Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film (review)

Although science fiction (SF) film is notable for its boundlessly imaginative representations of alien worlds, the cultural politics of the genre have been decidedly earthbound in scope. That such representations are best viewed through the prism of contemporary American racial politics is the central contention of Adilifu Nama, who suggests that the existing scholarship on SF film has failed to develop a comprehensive understanding of how race is represented in the genre. His book addresses this deficiency by underscoring the ideological and symbolic centrality of race for any serious scholar of a body of film not hitherto noted for its engagement with this topic.

In Black Space, Nama presents a series of thematically focused chapters that explore the visual coding of race in SF film, and although many of the films he examines appear devoid of any overt engagement with the racial politics of their day, he argues that these absences are structural, revealing more than they hide, which renders SF film an ideal site for the staging of displaced allegorical conflicts between hegemonic and resistant narrative subtexts. He suggests that the dominant allegories of race in SF film tend to articulate fears of racial contamination (with their associated fantasies of white "purity") and of permeable racial boundaries, which write the black body in SF film as a contested site for the shifting dynamics of racial meanings within the larger society. Nama provides a chapter-long amplification of this idea; the fascinated yet fearful frame SF film draws around the black body offers him rich evidence for the workings of the profoundly anxious discourses of white masculinity. Later in the book, Nama explores the conflicted allegorical responses in SF film to the collapse of the American manufacturing sector in the 1970s and anxieties over immigration from Asia and Mexico, highlighting the complex interplay between discourses of class and race that resulted, while his final chapter examines independently produced representations of blackness that create countervailing and resistant conceptions of blackness.

For the bulk of his analyses of individual films, Nama walks a fine line between the reflective semiotic approach he tends to favor and an occasional use of psychoanalytic and poststructuralist concepts in order to avoid the "too reductive" (p. 4) pitfalls of an interpretive stance that reads direct correspondences between race and its representations on screen, and readings that simply engage in identifying oppositions between negative and positive stereotypes. This willingness to be theoretically eclectic and his insistence on sociohistorical context provide the book with some of its most provocative moments; Nama's discussion of Ranald MacDougall's The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1959) and Boris Sagal's The Omega Man (1971), for example, ties each film to its particular cultural and political moment and teases out their often contradictory impulses. For instance, whereas MacDougall's film affirms the ethos of an integrationist racial politics then on the ascendancy in the United States, lingering sexual anxieties over miscegenation code this integrationist impulse as a troubling form of sexual penetration, working to produce what Nama characterizes as "one of the oddest resolutions in SF film history" (p. 46). The Omega Man (1971) articulates similar anxieties—the film's protagonist, the "omega man" of the title is, after all, the only survivor of a deadly biological war to be left "pure" of blood—graphically embodying white paranoia over the rise of black militancy and the affective sense of masculine victimhood in a post-Vietnam, postfeminist America (p. 52). By comparison, in films such as Predator (1987) and Total Recall (1990), racial unease manifests itself in the phallic spectacle of a black corporeality repeatedly neutralized by (white) fantasies of recuperative violence and dismemberment (pp. 75–80, 82). Bodies loom large in Nama's analysis, and his claim that the black body is a "representational canvas coated with signifiers of alien unsightliness, danger, fear, social inferiority, and even transgressive sexuality" (p. 73) opens up blackness in SF film to wider arguments that seek to examine how representations...