Dressed Up Exoticism: Avatar
In this week's reading, “Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film,” Adilifu Nama focuses on the relationship between Blackness and it's being viewed as innately "foreign" to whiteness, and how the genre of science fiction continually confutes being Black with being as uncanny as alien life, instead of letting Black people be human in those stories in the same way their white counterparts are allowed to be. This reading actually made me think about a very modern development of this unfortunate trope, in regards to the latest franchise Avatar by James Cameron, as it sort of exemplifies this phenomenon in the worse way. Nama provides several examples of Blackness within SF media that, among other things, strip Black people of their humanity, gender, agency, etc. And this rung a bell within me–I realized this sounded very familiar to the Avatar franchise. While the Na’vi in the movies are clearly intended to be indigenous-coded, with the way they display simi...