak and the postpositivist realist scholars argue, though, is that “race,” in order to be politically, socially and culturally meaningful, must be located at the nexus of social, historical, geographic and economic processes; identity in general must be treated as a theory to test against various conditions and contexts. When race is represented without any referents in BSG, it runs the risk of becoming an empty marker of an unspecific humanism or universalism, attempting to portray, without any anchor in history, the concept of “diversity.” As a result, the question of difference in the series falls automatically between the ontological categories of human and machine, a situation that reflects contemporary concerns without acknowledging the specificity of racial identity to those concerns. In a manner similar to the American disavowal of Mexican labor, official narratives of the War on Terror, as well as those of Battlestar Galactica, do not recognize the role of race, ethnicity and history in America’s relationship to the rest 182 of the world. But ultimately the war and its deployment of human and technological resources depends on specific ideologies about racial and ethnic difference, a fact which becomes even clearer when we consider the tenuous connections posed by the Bush administration between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, connections which were ethnically and religiously motivated rather than political in nature. The consequences of BSG’s post-race and post-nation universe become clearer when we examine its minority characters closer. One of the series’ most conflicted characters is the Galactica pilot Boomer, who is revealed early within the series to be a Cylon sleeper agent and switches allegiances to the Cylon community, while one of her copies begins a love affair with a human pilot and produces the first human-Cylon hybrid child. In her essay on Asian representation in BSG, Juliana Hu Pegues makes an important comparison between Hardt and Negri’s definition of Empire and the universe created on BSG: “BSG follows this same set of logics: the territories of the home planets have been destroyed, the battle-stars’ ability to make FTL (faster than light) jumps connote a borderless crossing, and the disciplining of human, i.e. national, subjects occurs without geographic parameters.” 51 Within this transnational context, Pegues examines the representation of Boomer through the well-known stories of Madame Butterfly and Miss Saigon and their shared myths about Asian women sacrificing themselves for white men. As Miss Saigon “recuperates the US’s loss in the Vietnam War” through its tragic love story, Pegues reads the Boomer character as a similar representation of neocolonial anxiety, invoking “the menacing revenge of the colonial masses that must be disciplined.” 52 The author ultimately argues that the figure of 183 Boomer functions as a kind of “flexible Asian/Arab other” within the show’s post-9/11 context, invoking stereotypes while disavowing them through her presence on a “liberal humanist crew,” 53 evoking Hardt and Negri’s Empire on the surface but actually speaking to a neocolonial obsession with borders and territory. Pegues also reads Boomer through LeiLani Nishime’s analysis of multi-racial cyborgs, claiming that Boomer’s “passing” as a human and confusion about her birth parents recalls trends of transracial adoption that have become more frequent in a flexible global economy. Boomer’s confusion about belonging, while seemingly separate from the actor’s Korean American identity, actually reveals concerns with race and nation that BSG attempts to hide. Boomer’s identity as a kind of transnational adoptee is further complicated by the fact that one of her copies, known as Caprica Boomer, tries to seduce a Galactica pilot named Helo, accidentally falls in love with him, and produces human- Cylon hybrid child named Hera. Pegues says of Boomer’s transition from adoptee to birth mother, “…the metaphor’s transition to literal re-occurs – Boomer, the cyborg ‘mulatta’ adopted by humans, is the birth mother of Hera, the hybrid Cylon who ‘passes’ for human.” 54 Pegues ultimately finds Boomer’s representations within the series to be challenging and pleasurable; despite the fact that they invoke stereotypes and reveal the show’s disavowal of neocolonial impulses, the author finds Boomers’ “irreducibility” and “unruly” natures to be in excess of the show’s liberal humanist outlook. Pegues’ conclusion suggests a second possible effect of BSG’s identity politics, its fantastic suggestion of utopian possibilities for representation, in television and visual media in general. The lack of common references to racial identity within the show’s 184 diegesis allows the show a space for alternative signifiers of identity, using the battle between humans and machines and the class distinctions between various planets and colonies as alternative sources of identity-based politics. Nayak says of the utopian drive of post-race theory: “By constantly revealing the racialized body as a highly dubious zone upon which to anchor difference and a treacherously slippery surface on which to sustain race meaning, a post-race attitude makes evident that our bodies are thoroughly unreliable sources of 'race truth'.” 55 I would argue that BSG attempts to divorce racial signifiers from clearly raced bodies and revisit the ways identity is created and represented; in having a racially diverse cast, a metaphorical war between humans and machines, and alternative markers of identity, perhaps BSG expands the phantastic mise- en-scene of identity to include multiple sites of access for the television audience to understand difference. The show’s invocation of the future, both in its setting and in its melodramatic structure, also supports its utopian visions of identity. The inexhaustible search for Earth, along with the ongoing and complex romantic and familiar narrative arcs, inscribes the expectation of the future into every episode, suggesting that the “phantastic” mise-en-scene of identity could also involve BSG’s (and television’s in general) melodramatic and serial structure; BSG’s continuing story lines not only anticipate the future(s) of the narrative, but also the future(s) and fluidity of identity and representation through the medium of television. Finally, though, we must factor in BSG’s commodity status within commercial television, branded as “quality” television within the Science Fiction Channel’s gamut of original programming, syndicated shows, and movies. The show’s topical subject matter, 185 high production values, and demanding acting standards have garnered it the attention of critics and a “cult” status among viewers, and I would argue that the show alters its exploration of identity to conform to certain standards of popular, “quality” commercial television. The show espouses what Bart Simon calls a “popular posthumanism:” “For popular posthumanism, the future is a space for the realization of individuality, the transcendence of biological limits, and the creation of a new social order.” 56 The suggestion that somehow we can “transcend” our human selves is present in contemporary debates about genetic engineering, robotics, the Internet, and biotechnology, yet, as Simon and the other contributors to Cultural Critique’s special posthumanist issue argue, discourses of posthumanism are firmly rooted in humanist debates about the origin and constitution of the self. While BSG imagines a race of intelligent machines who have surpassed their human creators, it also locates those machines within very human, individual bodies who exercise choice and free will. Granted, these bodies are super-human in strength and intelligence, yet their conflicts are made “human” through the use of melodramatic narrative and formal conventions such as interpersonal conflict, close-ups, the use of stirring music to underscore emotional moments, and shocking revelations. While suggesting a collective consciousness through some sort of sophisticated networking capabilities, BSG places its conflicts and concerns very firmly within the realm of individual subjects, perhaps best exemplified by Boomer’s story. As part of a Cylon experiment, she seduces and reproduces with the human Helo; but, employing the emotional plot twists that mark an effective melodrama, she ends up falling in love with Helo against her (Cylon) will, running from her Cylon 186 counterparts, and proving to the crew of the Galactica that she is sympathetic to the human cause. The distrust Caprica Boomer encounters upon Galactica, along with the tensions surrounding her inter-racial relationship with Helo and their hybrid Cylon- human child, mark Boomer’s story with deception, betrayal, acceptance, and using love to overcome difference – classic melodramatic traits that Pegues would argue subsumes the political implications of Boomer’s story. As Pegues says, Caprica Boomer’s dramatic rescue by the white pilot Helo “recuperates the American project of the War on Terror, questionable tactics and all, through a lens of romantic subjectivity.” 57 Similarly, the revelation of the other Cylons aboard Galactica is less of a grand reveal and more the individual characters’ slow self-realization that they are somehow “different” from their colleagues, again inscribing collective anxiety about technology into individual consciousness; perhaps these narrative arcs are most similar to the “coming out” of gay characters in daytime and primetime soaps, where fear and secrecy of difference dictate the characters’ actions and roles within the plot. Interestingly enough, while the show pushes the borders of sexual representation – both Cylons and humans seem as concerned with sex as with warfare – all the show’s unions, even those forged along Cylon-human lines, are heterosexual. Finally, while the surfaces of the show’s mise-en-scenes are austere and futuristic, the show’s camerawork encloses the characters within the various rooms and hallways of the ship, imbuing the show’s settings with the claustrophobia and tension associated with melodrama’s depiction of interiors rather than with the technological sophistication normally attributed to the science fiction environment. Simon asks in his introduction to the concept of posthumanism: “How does 187 one disentangle the critical potential of hybrid subjectivity from the corporate technoscientific practice of producing hybrids so well suited to the needs of global capitalism?” 