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Chapter 1: Structured Absence and Token Presence
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Chapter 1 Structured Absence and Token Presence It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often wearing on the nerves. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man They had a movie of the future called Logan’s Run. Ain’t no niggers in it. I said, “Well, white folks ain’t planning for us to be here.” Richard Pryor, Bicentennial Nigger American science fiction (SF) cinema has had a history of providing striking portrayals of the future, alternative worlds, sleek rocket ships, cyborgs, deadly ray guns, time machines, and wormholes through hyperspace, but, until quite recently, no black people. For decades it appeared as if science fiction cinema was the symbolic wish fulfillment of America’s staunchest advocates of white supremacy. Admittedly, such a strident characterization is informed by some degree of hyperbole. Nonetheless, the structured absence of blackness has historically been a signature feature of the genre. In numerous SF films, black people are missing, or if they are present, they are so extremely marginalized and irrelevant to the narrative that they are, for all intents and purposes, invisible. The exclusion, however, of black representation in SF cinema is not unique to the genre. The Hollywood film industry , from its inception, has been extremely exclusionary and at times even hostile toward black representation. The seminal film Birth of a Nation (1915) exemplifies the type of antagonistic film representations of blackness in early American cinema, with its blackface stereotypes and unabashed veneration of the Ku Klux Klan.1 Early Hollywood cinema chronically deployed black characters in films Structured Absence and Token Presence 11 set in the antebellum South and the jungle forests of Africa or as seemingly permanent members of the American service-class economy (i.e., the maids, chauffeurs, train porters, and butlers). Accordingly, for much of the classic Hollywood era, cinematic blackness was overdetermined by historical events or a particular geographical setting or social class status, resulting in what James Snead characterizes as a state of perpetual historical stasis for black representation in film.2 The historical stasis of black representation and the necessary “suspension of disbelief” by the audience in SF film mixed as well as oil and water, since a fundamental pillar of the SF cinema aesthetic is temporal speculation.3 For decades, black representation was too concentrated, too weighted down by history, geography, and social location, to aesthetically transcend and diffuse into the ethereal imaginative space envisioned in the postwar SF films of the 1950s. The presence of black people on alternative worlds, in space, on the moon, or exploring Mars was the ultimate impossibility, the ultimate aesthetic subterfuge of the genre’s central requirement for viewers to suspend disbelief. With this type of representational logic saddled to black representation, it is not difficult to deduce that black characters would be absent across a vast majority of American SF cinema or that, when they were present, their representation was overdetermined , as in Flash Gordon (1980), where black characters appear as futuristic African tribesmen who wear metallic loincloths. For the most part, black characters are absent from SF cinema, yet their omission does not eliminate blackness as a source of anxiety. Churning just below the narrative surface of many SF films, blackness is symbolically present. Edward Said’s seminal work Orientalism provides a conceptual framework to account for the symbolic presence of blackness in SF films where it is not readily apparent. Said analyzed how English literature constructed not only the Orient as a geographical source of difference but also its populace as an alien “other” in the Western popular imagination. From this platform of socially constructed dissimilarity a wellspring of representations of the East emerged that relied on binary representations of culture, taste, and appearance to create essential qualities of difference.4 Said’s observation has multiple areas of application, but for this book the oppositional dichotomy that attributes immutable traits to the East in comparison with the West is similar to how the nonwhite person represents an alien “other” to the white protagonist(s) in SF film and plays a significant role in revealing the representational tropes used in SF film to signify blackness. White Man’s Burden (1995) is an SF film that dramatically demonstrates the taken-for-granted notions of immutable racial traits that define the oppositional terrain of racial meaning in American society. Although the qualita- [3.239.119.159] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 22:57 GMT) 12 Black Space tive signifiers of racial difference are purposefully employed to play...