Pages:
2 pages (550 words) Double spaced
Type of paper:
Essay (any type) Undergraduate (yrs. 3-4)
Discipline:
International Relations
Title:
Extra Credit Response Paper: “District 9” and Genocide
Sources to be cited:
5
Paper format:
Chicago / Turabian
Paper instructions:
Please write a 1.5 to 2 page response (single spaced, 12 point font) to the following question. Draw from the assigned readings and the movie “District 9” for examples. Use parenthetical/in-text references(Turabian author-date style) when citing. A bibliography is not necessary. This should be an analysis, not a review of the movie. Proofread and upload under this prompt by 6pm onWednesday, December 4th. The file format should be .doc, .docx, or .pdf.
Choose a real-world genocide, and use examples from “District 9” to explain how that genocide happened. How can genocide unfold right under the noses of a population that considers itself moral and law-abiding? Discuss how it is that so many otherwise good people have been bystanders or even participants in genocide. How can this be prevented?
——————————————————————————-
Articles of district 9: (provided to us)
https://www.colorlines.com/articles/district-9-loved-it-hated-it
https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2009/sep/07/district-9-immigration-climate-change
and an uploaded article
1
Gender, Ethnicity and Religious Practices in European Contexts
(VR3V13001) // Sander Huisman (3639827) // Teacher: dr. E Midden //
Assignment 2: Final Paper // Workgroup 2
// District 9 as a critique on ‘Otherness’ in new South Africa
When science fiction uses its limitless range of symbol and
metaphor novelistic ally, with the subject at the centre, it
can show us who we are, and where we are, and what choices face
us, with unsurpassed clarity, and with a great and troubling
beauty.
– Ursula K. LeGuin, The Language of the Night,
quoted in Self and Other in SF: Alien Encounters.
1
As an aspiring film scholar, I am interested in how movies interact
with society and it is with this interest I am writing this final
paper for the course Gender, Ethnicity and Religious Practices. I
have always been fond of science fiction movies, so it is no
surprise that I chose to critically analyse the South African
science fiction movie DISTRICT 9, directed by Neill Blomkamp. In this
essay I will try to find an answer to the question in what way the
representation of the ‘Other’ in DISTRICT 9 can be seen as a critique
on the post-apartheid society of South Africa. This question will be
answered with the use of the concept of Whiteness. Before I
introduce this concept, I will explain why the science fiction movie
is a perfect medium to deliver critique on a society. But let’s
start by briefly describing the plot of the movie.
// The Plot
The starting point in the narrative of DISTRICT 9 is quite unusual for
its genre. An alien spaceship has been hanging for several years
above Johannesburg. Instead of conquering the planet, as it happens
in most science fiction movies, the aliens appear to be starving and
in need of some serious help. They are collected in a Local crowded
rusty refugee camp called District 9, but the government has decided
1 Malmgren, Carl D. “Self and Other in SF: Alien Encounters.” Science Fiction Studies 20, no. 1 (1993): 15
2
that the aliens have to move 250 kilometres outside of Johannesburg
and many locals are happy to see the aliens leave the city.
In the film we follow Wikus van der Merwe, a white employee of
Multi-National United (MNU), the company that will perform the
forced moving of the aliens. During a search through one of the slum
houses, Wikus accidentally sprays an unknown liquid on himself. He
makes a nervous impression, but continues with the searches. In the
72 hours that follow, Wikus slowly turns into an alien and he is
forced by MNU to participate in experiments with alien weapons. In a
lab, they discover that his DNA is mixed with alien DNA. After Wikus
escapes from the lab, he resides in District 9 among the aliens in
order to stay out of the hands of MNU and to find a way to stop his
transformation.
// The genre
The science fiction genre is not only a medium that focuses on the
future. Science fiction provides a way to look at the overall racial
desires, constructions, fantasies and fears that are widespread in
society.