58 I would argue that the word “hybrid” could refer not only to the anxiety surrounding the marriage of human and machine within BSG’s narratives, but also to the show itself as a whole. By locating fears about technology within the more televisual guise of melodrama, BSG demands the use of individual, heterosexual, American subjects that fit well into television’s overall commercial mindset, deploying posthumanism debates mostly as a superficially edgy “hook” for producing a lucrative, “quality” space opera. The show’s overarching narrative drive to find a home planet, despite the potential radicalism of its transnational and migratory environment, perhaps forms a parallel to its similarly conservative and comfortable position within the borders and boundaries of American commercial television. Conclusion Battlestar Galactica ended on March 20, 2009, in a two-hour series finale that settled the war between Cylons and humans and led to the revelation that the series was not actually set in the future, but in the universe’s distant past. When the fleet finally finds Earth, we discover human tribes roaming around an untouched paradise, and each prominent character leaves to find his or her own destiny (Admiral Adama, Edward James Olmos’ character, apparently founds Scotland). Even more tellingly, the Cylon- hybrid child Hera apparently becomes the genetic ancestor of modern-day humans, as a flash-forward near the end of the finale reveals archaeologists finding her remains and naming her the “Mitochondrial Eve.” Hera is a human-robot hybrid, and the actress who 188 plays the child looks vaguely non-white, perhaps to reflect the union between the Asian Boomer and the white Helo. The final position of the series suggests rather optimistically that not only did our extraterrestrial ancestors live in a functioning post-race community, but also that our genetic “mother” was bi-racial/bi-species woman of color. In its utopian ending, the series yet again reveals an obsession with territory – the various areas claimed by the fleet members can be identified as modern-day countries – but a desire to move beyond race, ending its allegedly post-race and post-nation vision with a conscious and contrived multicultural stake in the modern global order. The limitations of the television medium dictate that an American show, featuring primarily American actors, ultimately colonize the entire Earth, yet I would argue that the implications of this ending go beyond the material aspects of BSG’s production history and speak to the show’s overall neoliberal context and attitudes towards race, cultural and nationality. The lines between entertainment and politics were blurred when Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell appeared as “representatives” at the United Nations, suggesting ultimately that if an American television show can act as an arbiter of foreign relations, then BSG’s vision, as well as the post-race and post-nation attitudes that it reflects, poses a radical progressiveness that it cannot back up. 189 Chapter 3 Endnotes 1 Lynn Spigel and Michael Curtin, “Introduction,” The Revolution Wasn’t Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict, eds. Lynn Spigel and Michael Curtin (New York: Routledge, 1997) 11. 2 Ibid., 10. 3 Lynne Joyrich, Re-viewing Reception: Television, Gender and Postmodern Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996) 5. 4 Ibid., 17. 5 Jeff Sconce, “The ‘Outer Limits’ of Oblivion,” in The Revolution Wasn’t Televised, eds. Lynn Spigel and Michael Curtin (New York: Routledge, 1997) 23. 6 Jan Johnson-Smith, American Science-Fiction TV: Star Trek, Stargate and Beyond (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2005) 49. 7 John Caldwell, “Excessive Style: The Crisis of Network Television,” Television: The Critical View, 6 th ed., ed. Horace Newcombe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) 658. 8 Caldwell, 665. 9 David G. Gutierrez and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, “Introduction: Nation and Migration,” in American Quarterly 60.3 (September 2008), 504, Project MUSE, University of Southern California Libraries. 6 April 2009. 10 See “Deny All Knowledge”: Reading the X-Files, Eds. David Lavery, Angela Hague, and Marla Cartwright, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996. 11 John Edward Campbell, “Alien(ating) ideology and the American media: Apprehending the alien image in television through The X-Files, International Journal of Cultural Studies 4:3: 327-147. Accessed through http://ics.sagepub.com, University of Southern California Libraries. 12 Horace Newcomb and Paul M. Hirsch, “Television as a Cultural Forum,” in Television: The Critical View, 6 th ed., ed. Horace Newcombe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) 564. 13 Burns, Christy L. "Erasure: Alienation, Paranoia, and the Loss of Memory in The X-Files. " Camera Obscura (May 2001): 194. Academic OneFile (Gale), University of Southern California, 28 Aug. 2008. 14 Ibid. 15 J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, “Paranoia,” The Language of Psychoanalysis (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1967) 296-297. 16 Carl Freedman, “Towards a Theory of Paranoia: The Science Fiction of Phillip K. Dick,” in Phillip K. Dick: Contemporary Critical Interpretations, ed. Samuel J. Umland (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995) 10. 17 Ibid., 13. 190 18 Mark Bould, “The Dreadful Credibility of Absurd Things: A Tendency in Fantasy Theory,” Historical Materialism, 10.4 (2002): 79. 19 Ibid., 79. 20 Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks, Trans. Charles Lam Markmann ( New York: Grove Press, 1967) 160. 21 Fanon, 161. 22 Ibid., “Erasure.” 23 Ibid. 24 “El Mundo Gira” translates in “As The World Turns,” a televisual reference to the soap opera that connects this episode to the Mexican telenovela. The telenovela has been associated with fantasy, melodrama and excess, which lends another framework for thinking about the episode’s various narratives. 25 Norine Dresser, "Multicultural Manners; The Chupacabra: An Expression of Real-World Anxiety :[Home Edition], " Los Angeles Times (pre-1997 Fulltext) [Los Angeles, Calif.] 25 May 1996, 7, Los Angeles Times, ProQuest, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, 11 Apr. 2009 26 Mark Fineman, "Tales of Bloodthirsty Beast Terrify Mexico; Folklore: For weeks, the chupacabra, or goat-sucker, has obsessed the nation :[Home Edition]" Los Angeles Times (pre-1997 Fulltext) [Los Angeles, Calif.] 19 May 1996,1, Los Angeles Times, ProQuest, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, 11 Apr. 2009. 27 Natalia Molina, Fit to be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006) 2. 28 Douglas Kellner, “The X-Files and the Aesthetics and Politics of Postmodern Pop,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57:2 (Spring 1999), 168, JSTOR,University of Southern California Libraries. 29 Kellner, 170. 30 In an era of high definition programming, digital recording technology, and increasingly large television screens, certain aspects of television visual aesthetics must be reconsidered. For shows that are scientifically-based – documentaries, detective shows, and science fiction – increased visual accuracy encourages higher production values to maintain verisimilitude. 31 Laura Briggs, Gladys McCormick, and J.T. Way, “Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis,” American Quarterly 60.3 (September 2008), 642, Project MUSE, University of Southern California Libraries, 6 April 2009. 32 See B. DRUMMOND AYRES Jr., “The 1994 Campaign: California; Minorities Join California Fight,” The New York Times 1 November 1994, A01, LexisNexis®, 12 April 2009. 33 David Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001) 176. 34 Ibid., 187-188. 35 Joyrich, 46. 36 Ibid., 65. 191 37 Ibid., 56. 38 Ibid., 57. 39 Briggs, et. al, 642. 40 Sam Grobart, “Intergalactic Representatives at the U.N., The New York Times (online edition) 15 March 2009. 13 April 2009. 41 Lynne Joyrich. “Television Conceptions: Intorudction to ‘Re/Producing Cult TV: The Battlestar Galactica Issue,’” FlowTV 7.14, http://flowtv.org 12 December 2008. 42 Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006) 1. 43 Erika Johnson-Lewis, “Torture, Terrorism and Other Aspects of Human Nature,” in Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica, eds. Tiffany Potter and C.W. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2008) 31. 44 Ibid., 28. 45 David Bering-Porter, “Toaster-Frakkers and Remote Controls: Technophilia, Cylons and the Archival Drive,” FlowTV 7.14, 12 December 2008 <www.flowtv.org> 46 Bob Rehak, “Downloads, Copies and Reboots: Battlestar Galactica and the Changing Terms of TV Genre,” FlowTV 7.14,12 December 2008 <www.flowtv.org> 47 LeiLani Nishime, “The Mulatto Cyborg: Imagining a Multiracial Future,” Cinema Journal 44.2 (Winter 2005), 39, JSTOR, University of Southern California Libraries, Accessed on 14 April 2009. <www.jstor.com/search>. 48 Ibid., 42. 49 Ibid., 43. 50 Anoop Nayak, “After Race: Ethnography, race and post-race theory,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 29.3 (2006), Informaworld, University of Southern California Libraries, <http://www.informaworld.com/10.1080/01419870600597818 >. 51 Juliana Hu Pegues, “Miss Cylon: Empire and Adoption in Battlestar Galactica,” MELUS 33.4 (2008), 191, Research Library Core, ProQuest. University of Southern California Libraries. 13 Apr. 2009. 52 Ibid., 194. 53 Ibid., 196. 54 Ibid., 203. 55 Nayak, 423. 56 Bart Simon, “Introduction: Toward a Critique of Posthuman Futures,” Cultural Critique 53 (Winter 2003): 1. 57 Pegues, 198. 192 58 Simon, 4. 193 Chapter 4: Races in the Machine In the previous chapter, I discussed the implications of Battlestar Galactica’s post- human, post-race and post-nation imagination of the future. As some scholars argue, though, BSG’s representation of technology is not entirely “new”; the equipment aboard the Galactica looks old and dingy, and is not networked to the rest of the human fleet. In fact, as Melanie E.S. Kohnen points out in “Signal to Noise: The Paradoxes of History and Technology in Battlestar Galactica,” it is Galactica’s networking limitations that save the ship from a virus outbreak prompted by the Cylons. 1 What is interesting about Galactica’s depiction of technology is that instead of being infused with utopian possibilities, as the bright and shiny futures of science fiction often suggest, it looks worn down and overused, particularly in comparison to the sleek forms of the Cylons’ bodies and ships. As BSG tries to investigate questions of the posthuman, the series ends up answering its own questions with very human representations of idyllic natural utopias, failed and failing technology, and the effect of human errors and oversight in the creation of technology. In addition to the uncharacteristic representation of broken-down technology within a science fiction milieu, BSG’s depiction of technology oscillates between paranoia, fascination and optimism, reflecting the similar attitudes of its 21 st century, post 9/11 context. The Cylons became intelligent machines who took over their human creators, but Cylon “technology” is represented less as mechanical and more as organic material, often resembling flesh, veins and blood. The Galactica’s technological capabilities, while old and limited, still allow the ship unlimited access to the universe, as well as being heralded by its crew as “old but reliable,” a fetishistic attitude we often 194 reserve for outdated technology (record players versus CD players, for example). The blurring of lines between mechanical, human, dangerous and useful speaks to anxieties about technology’s reach and limitations in a 21 st century context. The limitless nature of the universe also speaks to the show’s suggestion of transnationalism, for the phrases used to describe transnationalism also apply to discourses about the Internet and digital technology. Technology, in its utopian forms, allegedly “reaches beyond” borders, class difference and racial, cultural and ethnic identifiers. Perhaps in a way, then, BSG’s use of technology within its mise-en-scene and narratives embodies key debates within new media theory, particularly distinctions between “old” and “new” media as well as the relationship of technology to categories of identity such as gender and race. The apparent fantasy of the Internet as an almost transcendent medium has been tempered in new media theory by attempts to ground technology in specific contexts, much in the same way Critical Race Theorists work to locate racial identity in a nexus of social, political and economic factors. The terms “new” and “old” are called into question within cultural studies approaches to new media, where a historical perspective on technology lends a deeper understanding to the relationship between human usage and manipulation and the technology itself. Several scholars have attempted to challenge the buzzwords associated with technology, such as “progress” and “modernity,” by associating technology and the history of invention with racial, gendered, and cultural contexts, revealing that discourses around technology are generally inscribed within white, Western, male terms. In this chapter, I will begin by surveying the various ways that new media scholars