The Racial Politics of Disaster and Dystopia in I Am Legend

On 12 September 2009 more than sixty thousand supporters of the 9/12 Project and TEA Baggers (Taxed Enough Already) marched on Washington. Although participants in the Taxpayers March decried Barack Obama's health-care reform, "big government" spending, and corporate bailouts, their placards sent a more alarming message. Bobbing among the crowd of mostly white faces were separate images of Obama with a Hitler moustache and "joker" makeup (made famous by the late Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight) as well as allusions to Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and the implied "horrors" of socialism. These symbols evoke a lexicon of fear that frames the current cultural politics of race and countenance of the nation as an omen of "immanent totalitarianism" (Goldberg 1). Swirling suspicions of Obama's U.S. citizenship, religious affiliation, and middle name (Hussein), for example, work to preemptively discredit his leadership in hopes of exposing the "Obama nation" as an "Obamanation." Following the September rally, Republican congressman Trent Franks called Obama "an enemy of humanity," while a writer for Newsmax.com suggested a military coup was needed to deal with "the Obama problem." While the rallies and rhetoric are inflamed by an unresolved economic morass, they have assumed an increasingly racialized tone in their failure to build multicultural alliances and jaundiced position on immigration reform. The eruption of such hostility and discontent so shortly after the election of a black president marks an open renewal of white male backlash, "Dixiecrat," racism and anti-multiculturalism, which can be read as a collective response to a perceived political and economic nightmare.

Despite the apparent spike in popularity of right-wing media pundits like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, figureheads of a revamped white identity politics, there is little novelty in the relationship between multiculturalism and dystopian visions. Before the "Obama era," Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" thesis forecasted the impending doom of the American Southwest as a result of "Hispanicization." Other commentators added similar predictions of "national breakdown" and a "new world disorder" caused by mounting immigration and the inherent "perils" of multiculturalism (Smith, Lyons, and Moore 6). It is perhaps not surprising that this homology of "difference" and dystopia underwrites a range of white identity movements, reactionary politics, and cultural obituaries for "tolerance" and "diversity" in the new millennium, most abruptly after 11 September 2001. For many on the far Right, multiculturalism is nothing short of a dystopia, one in which white public spaces and political offices are "taken over" by people of color. Similar anxieties underpin Glenn Beck's "doomsday" predictions (made shortly after Obama's inauguration) of a nation paralyzed by a distended liberal (multicultural) government, irascible labor unions, and Mexican immigrants—a triumvirate of "folk devils" that have historically haunted the conservative American imaginary.

Doomsdays and disasters are not uncommon themes in popular culture, especially within the narrative traditions of science fiction (SF), horror, and fantasy (Newman 4). In recent years there has been a spate of Hollywood films that visualize "multicultural" landscapes in a calamitous near future. Films like Resident Evil: Extinction (2007), The Happening (2008), Blindness (2008), and Quarantine (2008) pursue a postlapsarian curiosity to various ends through a multiracial group of characters. The intersection of science-fictional catastrophe, racial "difference," and the state is even more pronounced in Idiocracy (2006), Children of Men (2006), 2012 (2009), and, most important for our purposes here, I Am Legend (2007). While technically described as a biopolitical disaster film (rather than a classical dystopia), I Am Legend uses a dystopian background to sketch a crumbling social order and implicate the state in devastation. What distinguishes this SF film from conservative "doomsdays," however, is the extent to which hope is realized without restoring white normativity; instead, the racialized body holds the key to "national survival" (Kakoudaki 127). Both versions of dystopia anticipate the demise of a multicultural society, but they seem to support opposing racial projects in a "climate of fear." The purpose of this essay, then, is to trace some of the competing dystopian currents in popular and political culture of the post–civil rights era, specifically...