Black Space
The science fiction movie genre has been, for generations, far more than astronauts and lunar landers. But what about a role as a cultural weather vane? A new book, one of the first major writings on race in science fiction, sees sci-fi’s occasional, even tokenized, appearance of people of color in a much different light.
This week, we examine Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film by Adilifu Nama.
Science fiction’s multilayered vision of the future, in author Nama’s work, is still a plateau grounded in the contemporary realities of race. More specifically, as in dissection of the movie They Live, science fiction has, at times, offered a chance for a discussion about inequality, power and the cultural contradictions between white working-class idealism based in Horatio Alger-inspired meritocracy and the long-unresolved disenfranchisement of people of color which has engendered mistrust.
In Black Space, sci-fi gives the viewer a glimpse into racial fears and tensions of their periods. In the film Demolition Man, the menacing Black man in Wesley Snipes stands tall amid a burning Los Angeles shortly after the 1993 rebellions following the Rodney King case, in which white police officers were acquitted for a vicious beating caught on film. In Aliens, the lone Latino character faces anti-immigrant potshots by fellow soldiers. Class and economics become weapons in subverting the idea of racial justice in some works. And urban blight, typified in the movie Escape from New York, becomes a racial allegory for abandonment.
The films and Nama’s interpretations are diverse. From hit sci-fi fare to obscure movies over the decades, references go from anecdotal to engrossing. How race, sex and politics are portrayed as ever evolving. However, as the author states later, the historical struggles by people of color are hardly ever overtly examined or taken on as a major narrative in any science fiction film. Instead sci-fi, as with technology, exploration and the unknown, offers a futuristic look at race, and where it could be.
