“Allegories of 9/11 and Apartheid: Abjection, Race, and Surveillance in Neill Blomkamp’s District 9”

Abstract

District 9 (2009) is a science fiction film set and produced in South Africa and directed by South African filmmaker Neill Blomkamp. It depicts the country’s infiltration by an alien species during the 1980s and their subsequent capture, surveillance, and torture by South African military personnel. Although the film’s location, the nationality of the director, and the title of the film indicate an allegory of the racial discrimination experienced in South Africa at that time, its correlation between close/illicit watching and violence reflects a more pervasive relationship between surveillance, race, and Western culture that intensified following 9/11. For instance, power and violence were similarly connected to surveillance in the video- and photographic recording of acts of degradation and torture that were committed against terrorist suspects held at US detainee camps in the immediate post-9/11 period. Referring to theorists of abjection, racism, and exclusion (Kristeva in Powers of Horror. Columbia University Press, New York, 1982, in Strangers to Ourselves. Columbia University Press, New York, 1991, in Nations Without Nationalism. Columbia University Press, New York, London and New York, 1993; Hook in South African Journal of Psychology 34: 672–703, 2004; Sibley in Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West. Routledge, 1995), and power and the disciplinary gaze (Foucault in Power/Knowledge. Longman, London, 1980, in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Penguin, London, 1991), as well as considering torture associated with historical accounts of xenophobia, this chapter demonstrates how the film displays persecution of the racial ‘other’ through surveillance within a science fiction setting.