analyze racial identity within 195 histories of technology and music, moving beyond a fantastic post-racial post-humanism, the attitude embodied by both Battlestar Galactica and contemporary American politics, to locate the place of race within these narratives. The theorists that I will present attempt to disrupt conventional discourses around technology by imbricating technology and racial identity within the spaces of visual and aural media. In doing so, these theorists, in ways similar and different to works I have explored in previous chapters, interrupt the naturalization of fantastic narratives of race and reveal the way racial identity is an interplay of both fantasy and material conditions (a phantastic mise-en- scene, as I have been arguing throughout my project). After laying a theoretical foundation for the place of race within new media theory, using music as my example, I will investigate two intersections of racial identity and technology in television and film, focusing on how technology – both its representation and its applications – can displace markers of identity from raced bodies and represent them through different interfaces and screens. My project thus far has been focused solely on visual media, films and television, and this chapter represents an opportunity to expand the “mise-en-scenes” of the phantastic and representation onto other surfaces. New Media, Music and Race Ben Williams’ contribution to the collection Technicolor: Race, Technology and Everyday Life focuses on the relationship between blackness, new technology and alienation, and specifies his analysis to the Detroit techno scene. First, Williams sets the scene in Detroit, a city which was built around the auto industry and its offshoots, which transitioned “from monopoly to global capitalism” in the late 1970s and left Detroit 196 stranded with high unemployment and no economic development. 2 Williams says that musicians such as Derrick May and Juan Atkins moved into Detroit’s decimated downtown and started producing sounds that were simultaneously robotic as they were melancholy, “a response to the painful contradictions of the city’s changing economy.” 3 Part of that response – the allusions to robots and technology – was rooted in racial identity: “Becoming robots was, for African American musicians, a subliminally political act, the ramifications of which can be read as both a form of self-empowerment and an identification with otherness, whether technological or racial.” 4 Williams also goes on to argue that politically conscious techno groups like the Underground Resistance use technology as a way of expressing power, which can be read as a response to the historical uses of technology for controlling and oppressing black bodies. In fact, rather than become completely divorced from human bodies and movements, as is suggested by the metaphor of the robot, Williams argues that the music of the Underground Resistance represented the cyborg in its collapsing of the machine and human subjectivity: “In this reading, rather than erasing the body, Detroit techno’s astral strain regrounds it within the global electromagnetic sphere of postindustrial communications technologies.” 5 I would argue that Williams’ positioning of Detroit techno as an abstract response to the concrete conditions of Detroit in the late 1980s and early 1990s can be compared to Paula Moya and Satya Mohanty’s use of postpositivism to theorize racial identity. Moya and Mohanty both argue for the use of identity as a theoretical lens through which to view the more tangible facets of identity such as life experience and social and economic contexts, and in a way, Williams positions Detroit techno as a speculative space where black 197 identity can be “tested” against the physical properties of both the city and the technology of electronic music. In doing so, the artists that Williams analyzes create a “new form of racial subjectivity,” 6 and the following scholars expand on ways of using technology and music to rethink black subjectivity. Alexander G. Weheliye’s Phonographies is a study that combines an analysis of technology and representation with a subversion of Western modernity. For example, Weheliye uses W.E.B. Du Bois’s use of black spirituals to re-read The Souls of Black Folk in terms of a contemporary re-mix, casting Du Bois as the knowing DJ who re- contextualizes in order to connect blackness with modernity and vice versa. 7 Weheliye’s corrective is two-fold. On the one hand, he looks to include music and sound technology into a discussion of new media: “Pop music also represents the arena in which black subjects have culturally engaged with these technoinformational flows, so that any consideration of digital space might do well to include the sonic in order to comprehend different modalities of digitalness, but also to not endlessly circulate and therefore solidify the presumed ‘digital divide’ with all its attendant baggage.” 8 On the other hand, the author points out the falsely constructed gap between black and Western modernity and uses the sounds of blackness, their proximity and distance to technology and their disruption of an overemphasis on the visual, to imagine the possibility of a new black modern subject. 9 Weheliye says, “Phrased differently, how does blackness operate paradoxically as both central to and outside of Western modernity? The node of black cultural practices and sound technologies acts as one of the chief areas for examining this conundrum in the twentieth century.” 10 Weheliye’s examination of black identity and 198 sound technologies functions as a kind of time machine, then, rescuing the remnants of the black sonic past and inscribing it into contemporary discourses about technology and race. The analysis of sonic representation is also heavily informed by discourses of posthumanism, as representing the voice without the body connotes a kind of fantastic splitting of human identity. In fact, Weheliye connects the fantasy inherent to sound technology to the fantastic facets of racial identity throughout his work; for example, in his recontextualization of Ellison’s Invisible Man, when Ellison’s protagonist is listening to Louis Armstrong on his five phonographs, Weheliye says, “Rather than dissipating into thin air, as early cultural and legal discourse on the phonograph suggested, the dis/re/embodied voice is precisely what frames the social in/visibility of a black subject in this scene.” 11 Weheliye frames his analysis of Invisible Man within a larger tension between poststructuralist erasure of the subject and cultural and racial minority identity, yet what his work accomplishes, like the work of Paula Moya and Satya Mohanty, is a way of moving beyond the debate and creating new ways of theorizing identity. One of the techniques Weheliye uses to achieve this is by moving beyond traditional psychoanalytic methods of analyzing the subject, claiming that works that address the psychoanalytic dimensions of sound confine the subject to purely Oedipal structures of psychic development. Weheliye says about the theories of Kaja Silverman and David Schwarz, “This is where these analyses lose their force, since they routinely reduce listening to a particular lost configuration securely contained in the traditional mapping of subjectivity within psychoanalytic discourse.” 12 Weheliye posits, in turn, that the act of listening 199 (using Invisible Man as his example) does not necessarily indicate a regression to childhood desires, but rather suggests what he calls a “new sense of becoming,” 13 an entirely new way of perceiving the boundaries the self and the world. Weheliye argues that this new state of being/becoming comes about for Ellison’s protagonist while he is listening to the phantasmatic voice of Louis Armstrong over the phonograph; the invisible man speaks of “nodes” he experiences while listening: “These nodes stage time as time; they generally remain absent from linear and chronological perception so as to enable its ostensibly seamless functioning.” 14 What I would like to argue is that Weheliye’s language in describing the work of sonic technologies uses fantastic imagery to describe the effect of these technologies on racial identity. His arguments about disrupting conventional notions of time and space invoke fantasy and science fiction’s use of new worlds and dimensions to suggest the ways “the human” can be re-imagined. In Weheliye’s theoretical meditations on sound, the combination of material technology (the phonograph) and identity’s fantastic facets (the invisible man) leads to a re- imagination of racial identity that challenges psychoanalytic visual and linear interpretations of identity’s development. In Weheliye’s article “Feenin’: Posthuman Voices in Black Popular Music,” the author advances a similar critique of N. Katherine Hayles’ concept of post-humanism as Paula Moya’s critique of Donna Haraway and the cyborg. Weheliye argues that theories of posthumanism, using Hayles as an example, have a flaw in their basic assumptions about the “human,” positing individuality and subjectivity in a “hegemonic Western conception of humanity.” Black subjectivity, Weheliye argues, challenges these 200 definitions of “human” because of the history of black subjugation and the notion of black bodies as property of others, rather than being in possession of their own identity (a Western idea of being human). “The literal dehumanization of black people through chattel slavery, as well as the legal, political, anthropological, scientific, economic and cultural forces supporting and enforcing this system, afforded black subjects no easy passage to the sign of the human." 15 This intervention into the very definition of “human” suggests new possibilities for the representation of racial and cultural subjectivity. If phantasizing, in the Laplanche and Pontalis definition, is an ongoing and fluid process, then interrogating the “human” allows for more sites of access within the mise-en-scene of subjectivity, questioning the very nature of “human” subjectivity as already raced in particular ways. Weheliye says, “These inscriptions of humanity in black culture provide particular performances of the human – singularities, if you will, that always incorporate their own multiplicities – as opposed to mere uncritical echoes of the white liberal humanist subject.” 16 Weheliye uses contemporary R&B as his case study, analyzing the interaction of human voice and recording technology as a phantastic “site” for representing black identity. Contemporary R&B, as Weheliye and other scholars have noted, is often preoccupied with materialist concerns, and some of those concerns involve the purchase and use of cutting edge technology, like beepers, cell phones and PDAs: “…lyrically, hardly a track exists that does not mention cellular phones, beepers, two-way pagers, answering machines, various surveillance gadgets, e-mail messages, and the Internet, stressing the interdependency of contemporary interpersonal communication and 201 informational technologies.” 