2 It is the most imaginative genre, but within the boundaries
of the science fiction genre, there are no boundaries. This
limitless genre gives possibilities. So science fiction movies can
be around any kind of character and can have every social system
that you can think of in their stories, but in spite of this
creative freedom, science fiction films repeatedly use contemporary
social issues.3
[T]he genre offers the audience the opportunity to vicariously
experience a world without many of the challenges a society
presently faces and, in doing so, to contemplate ramifications
of and potential responses to an urgent social problem and
present a hypothesized outcome or solution.4
This writes Adilifu Nama in his book Black Space: Imagining Race in
Science Fiction Film. There are, according to Nama only a few
2
Nama, Adilifu. Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008, p 2
3
Nama, Adilifu. Black Space, p 3
4
Nama, Adilifu. Black Space, p 3
3
scientific articles written about the intersection of the genre with
race, despite the many articles that recognize the genre as an
ideological tester that produces hegemonic and counterhegemonic
social stories, piercing metaphors and ethical paradoxes.
As the representative and narrative conventions of science
fiction movies almost always challenge or exceed the realism of the
dominant cinema, the genre is open to subversive politics.5 Because
science fiction set in fictional, often future, worlds, these films
can project and fantasize about the outcome of failed institutional
policy, nuclear war, or depleted ecosystems. Many science fiction
films provide sharp criticisms against the cultural values of the
dominant social policy and the prevailing values of the present-day
societies.
6 And because science fiction is so popular, (cf. DISTRICT 9
brought in more than one hundred fifteen million dollars in the
United States alone,
7) the medium is a very powerful one.
// Whiteness
Whiteness is the unwritten rule, the invisible standard by which
‘the other’ should be defined, in order to be represented.8 We see
this come back in for example the fact that a white person is rarely
radicalized and rarely asked to speak to his or her specific
“group”, while when one has a coloured skin, this is more often the
case. Richard Dyer studied the representation of white people in
white Western culture in his book White. In his book he explores the
racial imagery of white people. He argues that race is something
only applied to non-white people and that as long as white people
are not racially seen and named, they are the norm, the ordinary,
the standard, for humanity.
9 Being white means having a privileged
position. Dyer concludes his first chapter by stating that:
5
Guerrero, Ed. Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film. Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1993, p 57
6
Guerrero, Ed. Framing Blackness, p 57
7
IMDb. “District 9 (2009) – Box office / business.” Accessed April 27, 2014.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1136608/business.
8
Ien Ang, “I’m a Feminist but … “Other” – Women and Postnational Feminism.” In Feminist Postcolonial Theory:
A Reader by Lewis, Reina, and Sara Mills. New York: Routledge, 2003, p 197
9
Dyer, Richard. White. London: Routledge, 1997, p 1
4
White identity is founded on compelling paradoxes: a vividly
corporeal cosmology that most values transcendence of the body;
a notion of being at once a sort of race and the human race, an
individual and a universal subject; a commitment to
heterosexuality that, for whiteness to be affirmed, entails men
fighting against sexual desires and women having none; a stress
on the display of spirit while maintaining a position of
invisibility; In short, a need always to be everything and
nothing, literally overwhelmingly present and apparently
absent, both alive and dead.10
To complicate whiteness even more, whiteness is not clear cut black
and white. It comes in gradations: some people are whiter than
others, even within the whiteness itself. 11 Very often people of
mixed races are excluded, but sometimes indeed assimilated into the
category of whiteness. As Dyer shows us, whiteness is closely linked
to sexuality and gender, but also class plays a role. According to
Les Back and John Solomos, the non-white or Other is very often
depicted as being a primitive, a member of the Third World or an
underclass person.
12
The social construction and representation of race, otherness,
and non-whiteness is an unending practice, according to Ed Guerrero,
working itself out in many symbolic, cinematic forms of expression,
but particularly in the abundant racialized metaphors and allegories
of the science fiction genre.
13 We can see in contemporary western
society that whiteness gets redefined in some practices and that it
can be asked if whiteness is still the norm, because also the
representations of race, otherness, and non-whiteness are changing.
Here I tried to give a quick definition of the concept of
whiteness and its relation to otherness, but this is a rather light
definition, because the concept is more complex than I could give
in this short essay and the only way to get a better understanding
of the concept is by reading several books in relation to the issues
of whiteness and otherness.
