Decolonising James Cameron's Pandora: Imperial History And

Decolonising James Cameron’s Pandora: Imperial history and science fiction

Dominic Alessio Richmond University, the American University in London

Kristen Meredith University of Cambridge

Abstract

The science fiction film Avatar will be examined in light of the social-political context in which it was written, demonstrating the director’s highly charged critique of US foreign policy. Yet this paper also argues that the depiction of the alien native species remains problematic from a postcolonial perspective. “Decolonising Pandora” addresses too the ways that Avatar has been used for political ends by peoples throughout the world, while acting as a vehicle for a critical examination of traditional definitions of empire and imperial history overall.

Introduction James Cameron’s science fiction (SF) blockbuster Avatar (2009) is a film about futuristic human-alien contact that takes place on a fictional moon called Pandora in the Alpha Centauri star system. It is famous for being the most expensive cinematic production ever made, its groundbreaking 3-D technology, and the fact that it has grossed over two billion US dollars worldwide. Yet it is of interest for more than just special effects and profit margins. Avatar has been also the subject of considerable media discussion regarding its anti-establishment political ideology and its historical revisionism. This paper has four aims. Firstly, Avatar will be examined in light of the social-political context in which it was written, namely the American-led invasion of Iraq at the start of the twenty-first century during the presidency of George W. Bush (2000-2008). The film’s dialogue references the requirement to “fight terror with terror,” “shock and awe,” and a “hearts and minds” strategy, while the plot centers on the need to gain control of a valuable energy source (“unobtainium” as opposed to oil). Therefore, Avatar comes across as a highly charged critique of

© 2012 Dominic Alessio & Kristen Meredith and The Johns Hopkins University Press Bush’s US foreign policy, especially the so-called “War on Terror”. As such it stands in good stead with a tradition of other anti-colonial SF texts and American metropolitan critiques of empire.

Secondly, we argue that while the film’s plot is a blatant metaphor for the history of European-Indigenous colonial contact, the depiction of the Na’vi (Pandora’s indigenous humanoid species) remains problematic from a postcolonial perspective. However well-intentioned Cameron’s motives may have been, the Na’vi are portrayed as one-dimensional, environmentalist, noble savage caricatures that ironically only serve to reveal the continuous power of a colonialist mindset. Avatar subsequently exposes the extent and depth of imperial cultural resonances to which even Cameron, the explicit anti-imperialist, falls victim. In this vein Pandora’s setting, despite all of the film’s cutting-edge technology, largely resembles the conventional ‘Lost Eden’ utopian fantasy common to much of the literature and art of Europe’s nineteenth century high age of empire.

By way of conclusion we address the manner in which the film has been used for political ends by peoples throughout the world to gain international attention for their particular domestic plights. “Decolonising Pandora” thus demonstrates how politics and popular culture can overlap, highlighting the sometimes unexpected resonances of such intersections. One additional consequence of just such an intersection includes the need to rethink traditional definitions and theories of empire. Although since the dawn of civilization there have been numerous empires all across the globe, there are relatively few comparative and theoretical attempts to define the term. As Herfried Münkler points out: “the question of what an empire is and how it differs from the political order of the territorial state… has remained virtually unexamined… Political science has not provided solid definitions.”1 Avatar’s emphasis on the relationship between empire and big business is a timely reminder of the necessity to re-examine the phenomenon and to draw attention to the fact that empires do not have to be always state led.

Avatar and science fiction Naomi Wolf asserts that a “a culture’s ‘dreamwork’—its films, pop music, visual arts, and even its resonant jokes, cartoons and advertising images—reveal the signs of this

© 2012 Dominic Alessio & Kristen Meredith and The Johns Hopkins University Press collective unconscious.”2 In other words, cultural productions are not “merely rarefied aesthetic objects but points of entry into a society or culture at a particular moment in history.”3 Such is the case for literature. In a critique of the fantasy genre, which is frequently associated with SF, Myles Balfe states that:

Fantasy texts and landscapes are not purely fantastic… they are located within, and inscribed by, particular social, geographical and cultural discourses… Fantasy is not about inventing other worlds… Rather, Fantasy texts, like all texts, are socially embedded.4