17 Weheliye specifically looks at the use of both the cell phone and the vocoder in contemporary R&B, particularly the way these devices distort the human voice within songs, providing aural examples of the way blackness and technology are “interfaced” within the music. Not only does the presence of these devices in R&B suggest a different way of representing and perceiving black identity, but Weheliye also argues that the oscillation of “human” and machinic within contemporary R&B alters the representation of desire. What he calls the “desiring machine” of R&B does not have a stable subject and object, but, much like the psychoanalytic definition of phantasy, reveals the act of desiring to be a constant and fluid process through the replacement of the human voice with the machine: “In the move from the vocoder to the vocoder effect 18 , the centrality of the human voice dissipates throughout the desiring machine that is R&B.” 19 I would argue that Weheliye’s use of human voice manipulation in contemporary R&B is yet another moment of Jose Esteban Munoz’s invocation of CLR James’ “future in the present,” where the use of technology in a predominantly Black cultural product interrogates the “parameters of the coherent subject” and raises questions about the categories of “human” and “black.” Herman Gray, in Cultural Moves, uses music in a similar way as Weheliye, as a site for the intersection of black identity and new technologies, but Gray expands his analysis to discuss the impact of this intersection within various social and cultural institutions. Gray says, “So I approach this inventory of practices, performers, and cultural politics for clues about the rich possibilities offered by music as a way out of the binary impasse on questions of identities and technologies.” 20 In order to illustrate his 202 argument, Gray looks into the ways that black digital music artists use technology in relationship to identity, and his method of interrogating cultural institutions exemplifies the idea that racial identity can be located at a variety of sites of “access.” Gray says, “These practices and operations include specific conditions and techniques of production (and reproduction), traditions, bodies of work, interpretive and critical communities (especially the characteristics, attribution of meaning, pleasure, and value they signal. I locate identity within this corpus of elements and practices and the meanings they come to signify.” 21 One of the first steps Gray takes within his last chapter, “Music, Identity, and New Technology,” is to outline some of the common and popular conceptions of blackness and technology, particularly related to the digital divide and questions of access. What is crucial about Gray’s analysis is the way he interrogates the “fantasies” inherent to the narratives told within the business and policy worlds about technology being race and gender-neutral. To return to the key concept of “alienation,” one of the common-sense assumptions by policy makers, educators, and business people is that black, Latino and other minority groups are alienated in two different ways from technology – they have no access to technology in neighborhoods and schools and, culturally, have little interest in the production or consumption of new technologies. But, as Gray argues, the efforts of these institutional representatives are generally inscribed within consumer-oriented discourses of citizenship; I would argue, then, that what is underlying the narratives of “alienation” in discourses about minorities and technology is actually alienation in the Marxist sense of the word. Black consumers of new technology are, like the workers in Marx’s account, alienated from the production process, or, in this 203 case, supposedly “neutral” technological innovation which is founded on primarily white industry and capital. In order for members of minority communities to become involved in the digital revolution, the argument goes, they must learn to be “twenty-first-century consumer- citizens.” 22 The use of the words “access” and “digital divide” in technological and corporate circles suggests yet another set of boundaries that minorities must cross in order to be recognized as citizens, and, as Gray points out, the demand for increased minority visibility in the field of technology fits well with corporations’ desire to create new markets: “…the noble aims of good corporate citizenship – which include philanthropy, social responsibility, and public service – and the strategic development of new consumer markets are compatible.” 23 In terms of music, Gray sees Afrofuturism as a counter-force to the capitalist drive towards closing the digital divide, as Afrofuturist musicians and artists use technology and sound in a way that expands black identity to include the “alien, data thief, translator, scientist, and mythologizer” 24 and not just the technology-illiterate black consumer. Gray uses the example of John Akomfrah’s The Last Angel of History to illustrate his points, and I would argue that in addition to the avant-garde documentary’s manipulation of filmic time and space, its use of black music as a form of electronic data suggests yet another way of thinking about history, technology and blackness. Just as Weheliye reads the history of sound recording technology as a way to consider new forms of black subjectivity, Akomfrah’s abstraction of black sonic history into pieces of data and electronic memory functions, like his use of screens, as a further expansion of black identity’s phantasmatic mise-en-scene, small 204 bits/bytes of access that traverse time and space and are not confined to conventional historical narratives. Akomfrah and other Afrofuturists’ use of both sonic and visual architecture redefines the white, consumer-oriented notions of “access” that Gray criticizes, instead creating new narratives where blackness and technology illuminate each other. Pimp My Ride: Urban Techno-Wizardry The work of Alexander Weheliye, Herman Gray and Ben Williams investigates representations of identity that are not visual in nature, expanding the mise-en-scene of identity to include the aural and the technological as sites where representation is negotiated. Part of the contested terrain of new media theory is the word “new,” and as the work of the above scholars indicates, historically raced uses of “new” technologies change conventional relationships between race, modernity and history. The reconsideration of terms like “old” and “new” also involves the analysis of different objects and different sites of interaction between people and technology; as Alexander Weheliye says in his description of “feenin’”, “This feenin dissolves the parameters of the coherent subject in such radical ways that human – all too human – desire can be represented only in the guise of the machinic, and the human is thus inextricably intertwined with various informational technologies.” 25 Weheliye looks to sound and digital recording as a place where human desire can only be expressed through non- human interfaces, and the editors of Technicolor: Race, Technology and Everyday Life see these non-human interfaces as the objects that communities of color interact with every day. They say, “Casting our nets farther and wider allows us to more fully realize 205 the different levels of technical knowledge and innovation that individuals and communities bring to their work, play, and creative expression.” 26 In this next section, I examine a cultural practice that encourages a new conception of the technological and adds a new surface to the mise-en-scene of identity. In Ben Chappell’s “Take a Little Trip with Me: Lowriding and the Poetics of Scale,” the author examines “lowriding,” a subcultural practice, historically located in Los Angeles, which drastically alters the form and aesthetics of cars. After locating the history of lowriding among Chicano communities since the 1930s, Chappell argues that lowriding – both creating the cars and driving them around – is a performative act. The author says, “Thus lowriding is a performance genre in the most literal sense, and identification happens in the process of making and driving a lowrider.” 27 Chappell’s characterization of identification as a process is strikingly similar to Laplanche and Pontalis’s similar definition of fantasy as an active and fluid narrative process marked by a variety of subject positions; in a way, the aesthetic makeover of a car demonstrates the car owner’s (subject’s) use of fantasy in the process of identification. The act of lowriding can therefore be characterized as a fantastic act, an act that incorporates material and social conditions, such as urban life and Chicano cultural practice, into Laplanche and Pontalis’s definition of the phantasmatic as a kind of tableaux. Lowriding involves an intricate knowledge of mechanics on both a large and small scale, and Chappell’s argument reinforces the idea that the “digital divide” is merely a myth that characterizes minority communities as “behind” or somehow stunted in growth and ignores the alternative ways that technology is incorporated into the 206 everyday lives of these communities. One of the ways automotive culture has been connected to ideals such as skill, creativity, and gadget wizardry is through the popular MTV reality show, Pimp My Ride. Pimp My Ride premiered on MTV on March 4, 2004 and officially ended in May 2007, although spin-offs continue to abound nationally and internationally. The first four seasons of Pimp My Ride featured a Southern California customization company called West Coast Customs, and seasons 5 and 6 switched to another garage called Galpin Auto Sports. The premise of the show takes a beaten up or falling apart car, usually from the Southern California area, and “pimps” it – redoes the car’s paint job and detailing and embellishes it with various high quality electronics, based on the car owner’s interests, hobbies or profession. Judging from the show’s use of the word “pimp”, its visual and aural incorporation of hip-hop and soul, and its Southern California location, Pimp My Ride borrows heavily from the subcultural practices of low- riding and makes them “mainstream.” I would argue, though, that one of the consequences of the way the show foregrounds the mechanical and technological makeovers of the cars is the creation of a more subversive new media narrative, one that associates the show’s multicultural and working class cast with high-tech ingenuity and savvy. Pimp My Ride’s popularity stemmed from the personalities of the garage crews and its host, rap star Xzibit. 28 The crews were a mix of Latino, Black, and Anglo engineers, paint specialists, electronics gurus, and mechanics who sport a variety of tattoos and piercings; crew members are coded as working class through their clothing and speech. Like other reality makeover shows on television, the show’s formula is fairly 207 predictable: in each episode, the crew receives a beat-up, dingy car in severe need of a makeover. The majority of the episode focuses on stripping the car of its parts and then refurbishing it with new paint and a variety of other amenities, primarily for novelty. The owner receives the car and is predictably thrilled and is shown in subsequent scenes giddily driving his or her new “ride” around. The fact that the majority of the episode focuses on the actual makeover is not unique within the genre of makeover television shows, but what is fascinating about the makeover process in Pimp My Ride is the amount of technical expertise required to aesthetically and mechanically remake these cars. During the makeover process, the subcultural practices of “lowriding” are foregrounded and represented through MTV’s characteristic editing – quick cuts and canted angles, set to samples of hip hop tracks – and a working class, ethnic practice is branded as “cool”. Ben Chappell makes a similar observation about the class component to lowrider aesthetics: “In a lowrider, then, working-class mechanical skills are translated into the creation of individuated, aestheticized display of objects that index the spending power and leisure time necessary to create them.” 29 While MTV is using the practice of lowriding to brand itself as an edgy network, the fact remains that the narrative arc of each episode depends on the technical knowledge and expertise of a multicultural crew of mechanics and auto body specialists, and their creations often stand as larger-than-life examples of technological genius. Chappell’s argument about the ostentatious nature of the lowrider aesthetic is that the excess has a complex relationship to class. On the one hand, the decoration of a car with absurd luxuries expresses a class aspiration, and on the other hand, the opulence 208 flies in the face of “good taste.” Chappell says, “Still, the overdecoration of a mundane object (the car) offends bourgeois ideas of “responsible” accumulation and consumption in a way that touches on race, class, and urban markers much like the dandyism of a 1940s zoot suiter or contemporary rap music stars.” 