Human Subjects - Alien Objects? Abjection and the Constructions of Race and Racism in District 9
- Submitting institution
-
Canterbury Christ Church University
- Unit of assessment
- 34 - Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, Library and Information Management
- Output identifier
- U34.051
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
-
-
- Book title
- Alien Imaginations: Science Fiction and Tales of Transnationalism
- Publisher
- Bloomsbury Academic
- ISBN
- 9781628921151
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2015
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- Yes
- Additional information
- This was an invited contribution to Alien Imaginations: Science Fiction and Tales of Transnationalism, which is an edited collection exploring the figure of the alien in science fiction literature and film as disruptive of geographical, cultural or linguistic borders which question the nature of the human.
The chapter focuses on one film, District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009), commonly read as an allegory, either of the Apartheid or post-Apartheid eras. The history of Apartheid and the real-world District Six was the initial stage of research. Butler applied Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection – explored in a, earlier commissioned contribution to The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy – which offered a way into understanding the metamorphosis of the protagonist of District 9. Butler also drew on perspectives by Mocke Jansen van Veuren and Adéle Nel that connected Apartheid and abjection in the film, but took the analysis further by developing it into an examination of the problems of science fiction as allegory. Immanuel Kant’s writings on race and on aliens offered a model for developing a new understanding of how a “racial” other is constructed to reify a white identity then represented as the norm.
The analysis finds that District 9’s allegory veils a problematic politics centred on a humans/White vs aliens/Black binary which it fails to undermine. Whilst the film dramatizes many aspects of abjection, it still uses racist stereotypes it its construction of a Nigerian other. Butler’s research shows that the film reinforces the differences it purports to challenge.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