Not surprisingly, the same also holds true for SF: “science fiction films are a particularly valuable tool for cultural analysis—the themes and techniques of such films in any given era may be held as an index of the dominant political and ideological concerns of the culture.”5

However, SF differs from fantasy in important ways. What distinctly makes Avatar a work of SF—apart from being marketed this way and proffering a speculative vision of the future extrapolated upon current trends—is that the film is “manifestly about science and scientific possibility—even probability.”6 Travel to Alpha Centauri, our closest star system, is a genuine prospect. Theoretically, life could exist on a moon. Therefore, although the SF genre is notoriously difficult to define, this emphasis on the possible, however extreme and improbable, helps to distinguish it from fantasy. By comparison, the latter’s purview consists mainly of magical and supernatural elements, and by implication a near total suspension of belief. SF’s emphasis, therefore, is upon the possibly real, as opposed to the really impossible. This distinguishing feature is what the critic Darko Suvin refers to as a “novum.”7 Nevertheless, Avatar exhibits a number of other typically SF characteristics: aliens, space ships, advanced technology, and themes relating to estrangement, didacticism, and apocalypse.8 These elements clearly demonstrate that Avatar belongs to the SF genre.

Storyline Set roughly a century-and-a-half in the future Avatar opens with the narrative of paraplegic ex-Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington). Jake takes the place of his deceased twin brother in the Avatar Program, an ongoing scientific exploration of the

© 2012 Dominic Alessio & Kristen Meredith and The Johns Hopkins University Press jungle-like Pandora. The moon is rich in unobtainium, a much-needed energy source in light of Earth’s own dwindling resources. The mineral is being sought for sale back on Earth by Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi) and the RDA Corporation he represents. Problematically for the RDA and its private mercenary army, unobtainium rests underneath Hometree, a gargantuan tree-like living space belonging to the Na’vi. The Na’vi are unwilling to surrender it.

Jake, in his avatar (faux Na’vi) form manages to infiltrate the Omaticaya, the clan of Na’vi at Hometree. He befriends Neytiri (Zoë Saldana), a female Na’vi, and eventually they fall in love, signifying the shift of Jake’s loyalties away from the humans. However, Selfridge and head of security Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) decide to relocate the Na’vi forcibly by destroying Hometree. The film climaxes with a battle between the united Na’vi clans of Pandora, led by Jake in his avatar body, and the RDA forces. At exhaustive length, the battle finishes and the Na’vi emerge victorious. Jake forgoes his human form completely and chooses to remain on Pandora, while the humans pack up and return home to planet Earth.

Political discussions aside, Avatar would have attracted attention for a variety of reasons, including the aforementioned extreme production costs (at a reputed 237 million US dollars it exceeded Cameron’s 1997 other big budget film Titanic), the fact that it is the globe’s top-grossing film to date, and its lavish and technologically advanced 3-D effects (referred to as “Stonervision” by one commentator).9 Other factors accounting for the media interest include the film’s epic length (162 minutes in original release) and the director’s difficult personality (crews working for him have referred to him as a combination of Captains Kurtz and Bligh).10 The director’s patriarchal tack is also of interest; his other SF films have featured strong female characters, such as Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) in The Terminator (1984) and Ellen Riply (Sigourney Weaver) in Aliens (1986). Intriguingly, what has not been the subject of detailed discussion is Jake’s physical infirmity. The fact that Cameron chose to finance the most expensive film ever made with a paraplegic as a central character suggests that Avatar is not as typically conservative, at least in terms of characterization, as some have maintained. Despite these concerns, however, the film has drawn the most attention due to its political message(s). As Dave Itzkoff has pointed out: “it has also found itself under fire from a growing list of interest groups,

© 2012 Dominic Alessio & Kristen Meredith and The Johns Hopkins University Press schools of thought and entire nations.”11 Such critics have included the Vatican, for the film’s apparent homage to pantheism, and the philosopher Slavoj Žižek, for its old-fashioned storyline.