30 In the case of Pimp My Ride, the aesthetic overload of lowrider aesthetic gets put to a curious end, as the various gadgets installed in the car are usually related to the interests of its owner. In an episode from Season 2, for example – “Ryan’s Volkswagen Bus” – Ryan receives an automated surfboard rack, mini clothes dryer, and 2 way marine radio in his bus because of his surfing hobby. Ryan also receives an LCD television, couch, Playstation 2, DVD player, and (my favorite), a school bus sign on the side that pops out and reads “Chill.” These fairly absurd additions to a vehicle definitely serves MTV’s more practical purpose of glorifying the various commodities that the crew adds to the bus, but I would argue, along the lines of Chappell’s argument, that the exaggerated nature of these improvements challenge the idea that technology must always be used towards practical and specific ends. Arguments about the so-called digital divide suggest that minority communities lack knowledge of the new technologies necessary for them to become productive members of society; the technical know-how of the Pimp My Ride crew is arguably being used for less practical purposes and therefore challenges conventional beliefs about how and why particular resources – including labor – should be used. Ultimately, though, the fact that Pimp My Ride is imbricated in television’s commercial structure definitely mitigates any kind of radical relationship it suggests between technology, race and class. The show is based on commodity fetishism, 209 beginning with the featured car; each added luxury represents another “thing” of value to both the crew members and the car owners. As Lisa Glebatis Perks points out in her analysis of class in reality television, Pimp My Ride makes an explicit connection between the individual identity of the car owner and the importance of his or her private property: “Pointing to the electronics in his new vehicle, [a contestant] more profoundly illustrates the blending of selfhood and private property, saying, ‘This is me’.” 31 Perks also points out that Pimp My Ride uses its automotive commodities to reward its contestants, who are often teenagers or young adults who are in financial need: “The moral of these stories seems to be that as long as one makes sacrifices for their art, their families, and their partners, they will receive material rewards and happiness.” 32 Perks’ criticism of the show’s “fantasy bribe” of upward mobility through a car makeover is well-founded, but the author ignores the class and ethnic markers of the owner and crews of West Coast Customs and Galpin Auto Sports. I would argue that the class identities of the show’s cast members form a curious relationship to MTV’s commodity fetishism. On the one hand, the show’s use of electronics and gadgets and a lower-class contestant speaks to the creation of class aspirations through commodities of Perks’ argument, and the style of the show and the personas of its cast mates reinforce MTV’s overall commodification of hip-hop culture. But on the other hand, the show foregrounds work in a way that moves beyond the idea of luxury and commodity, highlighting the fact that each crew member specializes in a specific kind of labor, labor that is usually associated with particular ethnic and urban subcultures; the portrayal of this labor encourages 210 viewers to reconsider key words associated with class mobility such as “success” and “skill.” Geek-Chic: Will Smith and Nerd Identity I have explored two intersections of race and technology which challenge the notion of a “digital divide,” or the narrative of separation between minority communities and technology. On the other side of this debate is a discourse that does not separate, but intimately links, racial identity and technology. Nerd identity has seen a resurgence in the last few decades, specifically linking Asian and Asian Americans to an inherent knowledge of and adeptness with technology. This association perhaps stems from the influx of Asian immigrants in the late 60s and 70s and their entrance into the computer and information technology industries; a more recent facet of this association also comes from the outsourcing of labor for these industries back to Asian countries. With the connection between Asian American identity and technology comes a more recent investment in the geek or “fanboy” identity, now popularized more and more with recent television programs like Big Bang Theory and Chuck and films such as 2008’s Fanboys. Fans are popularly conceived of as being obsessed with a particular text, whether from television or film, and, according to popular culture, they are primarily drawn to the genre of science fiction. The close relationship between science fiction and the fan often leads to a conflation of the fan and the “geek,” particularly because both identities are associated with an unhealthy obsession or knowledge of a particular topic, social alienation, and a lack of sexuality or desirability. Academic studies of fan culture have focused on fan and nerd identity, but, as Ron Eglash points out in his study of nerd 211 identity, these discourses tend to focus mainly on gender and sexuality. Henry Jenkins’ canonical look at Star Trek fans, “Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten,” argues that fan communities were largely comprised of women, particularly because women have been socialized to read texts in specific ways and find satisfaction in re-writing the mostly “male” stories and storylines they find in popular television shows. As Eglash points out, the association between fandom and femininity does not just exist within the academic world, but popular depictions and understandings of the male fan tend to focus on his emasculation and abstinence from sex, whether for lack of desire or opportunity. Jenkins’ article and his following book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, rescued the identity of the fan from popular connotations of being desperate and socially alienated and examined the fan as a site of agency and a challenge to the hegemony of media corporations. Ron Eglash continues Jenkins’ work, in a way, by adding a study of the “nerd” to Jenkins’ analysis of the fan, arguing that the nerd’s marginality to dominant paradigms of whiteness and masculinity opens up a space for discussions of race, gender, and nerd identity. He says, “Indeed, the more we examine it, the more nerd identity seems less a threatening gatekeeper than a potential paradox that might allow greater amounts of gender and race identity into the potent locations of technoscience…” 33 Eglash goes on in his article to isolate and analyze examples that challenge the ties between race and nerd identity, looking specifically at the figure of the “black nerd” and the challenges this figure poses to normative ideas of race, sexuality and technological know-how. Eglash uses the examples of Malcolm X, the character Steve 212 Urkel, various characters within the Star Trek universe, and the later films of Samuel L. Jackson to illustrate his argument, and to return to the persona of Will Smith yet again, I would add Smith and his oeuvre to Eglash’s list. While Smith is not a stereotypical nerd, his placement within science fiction and action milieus demands an engagement with and a particular set of attitudes towards technology. I would argue that analyzing Smith’s films in light of his interaction with technology presents an alternate way of reading representations of blackness and technology, particularly the ways in which Smith’s simultaneous disavowal and assumption of the signs of blackness work with his characters’ perceptions of technology. Will Smith’s alternately technophobic and technophilic characters have their counterparts in what Martin Kevorkian calls the “black techno-wizards” of particular science fiction and action films of the 1990s. Kevorkian’s analyses of blackness and technology in Color Monitors: The Black Face of Technology in America help place Smith’s characters in context. After examining Kevorkian’s arguments, I will analyze the 2004 science fiction thriller I, Robot as an example of the ways in which Smith’s character, Detective Del Spooner, interacts with technology on- screen. In Color Monitors, Kevorkian looks at what he calls “black techno-wizards” from five Hollywood action films. 34 Kevorkian argues that these characters, who also could be classified in Eglash’s terms as “black nerds,” represent the displacement of white fears of technology unto black bodies. He says, “If digital small screen technology tends to disembody the subject, the black male becomes the preferred object of this disembodiment.” 35 In a way, as Kevorkian argues, the representation of the black 213 technological genius in the 90s films he analyzes objectify the black body to a point where both blackness and technology are used to serve white agendas. The author’s argument probes deeper into the ways anxiety is represented in this “racial scripting of electronic expertise” 36 by suggesting these characters represent a “neo-minstrely”, 37 or a kind of black performance that is ultimately controlled by whites. Kevorkian says, “All these characters are instrumentalized and put to use, to do the work white folks cannot, or will not, do.” 38 Kevorkian’s argument also connects the black geniuses in the various films to certain aspects of fantasy that I have referred to in earlier chapters. For one, he mentions that the stereotypical black computer geeks seem to have an almost supernatural knowledge of technology and computer systems: “But even beyond the diligent application of advanced technology, time and again, the blacks who monitor the black screens manage to tap into the ghosts in the machine.” 39 The association between mysticism and magic and raced characters, which I previously pointed out in I Am Legend, is a common trope in Hollywood films, where a push towards “positive” representation leads to an overcompensation – minorities become more than human, which in turn limits their characters to particular “types” all over again. Interestingly enough, actor Joe Morton, who played the Brother in The Brother From Another Planet, figures into two of Kevorkian’s examples. In the first one, he plays the computer wizard Miles Dyson in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), whose technological genius is responsible for creating a race of androids that will potentially destroy the human race; according to Kevorkian, the black man’s villainous technological mastery leads to a 214 stereotypically uncivilized turn of events. In the second example, Morton plays an electronics expert in Executive Decision (1996) who is immobilized in the beginning of the film, which supports Kevorkian’s point about the objectification of the black genius and his literal and metaphoric containment. Looking at Morton’s role as Brother, as well as his roles as computer sidekicks, we can see a strange and fascinating inter-textual relationship between his characters, one in which a science fiction or technological background facilitates potentially subversive readings of black characters, but can commodify black bodies at the same time. Considering the role of these black technological gurus in recent Hollywood films, I would argue that Will Smith’s characters, generally main characters rather than supporting, represent a shift from Kevorkian’s “neo-minstrely”. Kevorkian says of Theo, the black technological part of the terrorist team in Die Hard (1988), “Effectively, everything is out of his hands; knowledge endows him with a kind of power, to be sure, but not a physical or self-determinative one.” 40 Smith’s characters do have that “physical or self-determinative” power within the narratives of his most recent films, where he plays the role of action star and unruly protagonist. Rather than claiming technology as an extension of the black servile body, as Kevorkian does with the characters in his study, Smith’s interactions with technology on screen underscore his simultaneous (and marketable) elision and embrace of black identity; his characters embrace or reject the action’s film’s weaponry, gadgetry, and inventions to the extent that they support Smith’s carefully maintained aura of “black cool.” For example, in I, Robot, Will Smith plays Detective Del Spooner, a technological Luddite in a world where robots have taken over 215 several aspects of labor, particularly menial jobs and the service industry. Based on a story by Isaac Asimov, the replacement of the labor force with robots and their association with the category of “slave” raises particular associations to the ethnic makeup of the contemporary American labor force. Alex Rivera, an artist and experimental filmmaker, examines the same questions in his short film, “Why Cybraceros?”, humorously examining the potential consequences of replacing Mexican migrant labor with robotic counterparts. Rivera’s film is a mock promotion for a program that would allow laborers to control robots working in America, via the Internet, from their homes in Mexico, basically eliminating the problems of border control: “The Cybracero, as a trouble free, no commitment, low cost laborer, is the perfect immigrant. The Cybracero is the hi-tech face of the age-old American Dream.” 