Eating the blue people

Sitting in class this week, feeling like an idiot in my moccasins, I cringingly realized how guilty I am of “eating the Other”. As bell hooks points out, I do it with a sense of pluralism and progress, and, ultimately, out of a desire to differentiate myself or add some ‘spice’ to my bland white façade. It comes from a need to disassociate myself from that which whiteness represents to me: racism, patriarchy, exploitation, republicans, consumption. But in an attempt to be “disloyal to western civilization” (p.5) I unknowingly reinforce it by consuming pieces of cultures that I don’t belong to.

hooks is astute in her observation that “white youth” are undergoing an “identity crisis” (p 4). This longing for some kind of cultural identity and community, and an effort to distance themselves from general white culture is apparent in (typically liberal) white young people. They cling to whatever semblance of ‘ethnic-ness’ they have in their genes, even if it’s just being a quarter Irish, at least it’s something. There is a particular desire to be part of a group that has been oppressed or persecuted. For instance, I have always been baffled and amused by the fact that, upon discovering that I’m Jewish, so many people tell me they “wish they were Jewish!” (Notably, this has stopped happening since Israel was portrayed as a bully in the latest Israeli-Palestine conflict). But why on earth would people want to be Jewish? Do they really want nagging, neurotic parents and a hypochondriac grandmother? (Ok, in my case, these stereotypes totally apply). People seize any connection to past victimization that they can use to shield themselves from guilt and separate themselves from the sordid history of European colonization – “I’m an eighth Cherokee, so I understand the suffering.” Admittedly, I’ve waved the Holocaust around a few times myself, so I’ve certainly succumbed to the temptation to claim an alibi. But how do you deal with the guilt of being the oppressor while continuing to benefit from the privileges that come with the package?


So, to completely change the subject, I saw Avatar this weekend, and came out spewing criticisms and saying “problematic” every other word, until my brother called me “esoteric and elitist.” To me this film epitomizes what hooks describes as “imperialist nostalgia.” The following quote applies perfectly to Avatar:

“In mass culture, imperialist nostalgia establishes a contemporary narrative where the suffering imposed by structures of domination on those designated Other is deflected by an emphasis on seduction and longing where the desire is not to make the Other over in one’s image but to become the Other” (p. 4)

I am sure that the parallels between Avatar and Pocahontas (and especially the animated film, Atlantis) were apparent to most people. Not only was the story essentially the same, but the recycling of romanticized myths about American Indians was blatantly obvious. This film works to assuage white guilt because it allows a, presumably, mostly white audience to vicariously participate in a rewrite of history, a nostalgic fantasy where, instead of destroying, we become “one with nature” and adopt a simple, harmonious, primitive lifestyle. Yet this fantasy is so pleasurable only because it maintains white patriarchal supremacy. The hero, a masculine white marine, ultimately saves the day by becoming the chief of the primitive aborigines. Although he does literally “become the Other” by taking on a new body, he is still a white man controlling a non-white population, who could not have survived without his paternal white wisdom. In the process, of course, he “claims the body of the colored Other (the chief’s daughter, naturally)…a symbolic frontier that will be fertile ground for [his] reconstruction of the masculine norm for asserting [himself] as [a] transgressive desiring object.” Thus, the “natural” order is reasserted – the white man dominates the blue people and “owns” the woman, even while superficially appearing to undermine white imperialism.

Could this film have been made with a black man as the hero, or, even less likely, a woman? I think not.