Avatar has been criticized especially for its derivative narrative. Although Cameron is said to have developed the concept of the film’s plot in the 1990s, the storyline has been lambasted as a cross between a traditional western and a hackneyed romance, albeit set in the future and on a distant world. Such attacks have ranged from it being labelled a version of “Dances with Wolves in Space” to “Space Porn.”12 David Brooks in the New York Times argues that an account of a young white hero saving noble savages is an old theme witnessed in countless filmic productions, such as A Man Called Horse (dir. Elliot Silverstein, 1970), Fern Gully: The last rainforest (dir. Bill Kroyer, 1992), and The Last Samurai (dir. Edward Zwick, 2003).13 It is certainly true that elements of the storyline appear strikingly similar to a number of SF and fantasy works. Examples include: Poul Anderson’s Call Me Joe (1957), about a paraplegic who connects with an Artificial Intelligence to explore a dangerous Jupiter; Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word For World is Forest (1976), a Vietnam era novel telling the story of a peaceful alien species invaded by humans intent on deforesting their world; and Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, with the books’ noble savage warriors based on a combination of Cheyenne and Zulu cultures, amongst others. The visualization of blue-skinned aliens is reminiscent too of the Andorrans from Star Trek (see Journey to Babel, 1968); although it has been suggested that Cameron was inspired by depictions of Hindu deities.14 All the while the inter-connected living world of Pandora is similar to both James Lovelock’s Gaia Theory, which postulates that the Earth is a single organism, and Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (1961), the story of a sentient alien planet. The idea of floating islands and rocks, which make up some of Avatar’s most visually stunning spectacles, is reminiscent also of Hayao Miyazaki’s Japanese animated productions, namely Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986).

The Anti-Imperial Message Critics, especially those on the right of the political spectrum, have been vociferous in their attacks on the film, both with regard to its derivation as well as its accompanying

© 2012 Dominic Alessio & Kristen Meredith and The Johns Hopkins University Press political message. The neoconservative journalist John Podhoretz, a former speechwriter for both Presidents Reagan and Bush Sr., called the film:

…blitheringly stupid… taken directly from the revisionist westerns of the 1960s—the ones in which the Indians become the good guys and the Americans the bad guys… The conclusion does ask the audience to root for the defeat of the American soldiers at the hands of an insurgency. So it is a deep expression of anti-Americanism...15

Likewise, the Canadian critic Robert Fulford sees the film “as a commercial for the Green Party… and a florid work of anti-war propaganda.”16

Those on the left of the political spectrum have noted too the overt countercultural stance of the film. The Marxist-postcolonial academic Nagesh Rao claims that what “really stands out… is the unabashed critique of corporate greed— and its inspiring tale of solidarity and resistance against occupation.”17 This anti- imperial message is the most remarkable element of the film’s otherwise predictable narrative. Wolf noted that US actions and corporate imperialism are questioned very publicly for “the first-time ever in a Hollywood blockbuster—from the point of view of the rest of the world.”18 Specifically, Avatar’s message is that twenty-first century warmongering America and its corporate allies are imperial powers, ones that attempt to mask their dominance in a number of ways. Security, pre-emptive strikes, and the offering of “education,” “healthcare,” “roads,” “light beer” and “blue jeans” to Indigenous people, are all used to legitimize colonial conquest. Such rationales are remarkably similar to former President Bush’s description of the US invasion of Afghanistan: “As we strike military targets, we will also drop food, medicine and supplies.”19 The presentation of the United States as an empire is significant here too because “most studies of imperial and postcolonial culture omit discussions of the USA as an imperial power.”20

Overt parallels between US involvement in conflicts at home and abroad and the humans’ interaction(s) with Pandora are many. Firstly, the humans in Avatar are exclusively Americans. Even in American SF this is not necessarily typical. The original Star Trek (1966-1969), for example, featured Russian (Chekov), Scottish (‘Scotty’) and Japanese (Sulu) central characters. Similarly, in Stargate Atlantis