10 Dyer, Richard. White, p 39
11 Dyer, Richard. White, p 19
12 Back, Les, and John Solomos. Theories of Race and Racism A Reader. London: Routledge, 2000, p 159
13 Guerrero, Ed. Framing Blackness, p 56-57
5
// New South Africa
On the 27th of April, 1994, South Africa became a new nation. The
elections were the symbol of the end of apartheid as a legally
enforced institutionalization of whiteness and asked a redefinition
of the social identity for most South Africans.14 They ask themselves
the question of what it means to be South Africans. Citizenship in
apartheid society of before 1994 was defined on the foundation of
race, while the government of ‘new South Africa’ defines citizenship
through the politics of belonging, which is based on the ownership
of the South African passport.
Although the first democratic elections represent the end of
apartheid, it does not mean that those elections were a radical
break in the exclusion of certain groups, because prejudice and
violence continue to mark contemporary South Africa.15 This became
clear with the xenophobic riots of May 2008 in which many people of
a minority group were killed. The attacks were directed at one of
the new discriminated groups: ‘The Foreigner’. Also during the
attacks, hundreds of people were injured and thousands were forced
out of their homes. The xenophobia in South Africa is not limited to
a anxiety or aversion of foreigner people, rather it results in a
tension and violence by South Africans towards immigrants, this is
what Bronwyn Harris shows in his interviews with victims of
discrimination towards foreigners.
16
Ten years before the xenophobic riots of May 2008, Roseline
Adegoke collected data on African countries and foreign Africans
published in three mainstream South African newspapers during the
month of March 1998 for her Master’s dissertation at the University
of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.17 Adegoke was able to conclude
with a great amount of certainty that the representations of foreign
14 Steyn, Melissa E. Whiteness Just Isn’t What It Used to Be: White Identity in a Changing South Africa. Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2001, back cover
15 Harris, Bronwyn, “Xenophobia: A new pathology for a new South Africa?” In Psychopathology and Social
Prejudice by Hook, Derek, and Gillian Eagle, Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2002, p 169
16 Harris, Bronwyn, “Xenophobia: A new pathology for a new South Africa?”, p 170
17 Janks, Hilary, and Roseline Adegoke. “District Nine and constructions of the other: Implications for
heterogeneous classrooms.” English Teaching: Practice and Critique 10, no. 2 (2011), p 42
6
Africa and Africans in the news articles she found were
“systematically negative”.
I have argued before that Whiteness as a norm is slowly
changing and is not stable at all. Through the flexibility of
whiteness and the many paradoxes it consists of, a new form of
whiteness appears. The old form as discussed above is too narrow to
describe the exclusions that are practiced in contemporary South
Africa. We can see this new form in the xenophobia that is currently
at stake in new South Africa. Being the norm and thus having a
privileged position is not fully defined by skin-color anymore, but
being part of a nation defines this position more and more. From the
interviews by Bronwyn Harris can also be concluded that speaking a
certain language defines if you belong to the group that determines
the norm.
// District 9 and The Other
The aliens created in DISTRICT 9 look like huge insects that are
quasi-human. We never learn the cultural name of the aliens. They
are in the fake interviews referred to as ‘prawns’ and have an
addiction to cat food. By constructing the aliens this way, the film
brings forth dichotomies and the understanding of difference and
identity. Making the alien non-human like, is a strategy to impose
the viewer a certain opinion. The viewer can easily forget that the
reality that the film pretends to represent is only a product of the
film itself.
DISTRICT 9 consists for approximately the first third of the
movie of television news reports and interviews that have been set
up. This construction makes it hard for the viewer to question the
authenticity of what the video material is about. The identities
presented in the movie are accessible through the given video
material and are in that way a construction of the media product
itself.
The aliens are called prawns not only because of their
appearance, but also to point at their non-humanness and create an
inferior position in society. The word prawn is used in the way
Nazi’s spoke about ‘the Jew’ and is a technology of othering and
7
dehumanizes the designated. Dimitris Papadopoulous and Vassilis
Tsianos argue that the use of animal names is quite common in antimigration discourses:
The coyote is more than a canis latrans in the borderline of
USA and Mexico. It designates all these commercial ‘guides’ who
are able to cross the national borders and to organize illegal
migrational movements and undocumented mobility. British
sailors call the elusive helpers of stowaway passengers sharks,
in the Greek-Albanian borders their name is ‘korakia,’ ravens.
