Daily Double: Film Genres for $400

[fusako]

I have a special challenge question for everyone out there:

I challenge you to name a single Black science-fiction film.

Comments

[bahia]

You should also take into consideration that with the science fiction genre as a whole, and by that I mean fantasy and science fiction novels, black characters and especially black main characters are extremely rare. So, the model is set by fiction, and the movie industry is no different.

In my opinion, this is because most of the people who produce this kind of work are white men (along with most things, really...)

Check out this article by Usela Le Guin http://slate.com/id/2111107/
I read a great article about this issue a while back but I can't remember by who or when it was. Oh well..

[fusako]

Thanks for the article. It would seem Le Guin's experiences corroborate some of my speculations regarding the role studios play in the genre-as-establishment, which is too bad. In this, it would be nice to be wrong

[bahia]

Good point about sci-fi in Japanese culture. Interestingly, most of the sci-fi in Japan seems to be from the animated genre. Anime is popular here, but is very much a subculture. Hardcore anime fandom is reserved for the "otaku" and that term has quite a negative meaning in the Japanese (someone who is so immersed in a fictional world that they cannot relate to the real one). That being said, most characters in Japanese animation do not look Japanese. They may have crazy colored hair, but are all too commonly blonds. In most Japanese sci-fi, at least in Manga and animation, even if the characters are Japanese, being Japanese is not the point of the story. It doesn't necessarily have that community you referenced when talking about black cinema (though this is not true in shojo manga, which is for girls and is usually love stories about characters in high school and the like

[fusako]

The "de-ethnification" of anime characters is intriguing. I've encountered this observation before. I agree that the aesthetics of the character design overwhelming strips any resemblance to the ethnicities of the characters (with some marked exceptions). But culturally speaking, their behavior is decidely Japanese (idealized, realistic, or otherwise).

So I guess my question regarding anime character ethnicity would be: would you interpret this dichotomy as race-disidentification? Do you think there is evidence that the "white-washing" may be indicative of a desire to be "white"? If so, I think that it would be difficult to extricate the intrinsic colonial perspective from the subject; the "graphing" of "whiteness" through sci-fi's formal properties.

One thing that has always struck me about sci-fi anime is its ostensible compulsion to replay WWII. Nadesico, Macross, Evangelion, to name a few, all seem to be structured upon a WWII narrative; from the perspective of the Japanese, of course. It frequently involves an alien, unknown

[bahia]

Well, to get back to my thought about gender roles before addressing the other issues... Firstly, I would say that even in the USA which is fairly equal in terms of gender in the workplace, it does strike me that the worlds of fantasy and sci-fi are dominated by men. Why this is I am not sure. That is not to say that women can't or don't do plausible fantasy/sci-fi, plenty of them do, but I feel that it is men who have defined the genre. Does this have to do with the initial surge of fantasy as pulp novels and Dungeons and Dragons? The role playing world is filled with men; most gamers are male. Is it because more men tend to be socially awkward and therefore embraced the idea of a different world more fully? I don't know, but that would be an interesting thing to look up in psychological research

wow, where to start...

[fusako]

With regard to the predominance of the male lead in sci-fi/fantasy, I believe that has to do with its genre predecessors. I would draw colonial expeditionary narrative as a common ancestor between the two. That is to say, I think that most of the thematic overtures and structural elements of sci-fi and fantasy are derived from the archetype of the frontiersman; an agent of reconciliation between the forces of civilization and the forces of nature; between the native and Westerner. In so far as the hero is either: penetrating the unknown, usually through the analogy of physical space (the jungle, outer space, the dragon's lair, etc); or defending the infrastructure of domestication against forces of regression (outpost vs. the savages, earth vs. alien monsters, etc). Both primary modes of action resonate strongly with western conceptions of masculinity, such that the expectation of males exclusivity has become naturalized. A process which, by its own social history, is both product and purpose