© 2012 Dominic Alessio & Kristen Meredith and The Johns Hopkins University Press (2004-9) the human crew is comprised of Americans, Canadians, British, Eastern Europeans, Asians, and an intriguing mix of Pacific Islanders. The fact that Americans alone are seeking unobtainium on Pandora suggests that they have remained uniquely imperialistic among human populations. Secondly, Jake and his human allies are imprisoned by the RDA without trial in what Wolf describes as “a small Guantánamo-style cell,” suggesting parallels with America’s “War on Terror.”21 Thirdly, there are obvious links between the RDA’s private army (Spec-Ops) and the former operations of private military firm Blackwater (subsequently Xe Services and now known as Academi) in the Middle East from 2003 onwards. Both are mercenary troops comprised of ex-military personnel (Jake calls Spec-Ops people “hired guns, taking the money, working for the company”), and both kill noncombatants. In 2007 Blackwater’s personnel were accused of shooting dead at least seventeen Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, similar to the Spec-Ops attack in the film that destroys Hometree. Fourthly, because of the destruction of Hometree the Na’vi survivors are forced to flee. Their compulsory removal resembles the Trail of Tears that Choctaw, Cherokee, Seminole, and other Indigenous peoples had to undertake when they were evicted from their homelands by US forces in the 1830s because American settlers wanted these lands and the gold beneath.22 Furthermore, the RDA military base on Pandora with its defensive perimeter is reminiscent of the Green Zone established in Baghdad during the Iraq War, as well as fortified US military bases in Vietnam.

Another highly significant analogy can be drawn between current political struggles and the fictional scenario in Avatar, with the film’s dialogue explicitly linking imperialism with American economic motives. Parker Selfridge says: “this is why we’re here, because this little grey rock [unobtainium] sells for twenty million a kilo.” The association of empire with profit is not new. It was described cogently as early as the beginning of the twentieth century by John Hobson in On the Economic Basis of Imperialism (1902), as well as by Vladimir Lenin in The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916). Indeed, Hobson’s assertion that the “interests of the nation as a whole are subordinated to those of certain sectional interests that usurp control of the national resources and use them for private gain,” ring surprisingly similar to the accusations meted out against Halliburton and its commercial links with the White House during the Bush Presidency.23

© 2012 Dominic Alessio & Kristen Meredith and The Johns Hopkins University Press In Cameron’s vision the RDA, like the American government, is keen to preserve a certain self-image. Selfridge insists that military force is a weapon of last resort. However, he displays no significant reluctance to undertake such a course of action when other solutions appear problematic or slow to achieve results. When the decision to engage militarily is made the humans, Quaritch in particular, come up with more excuses, namely, security: “Our survival relies on pre-emptive action. We will fight terror with terror!” Quaritch is a deliberately one-dimensional, alpha male character (pro-brute force, anti-education, with no nuances of personality or thought), and in many ways little more than a movie villain cliché. Nonetheless, his one-liners significantly echo US government justifications for the “war on terror”. George W Bush’s 2002 published security strategy states, “As a matter of common sense and self defense, America will act against threats before they are fully formed.”24 Avatar thus highlights Chalmers Johnson’s assertion that the USA “…has used… euphemisms to conceal harder imperial motives supported by aggressive militarism.”25 According to the film, America fulfills its imperialist agenda by presenting it as a security-based series of pre-emptive strikes. Quaritch’s line that “out there, beyond that fence, every living thing that crawls, flies or squats in the mud wants to kill you and eat your eyes for jujubes,” comes off as hyperbolic. But it reflects George W. Bush’s heavy-handedness concerning the American “enemy”: “the Iraqi regime continues to flaunt its hostility towards America… states like these constitute an axis of evil.”26 In short, Cameron suggests to us that leaders with ulterior motives deliberately exaggerate the state of things, warning of the dangers of weapons of mass destruction, merely to mask the inappropriateness of their response or action.

In interviews Cameron has linked the events in Avatar directly to the American war in Iraq, as well as to the Vietnam War and imperialism in general. Consequently there is no doubting the work’s deliberate anti-imperialist message. He says, “We went down a path that cost several hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. I don’t think the American people even know why it was done. So it’s all about opening your eyes.”27 He further states, “The Iraq stuff and the Vietnam stuff is there by design—and references to the colonial period are there by design.”28 He concludes that all of human history has been fashioned by imperial actions of one sort or another:

Human history is a series of invasions. One group invades another group. The militarily superior takes over and destroys the other culture… but we’re seeing it from the standpoint of the people who are getting invaded… anybody who’s going to take a position that a war is a right and moral path should understand what it feels like when it’s an aggressive war and what it feels like to be invaded. We felt it here with 9/11.29