41 The robots in I, Robot are advertised in a similar way, as accomplishing the necessary tasks of city life without the “messiness” of human beings; while no direct connection to race is made within the film, the contemporary contexts of migrant labor, border politics, and outsourcing suggest raced dimensions to both the robot and the displaced labor forces. Further complicating the racial implications of the robot labor force is the fact that the robots themselves are treated as a kind of “race,” and parallels are drawn between the robots and American attitudes towards immigrant labor. For example, commenting on Detective Spooner’s hatred of robots, the CEO of U.S. Robotics remarks, “I suppose your father lost his job to a robot.” Similarly, Spooner’s boss admonishes Spooner’s hatred as blind and irrational, claiming that he hates “their kind,” a phrase reminiscent of past prejudices leveled across entire minority populations. The use of the phrase is slightly 216 tongue-in-cheek, considering that both Spooner and his boss are black, yet the implication is also that in the world of the future, race has ceased to become a marker of difference in favor of a human/technological divide. If we consider the film’s use of invisible, robotic labor in light of Fanon’s argument about subjection formation – mentioned in the previous chapter – then the racial implications of Will Smith as protagonist become more complex. As I argued in Chapter 3, Fanon’s theories about subject formation and colonialism can be extended to American citizens’ subjectivity and the immigrant labor force. Alex Rivera’s film mockingly generates the invisibility of the migrant labor force through mechanization, rendering the metaphorically “inhuman” illegal immigrant literally “inhuman” without the messiness that physical border crossing entails. I, Robot un-ironically enacts this mechanization in its narrative, creating a subtextual relationship between the robots and the migrant population that, as Kevorkian would argue, equates machines and the raced labor force through “instrumentalization.” That instrumentalization is confused by the existence of Will Smith as a black protagonist: while the presence of migrants in the phenomenal world of American citizens disrupts “normal” subjectivity and generates paranoia, then the presence of Smith as protagonist in the visual field of this film similarly generates discord in the film’s racial logic. This is further complicated by the fact that Smith’s character is positioned later in the film as the de facto leader in the robots’ uprising, which of course assumes the racial overtones of a slave rebellion. Smith’s blackness intervenes in the film’s attempt to disavow the relationship of the robot population to American migrant communities. 217 Will Smith’s status as an action/romantic hero often elides his blackness, but I would argue that the narrative juxtaposition of Smith with a new robot race places his racial identity under scrutiny once again. While his hatred of this “new” race is dismissed as blind prejudice, he is eventually proved to be correct in his suspicions that the robots are beginning to turn against their creators. As with most of Smith’s oeuvre, he is set apart as the lone voice of defiance and discord, and in the case of I, Robot, this defiance is explicitly technological and scientific in nature. In contrast to the blind worshippers of technology who surround him, Smith is set apart as “real” and rebellious, and the film uses signifiers of blackness to support his authenticity as both a defender of the law and as a human being. In his introductory scene, Smith wakes up and performs all his morning rituals, and camera angles and positions, minimal costuming and shower scenes privilege his muscular body. The whole sequence is set to Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” and marked by anachronisms such as an old-fashioned digital clock and Converse All-Stars (“vintage 2004”). On one level, “Superstition” of course gives us auditory clues that Detective Spooner is wary, and probably rightfully so, of something in his technologically loaded environment. On another level, the choreographing of Smith’s intense bodily regimen to classic R&B music creates associations with past cultural icons of blackness and Smith’s black masculinity, a reference to history that provides a sense of constructed “realness” within a mise-en-scene characterized by artificiality. And much like the Converse All-Stars work to link Smith to historical icons of blackness, he establishes a distinct racial identity similarly in one of his other major science fiction films, Men in Black (1997): “In his role as Edwards, meanwhile, Smith is costumed in 218 brilliantly colored wind suits and street-inspired athletic gear that also associate him with urban blackness.” 42 Smith’s grandmother also functions as a sign of blackness through an invocation of history, for her house, surroundings, and demeanor are pleasantly old- fashioned and slightly stuffy; as she chides Spooner for his divorce and stuffs him with pie, she also contrasts her high-tech surroundings with an aura of matronliness. Her character forms blatant parallels to that of the “Oracle” in the Wachowski Brothers Matrix trilogy, where the intersection of blackness, old age and femininity is associated with a mystical second sight, again suggesting that blackness provides magical access to truths about the past, present and future. Spooner’s relationship to his grandmother is the only familial one featured in the film, aside from the allegedly artificial connection between scientist Dr. Alfred Lanning and his robot Sonny; the juxtaposition again sets up associations between blackness and whiteness as alternately organic and inorganic, healthy and unhealthy, old and new. Spooner himself has a robotic arm, which we find out later in the film, making him a hybrid of both worlds; but, as Barry Brummett points out, Spooner is a “hand-crafted repair job” and a “work of art,” 43 distinguishing himself from the robot hordes by being specially made and using his robotic arm only for good. The disavowal of blackness for robot-ness in I, Robot functions in a way, then, that juxtaposes black identity with larger concepts of mysticism and humanity. In the film, the conventional relationship between age and knowledge is reversed, as Will Smith senses before his grandmother that the robots will turn against the humans. The type of knowledge he is associated with in the film also distinguishes him from his mechanical counterparts. Smith functions on instinct and emotion rather than academic knowledge, a 219 contrast that is highlighted by miscalculations of the female lead scientist, Dr. Susan Calvin, and the fact that society’s investments in technology and science have gone awry. Smith’s refusal to understand or appreciate science works in the film to further emphasize his masculinity, as well. As Eglash says, “The more abstract artifice of science does not seem nearly so testosterone-drenched; it is easy to see how the artificial spaces of mathematics and computing can be framed in opposition to manly identity.” 44 I, Robot enacts this opposition through Spooner’s mistrust of science and a concentrated focus on the “real” aspects of life, such as his grandmother’s pies and fighting crime. Eglash also analyzes the way that nerd identity is marked by race, claiming that one dichotomy that has arisen with the postmodern landscape is between primitive and orientalist racism; the former claims that a group is “not really a culture at all but rather beings of uncontrolled emotion and direct bodily sensation, rooted in the soil of sensuality” while the latter is “abstract” and “devoid of emotion.” 45 Spooner ironically eschews the practical and objective realm of hard science, usually known for its trustworthiness, in favor of the unpredictability of his fellow humans, and in doing so he makes the subtle connection between his racial identity and the relationship Eglash points out between race and various types of knowledge and skill sets. Heather Hicks adds support to this argument in her reading of Smith’s character in Men in Black, claiming that it is Smith’s physical prowess that distinguishes him from the other authority figures in the film, who are mostly old, white and out-of-shape, and in doing so, Smith’s physicality aligns him more with the abnormal aliens than their normal (white) captors. The situation is slightly different in I, Robot, where a focus on Smith’s physicality actually emphasizes his 220 normalcy over the mechanical, artificial nature of the robots, while at the same time, his well-tuned body and mechanical arm suggest that there is less distance between him and the robots than he thinks. The subtle aligning of Smith with the robot population also occurs within the film’s narrative, where older models of robots are treated as a kind of slave population and Smith is positioned as their leader and liberator, adding a historical dimension to the already circulating associations between the alien, the familiar, and race. Kevorkian says of Miles Dyson’s creation of the apocalyptic Terminator technology in T2, “This apocalyptic vision of technology spun out of control resembles an hysterical fear of slave insurrection: the black man’s programming plants the seeds that enable the robotic servants to turn against their masters.” 