“About a Life Shaped by Exploitation”: The Uncanny Racialized Capitalism and the (Black) Performative in Sorry to Bother You

Abstract

Although Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018) is not conspicuously different from other didactic films at the beginning, it soon becomes unpredictable and even surreal when its protagonist Cassius “Cash” Green encounters an abominable epitome of racialized capitalism, the horse-men called the Equisapiens. Considering the abhorrent experiments whereby the black body is transformed into a horse-man that is a “stronger, more durable, and more obedient” workforce, it can be said that Sorry to Bother You launches into a diatribe against contemporary capitalism which is still inextricably tethered to racism. In light of Afrossurealism which sheds light on the black agony and grief through unrealistic and surreal elements, this paper examines the plan of transforming black people to the horse-men and the continuous attempts of subverting the dehumanization. In drawing on the idea of the uncanny conceptualized by Tzvetan Todorov and Rosemary Jackson, I will attempt to construe the Equisapiens as a representative symbol of the contemporary racialized capitalism. I will then seek to explore how the protagonists begin causing a rupture in a non-self-destructive way with the vestiges of racism which persist in the guise of capitalism, applying the idea of the (black) performative conceptualized by Sadiya V. Hartman and Jeffrey T. Nealon. I will ultimately argue that Sorry to Bother You as an Afrosurrealist film raises a possibility of resistance against the surreptitious racialized capitalism in contemporary American society.