In Chinese they are called ‘shetou,’ snakehead, a person who is
as cunning as a snake and knows how to use his/her agile head
to find a way through difficult situations.
18
DISTRICT 9 does not deal with a typical alien-encounter we can find in
the mainstream science fiction movies, but the encounter is
nonetheless between a terrestrial self and an extra-terrestrial
other and raises the question of the Self and the Other. The viewer
will, consciously or not, compare human and alien to define what it
means to be human. This being human can be seen as a new form of
whiteness. But the old norm still lurks in the background in the
movie: a white, heterosexual, Christian-religious, middle-class
male.
As many movies, also DISTRICT 9 asks its viewers to identify
with the main character who is a white heterosexual male. Only in
DISTRICT 9 this male makes jokes about abortion while burning alien
eggs with breathing babies. Besides that he is not afraid to
sacrifice anyone and anything to get what he want, even his alien
companions. And although the is willing to sacrifice everything to
meet his needs, his alien companions still save him and offer to
remain with him. He helps the aliens only so that they can cure him
from his slowly becoming alien.
18 Papadopoulos, Dimitris and Vassilis Tsiano, “The Autonomy of Migration: The Animals of Undocumented
Mobility.” In Deleuzian Encounters: Studies in Contemporary Social Issues by Hickey-Moody, Anna, and Peta
Malins, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, p 225-226
8
The audiences develop empathy for the aliens instead of the
humans in the movie, so Seth D. Baum notices.19 It is interesting
that the viewer does recognize emotions that are being experienced
by another sentient or fictional being that is non-human and
basically the “other” and by that we can see that they are more
likely to identify with humanlike aliens than alienlike humans.
Christopher Johnson, as the alien companion of Wikus is called,
is a rational, intelligent and individualized alien. Not only its
name hints toward it being gendered as male, just as all the other
aliens, it displays masculine behaviour. There is one alien that can
be identified as having a small possibility of being female, but
besides it wearing a pink bra, there are no female characteristics.
Its bra is dirty which adds to the conclusion that it is just a
male, acting a little weird in the eyes of Wikus. Besides this one
bra-wearing alien, clothes stand for intelligence when worn by
aliens, those who wear clothing are established to be more
intelligent, but most of the aliens do not wear any clothes.
// Nigerians and becoming an ‘Other’
Besides the aliens, there is another marginalized group. Inside the
movie they are being referred to as Nigerians, but nothing besides
the spoken references inside the movie hint to them as being of
Nigerian origin. They are being portrayed as an ‘other’, an ‘other’
which is perhaps more frightening than the aliens. Their aim is the
greatest fear of a racist: they do not only trade with the aliens ,
they are living closely to the aliens – they want to be like the
aliens. Even there is a suggestion that the Nigerian women are
having sex with the aliens.
So District 9 is populated with human men and seemingly male
aliens. There are many instances in which gender and sexuality come
into play in negative ways in the othering of Nigerians, for example
in the sexual exploitation of Nigerian women by the Nigerians to
service the aliens. The sex workers are just silent actors, without
any agency, and so are the black female workers of one of the
restaurants in District 9. Through this, the construction of the
19 Baum, Seth D. “Film review: District 9.” Journal of Evolution and Technology 20, no. 2 (2009). Accessed
April 27, 2014. http://jetpress.org/v20/baum.htm. p 87
9
Nigerian and the black females who work inside District 9, the
characters are an important part of the construction of the other
inside the movie.
There is nothing scarier than becoming the ‘other’ or the
‘other’ entering the ‘norm’ seen through a racist worldview. This is
exactly what happens to Wikus after he is contaminated by the fluid.