46 In I, Robot the racial situation is reversed, in that a white man is responsible for the robot revolution, yet a similar hysteria is manifested when Spooner becomes the leader of the robot uprising and leads them to freedom. Spooner’s position as robot freedom fighter and his robotic arm endow him with what Kevorkian calls the “markings of technological disembodiment,” a way of containing the black body as object and tool. I, Robot therefore ultimately engages in some of the neo-minstrely that Kevorkian proposes but hides it through the carefully constructed blackness of Smith’s able and agile star persona. Spooner does not give up gadgetry completely, taking an obvious pride in his sports car, but he derives even more pleasure from the fact that he knows how to drive it manually. Smith’s on-screen mythology as a black action star adds to the reading of Detective Spooner as embodying the qualities associated with the “black cool” and somehow transcending them at the same time. Spooner exists, therefore, in a liminal 221 space between technological mastery and the “primitive” (human) qualities of emotional insight and physical strength. Eglash claims, finally, that it is the genre of Afrofuturism, which I touched on earlier in this chapter, that is able to “disrupt and redefine the boundaries of technocultural identity – the putative opposition between blackness and technology – rather than merely relocate the figures that inhabit them.” 47 While Afrofuturism as a movement is more radical in its displacement of normative relationships between technology and race, I would argue that paying close attention to Will Smith as a black science fiction/technothriller hero still reveals alternative connections between technology and blackness. At the same time, focusing on Smith as a kind of text also highlights the limits that remain within Hollywood’s mainstream representation of race, particularly the way Smith reinforces stereotypical conventions of masculinity, blackness, and knowledge through his roles. Conclusion The language used to describe new media and digital technology consistently evokes words and phrases that can also refer to identity. The notions of destroying or transcending borders, of being anything or anybody, or of alternating between human and non-human, all of which are applied in theories and debates about new media, are also debates which apply to discourses of cultural, racial, sexual and gendered identity. New media, similar to identity, must also be located at the intersection of social, political and economic contexts in order to generate meaningful and productive discourses. The theoretical and popular examples in this chapter attempt to examine both racial identity and new media theory in relation to specific contexts. Alexander Weheliye, Herman 222 Gray and Ben Williams attempt to analyze the intersection of minority identity and music technology in their respective texts, looking respectively at the history, access to, and regional specificity of the digital technology various minority groups use to produce music. The focus on the visual in psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity ignores the ways the aural can be an important site for examining narratives of racial identity; in the case of Weheliye’s work, for example, the analysis of the black voice’s intersection with sound recording technologies reveals and challenges assumptions about white, Western, humanist definitions of modernity and progress. Herman Gray and Ben Williams expand Weheliye’s analysis to include the institutional contexts of music production, arguing against narratives about the “digital divide” and “access” inscribed into technological discourses about minority communities, claiming that such narratives reproduce the white and corporate-based foundations of mainstream technology. Williams argues instead that new media work produced in specific contexts, such as Detroit, can form new kinds of minority subjectivities based on responses to American, post-Fordist, capitalist conditions. I moved from a brief examination of the ways music, digital technology and minority identity are theorized by new media scholars to an analysis of two on-screen representations of minority identity and technology. While MTV’s Pimp My Ride is located in mainstream, commercial American television, I argue that its representations of the working class, sub-cultural practice of low-riding presents a fantasy space where genius, labor and excess can take on new, potentially radical racial and class dimensions. Genius has also been represented in a variety of ways on film, particularly, as Martin 223 Kevorkian argues, in the form of black techno-geniuses in action films. In light of Kevorkian’s analysis of blackness and the techno-thriller, as well as the current fascination with nerd identity in popular culture, I examine the representation of Will Smith in the science fiction thriller I, Robot in light of his roles on and off-screen as black action star, technological Luddite, and leader of a pseudo-slave rebellion. My examination of these three intersections of racial identity and technology reveals more facets of identity’s mise-en-scene – points of access where we are lent insight into the narratives and fantasies that make up racial identity – which hopefully trouble the understanding of technology as a-historical and race-neutral. 224 Chapter 4 Endnotes 1 Melanie E.S. Kohnen, “Signal to Noise: The Paradoxes of History and Technology in Battlestar Galactica,” FlowTV 7.14, 12 December 2008 www.flowtv.org. 2 Ben Williams, “Black Secret Technology: Detroit Techno and the Information Age,” Technicolor: Race, Technology and Everyday Life, eds. Alondra Nelson and Thuy Lihn N. Tu (New York: New York University Press, 2001) 158. 3 Ibid., 160. 4 Ibid., 161. 5 Ibid., 166. 6 Ibid., 164. 7 Alexander G. Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005) 82-105. 8 Ibid., 3. 9 Fred Moten’s In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition also uses black music, both its forms and its content, as a foundation for his theory about the avant-garde. Even the “sound” of Moten’s writing, elegant and rhythmic, represents a deployment of black radical theory into practice. 10 Weheliye, 5. 11 Ibid., 56. 12 Ibid., 59. 13 Ibid., 65. 14 Ibid., 63. 15 Alexander Weheliye, “Feenin’: Posthuman Voices in Black Popular Music,” in Social Text: Afrofuturism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002) 24. 16 Ibid., 30. 17 Ibid., 33. 18 The vocoder effect, as Weheliye explains it, is the contemporary use of the effects of the vocoder without the device itself. The vocoder effect is produced with digital technologies, “transforming vocals into a portion of the many ‘zeroes and ones’ that constitute the totality of a digitally produced sound recording (37).” 19 Weheliye, 38. 20 Herman Gray, Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) 154. 225 21 Ibid., 170. 22 Ibid., 156. 23 Ibid., 158. 24 Ibid., 165. 25 Weheliye, “Feenin,” 39. 26 “Introduction: Hidden Circuits,” in Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life, eds. Alondra Nelson, Thuy Linh N. Tu, and Alicia Headlam Hines (New York: New York University Press, 2001) 5. 27 Ben Chappell, “Take a Little Trip with Me: Lowriding and the Poetics of Scale,” in Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life, eds. Alondra Nelson, Thuy Linh N. Tu, and Alicia Headlam Hines (New York: New York University Press, 2001) 104. 28 In fact, among fans, there is much debate about the change from West Coast Customs to Galpin Auto Sports; fans generally claimed that the crew of West Coast Customs was more entertaining. 29 Chappell, 106. 30 Ibid., 107. 31 Lisa Glebatis Perks. “The Nouveau Reach: Ideologies of Class and Consumerism in Reality-Based Television,” Studies in Language and Capitalism, Issue 2 (2007) 111, www.languageandcapitalism.info. 32 Ibid., 114. 33 Ron Eglash, “Race, Sex and Nerds: From Black Geeks to Asian American Hipsters,” Social Text: Afrofuturism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002) 50. 34 Martin Kevorkian, Color Monitors: the Black Face of Technology in America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006) 11. 35 Ibid., 13. 36 Ibid., 13. 37 Ibid., 15. 38 Ibid., 15. 39 Ibid., 296. 40 Ibid., 288. 41 Alex Rivera. “Why Cybraceros?” in the Invisible Cinema section of Invisible America. 29 February 2008. http://www.invisibleamerica.com/whycybraceros.shtml 42 Heather Hicks, “Suits v. Skins: Immigration and Race in Men in Black,” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture and Theory 63.2 (2007): 109-136, 122. 43 Barry Brummett, “Rhetorical Homologies in Walter Benjamin, The Ring, and Capital,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 36 (2006) 452. 226 44 Eglash, 51-52. 45 Ibid., 52. 46 Kevorkian, 291. 47 Ibid., 60. 227 Afterword About a month before the Iowa caucuses in December 2007, Oprah Winfrey declared to crowds in Cedar Rapids, Iowa that Barack Obama was “the one.” Her statement echoed throughout the news media, not only because of the surprise of Winfrey’s endorsement, but also because the phrase “the one” carried powerful religious and somewhat mystical connotations. “The one” recalls the name given to Neo within The Matrix, hailed as humanity’s savior and a postmodern representative of the Second Coming, and we can also apply “the one” to Will Smith’s lonely fight against vampiric zombies in I Am Legend’s post-apocalyptic New York. Robert Neville stood amidst humanity’s debris and eventually passed on his blood to resurrect the human race, and it is not a stretch to see Obama being positioned in a similar way, surrounded by two wars and the tattered remains of the economy, supposedly carrying global salvation on his shoulders. In fact, just as Will Smith has been carefully constructed to be the black everyman, to disavow and embrace blackness as befitting his Hollywood career, Barack Obama has been similarly cast in the role of America’s black protagonist, action hero, and leading man, with his blackness meticulously doled out in doses deemed palatable to the American public. The theaters of politics and film collided right after Obama’s election, when people began debating whether or not Will Smith could play Obama in the film version of Obama’s life and presidency; in fact, Obama himself jokingly declared that Will Smith should play him “because he has the ears!” 1 The casting of Obama as a kind of “savior” is a reaction to America’s history of racial trauma and injustice and the search for an easy palliative, a fantasy narrative that will equate one man’s political ascendancy to the “healing” of America’s racial problems. 228 In the preceding chapters, I have examined a range of similarly fantastic narratives related to race, particularly deconstructing the ways in which these fantasies become naturalized within American culture. My project is also an examination of fantasy as a genre across a variety of media, looking at how fantastic and science fiction narratives can deconstruct narratives of racial identity and lend insight into the processes of racial formation. While the scope of this project is daunting, I attempt to link disparate media under a psychoanalytic understanding of identity as a “mise-en-scene” of desire, or as a fluid narrative process where subjects can occupy a range of positions and identities. In line with Laplanche and Pontalis, I look at fantasy as a process, and the media of my study can be considered acts of fantasy that reveal the process of creating raced subjectivities in specific historical, social and cultural contexts. Another aspect of fantasy that my project incorporates is Todorov’s theory of the fantastic, a structuralist approach to literature that questions the radical potential of the reader’s uncertainty – what Todorov refers to as a “hesitation” between supernatural or natural explanations of particular narratives. In my project, I consider the concept of hesitation as it applies to narratives of racial identity and visual media. In the case of racial identity, I raise the question of hesitation between competing definitions of race, as constructed, essential, biological, cultural, etc., and whether a focus on this hesitation can lead to critical and productive ends. I also apply Todorovian hesitation to film, particularly in my analysis of the avant-garde, to ask whether visual media can be “fantastic” in a literal sense and to determine the effect of this categorization on representations of racial identity. 