Such anti-imperial themes are not unique to Avatar. As Michel Foucault pointed out, wherever there is power there is resistance.30 There is a long history of Hollywood productions critical of the US. In Aliens (1986), another Cameron SF production, we witness the story of a yet another failed attempt at human colonization in space, this one too initiated by a commercial enterprise that is willing to sacrifice human lives for profit. In the film’s narrative the marine spaceship that is sent to rescue a lost human colony is called the Sulaco, after the town in Joseph Conrad’s novel Nostromo (1904), itself an epic story about colonialism and the consequences of interference by foreign capital. The fact that Jake in Avatar is a wheel-chair bound ex-marine draws to mind also the anti-war novel by Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July (1976), which was turned later into a film of the same name (dir. Oliver Stone, 1989). Meanwhile the RDA’s attack on Hometree references the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York. Cameron’s visual analogy implies that American civilians have been the innocent victims of such attacks also and should sympathise with such atrocities.

Finally, Avatar presents this narrative of American imperialism against a metaphorical backdrop of “seeing.” In numerous sequences throughout the film the Na’vi deny Jake’s ability to “see” in the same emic way that they can: “Sky People… do not see,” affirms Neytiri. Yet at the end—in the very last shot—as a Na’vi, Jake opens his eyes. He “sees.” By the end of the film Cameron wants the audience to “see” the truth also, or at least his version of it. The subtext is that Americans at home have only minimal understanding of the lives being lost and the devastation being incurred by American military ventures abroad. Avatar subsequently brings the tragedy direct to the folks back home (Hometree/hometruths). Therefore, the

© 2012 Dominic Alessio & Kristen Meredith and The Johns Hopkins University Press additional effect of enriched 3-D to make Pandora seem real is potentially more than just a technological development for commercial gain. 3-D could be a political act. Cameron’s film suggests that the “other” world, the faraway one, has seemed (or been) unreal in the past, but that through Avatar’s 3-D enhancements one may enter it at last. The audience consequently undergoes the same transformation as Jake and the viewer essentially becomes an avatar too. By the film’s end, one is supposed to “see” as Jake does. “The aliens went back to their dying world,” says Jake after the Na’vi victory. The audience goes back to its world too, seeing their own ecologically fragile earth and the fact that empire is alive and well.

Cameron is certainly not the first critic of empire from within his own imperial metropole. There is a long history of internal opposition to colonialist actions, ranging from the Roman writer Cicero to the Dominican priest Bartolomé das Casas. The US, possibly because of its historical struggle for independence against Britain, has itself a long tradition of internal criticism of this kind. Some anti-imperial opponents have included the greats of nineteenth century American literature, including James Russell Lowell, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Mark Twain. But as Stephen Howe contends, such groups were “nearly always small, dissident minorities,” and by implication, ineffectual.31 It was instead the growing mass opposition to the Vietnam War in the twentieth century, fuelled by developments in communication that propelled what was the first successful anti-war movement in the history of the western world. Students, religious groups, civil rights activists, returning veterans, musicians, and eventually even Hollywood, all contributed to pressuring the nation’s leaders to pull out from southeast Asia.

The original Star Trek series helped to mark this sea-change in popular American attitudes to Vietnam, with the episode The Omega Glory (1968) calling for two alien races long at war—the Kohms and the Yangs (read Communists and Yanks) —to cooperate or instead to destroy their world entirely.32 SF, therefore, has an over- looked but cutting-edge position in the history of anti-imperial sentiment. As a genre it is much like magical realism, another literary space “from which to critique the modalities of western reason and rationality that prop up colonial regimes.”33 Ericka Hoagland and Reema Sarwal advocate that SF’s tendency to draw “critical attention

© 2012 Dominic Alessio & Kristen Meredith and The Johns Hopkins University Press to how imperialist history is constructed and maintained,” as well as its focus on the Other, makes it close to an ideal postcolonial genus.34

Yet there has been an “academic reluctance to engage with SF.”35 Edward Said ignored the genre and concentrated instead on so-called “high culture” or examined other lowbrow literatures, such as the “Boys Own” adventure genre.36 It is not surprising, however, that SF, a genre focusing on colonisation in space, advanced mechanical and communication developments, and contact with alien others, came into its own during the late nineteenth century—the High Age of European imperialism. H.G. Wells’ late nineteenth century story of a Martian invasion of Earth is indeed one of the seminal SF invasion narratives to articulate the evils of colonialism. What is surprising is that so few people have identified this correlation, with the plot lines of colonial history and SF looking remarkably similar. As the historian James Belich noted in relation to Australia:

