White Womanhood and/as American Empire in Arrival and Annihilation

Meghan Johnston Aelabouni

doi:10.3390/rel11030130

Abstract

American science fiction stories, such as U.S. historical narratives, often give central place to white, Western male subjects as noble explorers, benevolent colonizers, and border-guarding patriots. This constructed subjectivity renders colonized or cultural others as potentially threatening aliens, and it works alongside the parallel construction of white womanhood as a signifier for the territory to be possessed and protected by American empire—or as a sign of empire itself. Popular cultural narratives, whether in the world of U.S. imperialism or the speculative worlds of science fiction, may serve a religious function by helping to shape world-making: the envisioning and enacting of imagined communities. This paper argues that the world-making of American science fiction can participate in the construction and maintenance of American empire; yet, such speculative world-making may also subvert and critique imperialist ideologies. Analyzing the recent films Arrival (2016) and Annihilation (2018) through the lenses of postcolonial and feminist critique and theories of religion and popular culture, I argue that these films function as parables about human migration, diversity, and hybrid identities with ambiguous implications. Contact with the alien other can be read as bringing threat, loss, and tragedy or promise, birth, and possibility.

Highlights

Fanon further recognizes that the performative role prescribed for colonized people of color, including in a post-slavery U.S context, is constructed in large part through popular culture: the “grinning stereotype Y a bon Banania” of American films17 or the “Uncle Remus stories” and other novels of white American authors
Lumière’s short film, Arrival of the Train, 21st-century audiences generally have enough experience with cinema to remain aware of the separation of the filmic world from their own
Through narrative myths and symbols, the conceptual and the aesthetic, the world-making of film—like the world-making of religion—helps to shape our perceptions and worldviews, forming and reforming the imagined communities, which we enact in the “real” world

Summary

Introduction

I assert that the narrative and aesthetic worlds of popular American science fiction, with their frequent focus on imagined futures and on contact between an “us” and an alien “them”, often function to construct and maintain ideologies of American empire. Fanon further recognizes that the performative role prescribed for colonized people of color, including in a post-slavery U.S context, is constructed in large part through popular culture: the “grinning stereotype Y a bon Banania” of American films17 or the “Uncle Remus stories” and other novels of white American authors.18

Results

Conclusion