229 My first step was to examine works within Critical Race Theory that use the language of fantasy to describe and analyze racial identities. The work of David Eng and Anne Anlin Cheng use the psychoanalytic definitions of fantasy to theorize Asian American subjectivity; Eng investigates the intersection of race and sexuality, while Cheng uses the Freudian concept of melancholy to examine the role of desire in the phantasmatic. Along with their explication of the relationship of fantasy to identity formation, both authors’ studies form an important intervention into conventionally white, Western and heteronormative psychoanalytic discourses. My next step, in a science fiction move, is to examine another seminal work of Critical Race Theory – This Bridge Called My Back – as a kind of cyborg of Chicana identity; Bridge literalizes the phantasmatic tableaux in both form and content through authors writing from a variety of subject positions. I go on to examine the way fictional narratives such as George Schuyler’s Black No More and Derrick Bell’s “The Space Traders” can function as Critical Race Theory, as well, by combining fantastic fictional narratives with the more tangible aspects and conditions of being black in American society. I continue my exploration of fantastic fictional narratives in Chapter 1, where I look closely at the concept of “alienation” within reception studies, Marxism, and science fiction, all helpful tools for considering race as a speculative object that has specific relationships to the gaze of the film spectator, commodity fetishism, and the defamiliarising effects of the science fiction milieu. The theoretical lenses of Marxism and science fiction were helpful in deconstructing John Sayles’ The Brother From Another Planet, for on the surface, the film creates a metaphorical relationship between 230 its black protagonist and extraterrestrials, but on a deeper level, the film’s characterization of its black protagonist as an alien creates a Todorovian hesitation around the meanings of blackness and alienation in Reagan-era, disenfranchised urban spaces. Going forward to 2007, I look at another film featuring a black protagonist, but one whose Hollywood mythology and persona works against the critical potential of the film’s science fiction, post-apocalyptic environment. Will Smith’s portrayal of Robert Neville in the most recent version of The Last Man on Earth – I Am Legend – disavows the racial implications of the last man on Earth being black, being chased by white hordes, and using his blood to save humanity, foregoing any potentially critical representation of the black man’s alienation for a commodifiable multiculturalism and stereotypical black mysticism. I continue to explore the fantastic mise-en-scene of identity in Chapter 2, looking more specifically at the formal aspects of film and their relationship to representation and fantasy. The intersection of science fiction and the avant-garde provides helpful theoretical ground for considering formally alienating representations of race, and using George Lucas’ THX 1138 as an example, I explore the abstraction of black identity within a science fiction film that uses avant-garde techniques. The avant-garde’s use of abstraction also has a formative influence on its representations of “self,” and I go on to explore the ways self-representation within the history of the avant-garde relates to identity, looking specifically at the work of surrealist filmmakers and the Chicano and Black avant-gardes and the way these filmmakers use fantasy to narrate their political and racial struggles. I focus on the work of filmmaker John Akomfrah, specifically his films 231 Handsworth Songs and The Last Angel of History, and their use of documentary and avant-garde formats to explore racial alienation and representations of history and memory; Akomfrah uses music and the genre of science fiction within The Last Angel to explore the African diaspora’s fantastic relationship to Africa and the re-definition of ideas of origins and home. History and memory are also the main focuses of the last two filmmakers of my analysis, Craig Baldwin and Walid Ra’ad, as both attempt to represent the chaos of war and political conflict through a marriage of fantasy, science fiction, and the avant-garde. While both Tribulation 99 and The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs play with the concept of imagery – filmic and photographic, respectively – Baldwin’s film uses archival footage to narrate his fantastic tale, while Ra’ad creates his own images and history to emphasize the gaps in national memory created by the horrors of war. Baldwin and Ra’ad’s focus on conflicts outside of and within national borders speaks to contemporary debates about globalization and transnationalism; perhaps their films, because they are not participating in the mainstream global entertainment market, can point to the darker and more absurd sides of transnational fantasies. American television, on the other hand, is a participant in and promoter of current trends in the global marketplace, and in many ways is an excellent model for ideals of globalization – not only in the ways American television exports its products around the world, but also in its constant recycling of global television franchises for American markets. In Chapter 3, I examine two science fiction series from two distinct eras in American political, economic and foreign history – The X-Files and Battlestar Galactica – focusing 232 specifically on their respective representations of migration. I conclude that The X-Files’ creation of a paranoid narrative, along with its use of high quality, science fiction and horror aesthetics, creates a potentially insightful criticism of American paranoid reactions to illegal immigrants and uses metaphors of monstrosity, alienation, and dismemberment to illustrate the fantastic and horrific nature of migrant narratives. While the limitations of American commercial television complicate The X-Files’ representations of the Other, the demands of a high-quality, commercially viable programming seem to simplify the potential subversive nature of Battlestar Galactica. While portraying humans as permanent migrants and using a racially diverse cast, BSG still relies on an obsession with borders, territory and citizenship and disavows the racial implications of its cyborg narrative, ultimately participating in an uncritically American and liberal humanist position on foreign policy. The fantasies of transnationalism truly come to fruition in the language of new media, as technology is hailed as breaking down boundaries of identity, such as nation, gender, race and class. Technological discourses often take the tone of science fiction narratives in their promises of taking away the “messiness” of life, and Chapter 4 attempts to ground the post-race, utopian discourses of new media in specific social contexts. First I look at the use of fantastic language in new media theory, specifically the way Alexander Weheliye and Herman Gray use music to suggest new ways of thinking about black subjectivity and of deconstructing commonly held assumptions about modernity, access, and minority communities. I then turn once more to television and film, examining two representations of technology and racial identity which, 233 continuing Gray and Weheliye’s theoretical project, raise alternative possibilities for thinking about the intersections of raced bodies with technology. Pimp My Ride, while firmly inscribed in the consumerist ideology of MTV and American television, presents a fantasy space for rethinking assumptions about class, race, skills and labor, suggesting through its popularization of subcultural practices that technological wizardry does not have to be confined to upper-class, white realms. The crews at West Coast Customs and Galpin Auto Sports can be considered nerds in their own right, as the racial and gendered markers of nerd and geek identity are being updated and reexamined in contemporary culture. As Ron Eglash and Martin Kevorkian suggest through their respective arguments, the presence of black nerds and geeks in mainstream film and television reinscribes certain cultural stereotypes and challenges others, but ultimately provokes an alternative reading of technology and racial identity. I argue that Will Smith’s portrayal of Detective Del Spooner in I, Robot, particularly his attitudes towards technology in a society taken over by robots, places his status as a black movie star – his disavowal of blackness – in relief against issues of labor, authenticity, and science gone awry. My survey of new media theory and the representation of technology and race hopefully expands the mise-en-scene of identity to include new points of access and grounds the utopian, post-race strains of new media discourse in more tangible, but equally radical, contexts. Much has been made of Obama’s mixed-race heritage and diverse life experiences. Obama himself says in “A More Perfect Union,” his March 18, 2008 speech on race: 234 I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton's Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I've gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world's poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners - an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. 2 In a way, we can consider Obama as a paradigmatic transnational, trans-racial cyborg, a figure who lays claim to a variety of origins and whose various parts add up to a mythic, superhuman whole. Current controversies about Obama’s failure to produce a legitimate birth certificate confirming that he was born in the United States, not Africa, reveal an anxiety about his origins that also adds to the mysterious and mystical aura constructed around him in the public imagination. To some, the fact that a black man has ascended to the presidency is already a fairy tale of sorts – and the Obama family a kind of black Camelot – and in a way, the fantasies built around him are merely reflections of fantasies that have been told and re-told through American history. In a country with a brutal and traumatic racial past, the only way to, in the words of Walid Ra’ad, “approach the fact” of race is through fantasy, and only by carefully taking apart and piecing together fantastic narratives of race, reflected on a variety of screens and surfaces, can we come to a deeper understanding of our participation in and creation of those fantasies. 235 Afterword Endnotes 1 “In the movie of Obama's life, he'd pick Will Smith to star,” Chicago Sun-Times 26 February 2008, http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/people/813369,obamamovies022608.article. 2 Barack Obama, “A More Perfect Union,” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/18/obama-race- speech-read-th_n_92077.html. 236 Bibliography Alarcon, Norma. “The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American Feminism.” Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras. Ed. Gloria Anzaldua. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1990. 356-369. 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Asset Metadata

Creator Subramanian, Janani (author)

Core Title Riddles of representation in fantastic media

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 08/07/2009

Defense Date 05/14/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag avant-garde,identity,OAI-PMH Harvest,Race,Science fiction,television

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Marez, Curtis (committee chair), Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee member), McPherson, Tara (committee member)

Creator Email janani.subramanian2@gmail.com,jananisu@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2524

Unique identifier UC1438171

Identifier etd-Subramanian-3066 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-188930 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2524 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Subramanian-3066.pdf

Dmrecord 188930

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Subramanian, Janani

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu