Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film

by Adilifu Nama

Winner, Rollins Book Award, Southwest Texas Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, 2008 Science fiction film offers its viewers many pleasures, not least of which is the possibility of imagining other worlds in which very different forms of society exist. Not surprisingly, however, these alternative worlds often become spaces in which filmmakers and film audiences can explore issues of concern in our own society. Through an analysis of over thirty canonic science fiction (SF) films, including Logan's Run, Star Wars, Blade Runner, Back to the Future, Gattaca, and Minority Report , Black Space offers a thorough-going investigation of how SF film since the 1950s has dealt with the issue of race and specifically with the representation of blackness. Setting his study against the backdrop of America's ongoing racial struggles and complex socioeconomic histories, Adilifu Nama pursues a number of themes in Black Space . They include the structured absence/token presence of blacks in SF film; racial contamination and racial paranoia; the traumatized black body as the ultimate signifier of difference, alienness, and "otherness"; the use of class and economic issues to subsume race as an issue; the racially subversive pleasures and allegories encoded in some mainstream SF films; and the ways in which independent and extra-filmic productions are subverting the SF genre of Hollywood filmmaking. The first book-length study of African American representation in science fiction film, Black Space demonstrates that SF cinema has become an important field of racial analysis, a site where definitions of race can be contested and post-civil rights race relations (re)imagined.

Genres: Nonfiction, Research, Race, Film

212 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2008

Reviews

[Jessica Richardson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly an eye-opener. I just think the analysis on Minority Report is a bit of a reach, but the many other films, when looked at THAT way...well it's embarrassing I didn't see it before.

[Morgan Dhu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adilifu Nama, in Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film, explores and interrogated (as he notes in his Introduction) "... the intersection of black representation and science fiction (sf) cinema." Acknowledging that actual representation of black people in sf film is extremely limited (even more so in 2008, when the book was published), he adds:

"... in spite of the overt omission of black representation and racial issues in sf cinema, I have found that both are present in numerous sf films. Albeit implicit—as structured absence, repressed or symbolic—blackness and race are often present in sf films as narrative subtext or implicit allegorical subject. Most important, for this book, is the cultural politics of race that such representations suggest not only in sf cinema but alongside the sociohis- torical place that blackness has occupied in American society. As a result, the sf film genre is not merely an imaginative medium primarily focused on the future. Sf film is also a powerful lens by which to observe the collective racial desires, constructs, fantasies, and fears circulating throughout American society."

In discussing the ways in which blackness is both openly represented and covertly coded in science fiction film, Nama acknowledges that he is examining the genre in unaccustomed ways:

"Too often the sf film genre is regarded as addressing only signature divisions in the genre: humans versus machines, old versus new, individual versus society, and nature versus the artificial. In this book, however, I place black racial formation at the center of these common dichotomies. As a result, a more complex and provocative picture emerges of how sf cinema, in imagining new worlds and addressing a broad range of social topics, has confronted and retreated from the color line, one of the most troubling and turbulent social issues present in American society."

Nama organises his analyses into six general topics. In the book's first chapter, "Structured Absence and Token Presence," he looks at the meanings inherent in the absence of black (and other racialised) characters in sf films, the implications of imagined futures in which only white people (and often only white Americans) survive, and the way blackness is coded through the use of symbolic characteristics and animals or animal-like others. While noting a number of films which do incorporate black characters - many of which, in the earlier years of sf film, were produced during the brief flourishing of 'blaxploitation' films which presented and validated black experience - Nama shows how these 'token' black characters often embody white concerns about racial issues. Examining films produced in more recent years, Nama looks at the emergence of the 'safe' black hero - in many instances portrayed by a single actor, Will Smith - as a reassuring figure for white audiences.

In the second chapter, "Bad Blood: Fear of Racial Contamination," Nama "examines the theme of racial contamination in sf cinema and, by extension, America’s fixation with racial boundary maintenance." Fear of racial 'contamination,' and the history of eugenicist responses to this fear, can be seen both in coded implication and overt symbolism in a number of science fiction themes and tropes - mutants, zombies, androids, shape-shifting 'things' - that, when associated, as they frequently are, with dystopian and post-apocalyptic settings, underline the belief that 'blood mixing' is the first step to the end of civilisation.

The third chapter, "The Black Body: Figures of Distortion," begins with the observation that the black body has long been depicted in a distorted or exaggerated fashion in American media. Nama goes on to discuss how "... the black body is often depicted in sf film not merely in ways that connect it with a sense of the grotesque or a source and site of phantasmagoric spectacle but also as a cultural and political metaphor for racial difference." Nama also notes the ways in which the male black body is associated with violent phallic and sexual imagery, suggestive of the construction of black men as sexually aggressive and threatening.

In the fourth chapter, "Humans Unite!: Race, Class and Postindustrial Aliens," Nama explores various unifying interests - class notably among them - that appear to override interracial strife or threats. In a number of science fiction films, the evil corporation becomes the threat which brings together black and white, while in others, the threat of an even greater Other - the invading or infiltrating alien - stand in for loss of jobs and disempowerment in a postindustrial economy and "... make racial strife obsolete." Ironically, while downplaying black/white racial tensions, many of these films symbolically depict fear of Latin@ immigrants 'invading' the shrinking blue-collar labour market.

In "White Narratives, Black Allegories," Nama begins his discussion by noting that science fiction film is a genre that, while superficially recapitulating many of the tropes of the white-supremacist, colonialist 'Western' genre, it is notably more open to resistant and subversive readings. In expanding on this, he "examines the allegorical import of sf film not only in breaching and buttressing the ideological constructs of America’s racial hierarchy but also as sources of subversive pleasure, meaning, and play that often contest the “preferred” meaning..." The chapter discusses a number of films that in Nama's analysis are "...open to racial readings that engage the legacy of American slavery, the racial injustice of the American legal system, black crime, police brutality, black liberation, and “race” riots, as well as racial pro ling."

In the final chapter, "Subverting the Genre: The Mothership Connection," Nama "... shifts focus from Hollywood representations of science fiction blackness to those independent and extrafilmic productions that stand not only outside the mainstream apparatus of cinematic production but in some cases outside the cultural conventions of mainstream notions of blackness." In particular, he examines films which consciously engage with race and the black community. Nama also explores the relatively new movement of Afrofuturism which includes not only film, but "... art, independent black comic books, black music, and even hip-hop videos [which] have functioned as alternative sites where futuristic fantasyscapes populated by black people can find expression." In considering the importance of the Afrofuturism movement in black-created and black-centred cultural productions, Nama asks, as his closing remarks, "... sf film is an important symbol of the social progress of a society still struggling to come to terms with the legacy of American racism. If we cannot look toward the future to imagine new possibilities and solutions for a history of race relations marred with fear, violence, institutional discrimination, and deep-seated ambivalence, then where else?"

[J · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought this was a very interesting book. I didn't agree with everything the author said and I thought some of their arguments were a bit of a stretch, but I still thought that it was very interesting.

So yeah, I decided to read another non-fiction book about film. It took me a while to decide which book to read, but then I came across this book. And when I discovered that this book is about Black and African American representation in science fiction films, I was genuinely excited to read it, because that's a perfection intersection of my interests.

So initially, I was really excited about this book and I actually looked forward to reading more of it every time I read it. But eventually, I started to lose interest in this book, partly because some of the arguments didn't make sense or seemed like a stretch. There were some arguments that will definitely change how I view black representation in science fiction films, but there were other arguments that weren't as convincing or compelling. (I guess I could list the arguments, but I'm lazy :/)

Also, I kind of wish that the author explored black representation in science fiction films that weren't produced or made in the U.S. It would've been really interesting to see how black representation in "foreign" science fiction films compares to black representation in American science fiction films. The author did occasionally explore how other races and ethnicities were portrayed in American science fiction films, which I really appreciated. But I wish the author took it a step further and explored science fiction films from different countries. (I'm sure there are other books that explore this, but like I said before, I'm lazy :/)

Oh yeah, I almost forgot to mention that this book was actually easy to follow, especially compared to the previous non-fiction books I read. It was really nice to read this book without having to look up the meaning of a particular word or phrase or reference every five minutes.

So overall, this book was interesting. I don't agree with everything the author said, but I thought some of their arguments were really interesting and compelling. I'll definitely consider those arguments and criticisms when watching science fiction films and tv shows.

Rating: 3.5/5

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely valuable work for reading the semiotics of a text even if it's not explicitly about the thing you're seeing. This is a kind of reading I don't do much but I can already feel it seeping into my brain. Nama's race-based breakdown of specific SF texts cuts to the bone and is fun to read to boot.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very rich analysis of both literal and allegorical blackness in sf cinema. Some of the readings are a bit reductive and the book gets a little repetitive after a certain point. But it's a great entry point into discussions of race in popular film.

[Ernesto Aguilar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Science fiction's multilayered vision of the future, in author Nama's work, is still a plateau grounded in the contemporary realities of race. More specifically, as in dissection of the movie "They Live," science fiction has, at times, offered a chance for a discussion about inequality, power and the cultural contradictions between white working-class idealism based in Horatio Alger-inspired meritocracy and the long-unresolved disenfranchisement of people of color which has engendered mistrust.

In this book, sci-fi gives the viewer a glimpse into racial fears and tensions of their periods. In the film "Demolition Man," the menacing Black man in Wesley Snipes stands tall amid a burning Los Angeles shortly after the 1993 rebellions following the Rodney King case, in which white police officers were acquitted for a vicious beating caught on film. In "Aliens," the lone Latino character faces anti-immigrant potshots by fellow soldiers. Class and economics become weapons in subverting the idea of racial justice in some works. And urban blight, typified in the movie "Escape from New York," becomes a racial allegory for abandonment.

The films and Nama's interpretations are diverse. From hit sci-fi fare to obscure movies over the decades, references go from anecdotal to engrossing. How race, sex and politics are portrayed as ever evolving. However, as the author states later, the historical struggles by people of color are hardly ever overtly examined or taken on as a major narrative in any science fiction film. Instead sci-fi, as with technology, exploration and the unknown, offers a futuristic look at race, and where it could be.

[J. · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one would be about a 3.8 if I could give decimal points. While the middle chapters of this book do some very important work, he leads with (chapter 2) his weakest chapter, and the last chapter is a little light on detail (after all, "Alien Nation" is the film that proves his whole theory, and likely should be examined in a great deal of detail). I'm not thrilled by how much he relies on Adam Roberts' book, because that book is awful. Some very useful theory, here, though, despite that. His work with the Alien quadrology is inspired. Recommended, especially if you're doing work on race or sci fi.

[kayla reed · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is really interesting, an excellent look at race and science fiction. Sometimes he reads quite far between the lines, but acknowledges this and it never seems to hinder his analysis. Very interesting.

[Books written by POC]

I loved this book and wished I were educated enough on the subject to really say more than "I never thought of that" fifty million times while I read.