Original scientific paper
Avatar – Postcolonial Criticism Workbook (It Doesn’t Matter If You’re White or Blue) (Summary)
Bojan Mucko
; Varaždin
Abstract
It is hard not to read James Cameron’s movie Avatar from the postcolonial studies point of view. What appears to be an attempt of criticism towards the American imperialism, is build upon the rasistic subtext (and a vague discourse of, as Žižek put it, “Holywood’s Marxism”). Cameron constructed the Na’vi – the representation of the universal American other in a form of the blue aliens attributed
with wide range of very “native” characteristics. In this search of the nativeness essence, Cameron (and his team of anthropologists) even managed to widen the scope of colonial tropes. By projecting the universal natives into outer space, the nativness is alienized, and the natives are depicted as non-human species. With the tail attribution, Holywood’s colonial trope becomes even more vivid: the natives are animalised. After the Avatar became the highest grossing movie in the history, Cameron was engaged by the US-based NGO Amazon Watch to help them fight for the rights of the tribes living in the Amazon Basin, since their traditional way of life is threatened by the big national project – the Monte Belo Dam on the Xingu river in Brazil. So, in the inverted logic of simulacrum, Cameron travelled in the “Heart Of Darkness” to meet some real Na’vi, but instead of leading them in the armed insurrection against the government (like his main character in Avatar did), he is thinking about filming a sequel. One of the anthropology-related topics provoked by the movie is the collaboration of the army and the anthropologists. Since 2007, in a context of Iraq and Afganistan wars, collaboration of this kind became a central point in the “counter-insurgency” war strategies of the US Army. This strategy is called the “Human Terrain System” (HTS) and is condemned by the American Anthropological Association (AAA) for violating the rules of the AAA Code of Ethics. Nevertheless, there are some misinterpretations of the HTS (considered in the paper) that dangerously confuse anthropological militarization with activism.
Keywords
Avatar; James Cameron; Belo Monte Dam; postcolonial criticism; Human Terrain System; anthropological militarization; unreal loyalties; representation; anthropological irony
Hrčak ID:
75293
URI
Publication date:
27.12.2011.
Visits: 3.573 *