His arm slowly reforms an alien part as alien DNA takes over his
human DNA and becomes ‘the other’. Wikus switches sides and tries to
assimilate into the culture of the aliens, seeing things from a new
perspective and in the end even saving the culture he once despised
by fighting against his old allies.
Just as whiteness got a new form through the xenophobia that is
currently at stake in New South Africa, so does whiteness get a
slightly different norm in the context of the fictional world that
is constructed in DISTRICT 9. Being part of a nation to define the
position on the whiteness spectrum as discussed in the analysis of
new South Africa is too narrow to describe the exclusions that are
practiced in the movie world. The form that can be viewed in the
movie adds a new dimension to the concept of whiteness, namely one
that is being defined on the basis of being human. One in which the
other is perceived as being non-human and thus alien.
// District 9 as a critique
As a white male South African, Wikus has a privileged position in
society, but he is immediately othered once MNU discovers his
alienness. The movies thus shows how being of a certain race, which
in the movie can be measured by humanness, makes you an “other” in
society and the movie shows how this otherness is constructed by the
same society to give a certain power to groups. With this, Wikus is
excluded by forces that are imposed by humans against aliens. The
aliens are seen as hostile to the norms in which humans live. The
switching of the point of view shows that we also do not belong to
the whiteness/humanness norm and that we are no more human than the
Other/non-white/non-human we try to separate ourselves from.
The decontextualization of the fake interviews and the fake
television broadcasts inside the movie, that places itself the
10
science fiction genre, through the use of dehumanizing prawn-like
aliens and Computer Generated Images, puts the dehumanizing logic of
xenophobic discourse that prevails in today’s society of new South
Africa in a whole new daylight.
In that way, DISTRICT 9 is essentially about the contemporary
reality of new South Africa in which everyday racism and
stereotyping leads to discrimination and forced removals, just as
thousands of people were forced out of their homes during the
xenophobic riots of May 2008. DISTRICT 9 is eager to show the audience
their own subconscious racism and stereotyping. There is of course
no way of telling if DISTRICT 9 was meant to be a critique on the
post-apartheid society of South Africa. But when the film is viewed
as a critique of xenophobia in the new South African society, the
critique is very uncomfortable and direct, the film sends a warning
of a repetition of history we know from the apartheid era.
11
// Bibliography
Ang, Ien, “I’m a Feminist but … “Other” – Women and Postnational
Feminism.” In Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, by Lewis,
Reina, and Sara Mills, 190-206. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Back, Les, and John Solomos. Theories of Race and Racism A Reader.
London: Routledge, 2000.
Baum, Seth D. “Film review: District 9.” Journal of Evolution and
Technology 20, no. 2 (2009): 86-89. Accessed April 27, 2014.
http://jetpress.org/v20/baum.htm.
IMDb. “District 9 (2009) – Box office / business.” Accessed
April 27, 2014. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1136608/business.
Dyer, Richard. White. London: Routledge, 1997.
Guerrero, Ed. Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993.
Harris, Bronwyn, “Xenophobia: A new pathology for a new South
Africa?” In Psychopathology and Social Prejudice, by Hook,
Derek, and Gillian Eagle, 169-184. Cape Town: University of Cape
Town Press, 2002.
Janks, Hilary, and Roseline Adegoke. “District Nine and
constructions of the other: Implications for heterogeneous
classrooms.” English Teaching: Practice and Critique 10, no. 2
(2011): 39-48. Accessed April 27, 2014.
http://education.waikato.ac.nz/research/files/etpc/files/2011v10
n2art3.pdf.
Malmgren, Carl D. “Self and Other in SF: Alien Encounters.” Science
Fiction Studies 20, no. 1 (1993): 15-33. Accessed
April 27, 2014. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4240211.
Nama, Adilifu. Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film.
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008.
Papadopoulos, Dimitris and Vassilis Tsiano, “The Autonomy of
Migration: The Animals of Undocumented Mobility.” In Deleuzian
Encounters: Studies in Contemporary Social Issues, by HickeyMoody, Anna, and Peta Malins, 223-235. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007.
Steyn, Melissa E. Whiteness Just Isn’t What It Used to Be: White
Identity in a Changing South Africa. Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2001.
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