Little was known of Australia apart from the partial and seasonal observations of Cook and Banks in 1770. Add to this the sheer difference of Australian nature, with its duck-billed mammals and jumping ruminants, and it is no wonder that historians compare the settlement of Botany Bay to the founding of a colony on Mars.37

It is consequently unsurprising that SF developed into a critical tool with which to explore imperialism. It highlights “fantasies of appropriating land, power, sex, and treasure... [as well as] nightmarish reversals of the positions of colonizer and colonized in tales of invasion and apocalypse.”38 SF for critics like John Reider is in fact “the obverse of the celebratory narratives of exploration and discovery.”39 As to why Cameron chose to become such an outspoken critic of US foreign policy we can only guess.40

New Orientalisms and New Edens Nevertheless, however much the film’s anti-imperialist agenda “gestures to some political depth,” it has been suggested that Avatar “pales in comparison” with other more mature SF productions.41 According to Davidson, “the film romanticizes indigenous populations, falling into a patronizing ‘noble savage’ myth that is too

© 2012 Dominic Alessio & Kristen Meredith and The Johns Hopkins University Press often the flip side of the racism it opposes.”42 Avatar, in spite of its overt political stance, consequently remains a colonialist work as it fails to “challenge the traditional one-dimensional representation(s) of indigenous peoples [read Na’vi] common to much of the movie industry over the last century.”43 The Na’vi are depicted instead as a primitive palimpsest of non-western Indigenous cultures epitomized by Maasai- looking necklaces, Rastafarian dreadlocked hair, North American Indigenous peoples’ clothing and weapons, and Māori cultural practices, including a hongi (when Jake and Neytiri are together at the Tree of Souls). The Na’vi’s blue skin colour might be a reflection of an association between “red-skins” and North American Indigenous peoples, whilst the term Na’vi itself could also be a play on the term Na(ti)V(e). Additionally, the Na’vi all appear to be voiced by black or Cherokee actors.44 In essence, Avatar presents a wide array of Orientalist stereotypes. As a result it appears to resemble a big-budget, space-based, technologically innovative version of Pocahontas (1995), an animated film by Disney with a similar narrative

Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) noted that western representations of the Orient typically describe those regions as mythic and include stereotyped assumptions about the peoples and places encountered there. The same is true of Cameron’s Pandora. As Said argued, such Orientalised perspectives tell us more about the culture of the colonizers rather than the colonized, revealing “by proxy more about those that describe… than the people in places that are being described.”45 So Avatar “reveals” a new Orientalism for a new century, bringing out the inherent tension between the stigmatization of empire in Cameron’s film and the resonances of imperial culture that underlie the production itself. Thus, the film can be read as a marker of the extreme power and depth of Orientalist stereotypes. Even more significantly, these stereotypes are to be found in a work of popular culture (as opposed to Said’s focus on elite or high culture), and one that ironically purports to offer a critique of empire.

Klaus Lubber notes, “the white man’s Indian underwent a paradigmatic change in the nineteenth century… for some, Native Americans remained savages, but to others they became sons or children of nature… ‘little children of the forest’.”46 The Na'vi are idealized in the manner of the latter. Their apparently intimate connections with nature and the environment are appealing in an age when technology

© 2012 Dominic Alessio & Kristen Meredith and The Johns Hopkins University Press has lost its twentieth century gleam and is somewhat demonized.47 As “little children of the forest,” the Na’vi are unfazed by the “natural” things that humans might typically fear, such as death, heights, or a wolf creature intent on slaughter.48 Their sexuality is also idealized; they are long legged and the women have tiny waists and big eyes. “There was a strong movement in Orientalism,” comments Bryan S. Turner, “that assumed a romantic view of the East as a land of promise, sensuality and pleasure that contrasted with the drab reality of bourgeois aestheticism.”49 In Avatar, this is realized. The film portrays the image of the colonized Other “[as] penetrated by the traveler whose ‘passions’ it rouses, it is ‘possessed’, ‘ravished’, ‘embraced’… and ultimately ‘domesticated’ by the masculine colonizer”50 Jake Sully (the masculine traveller representing the West) “penetrates” Pandora (the feminine East). The moon’s sexy Indigenous peoples are perpetually half-nude, as in the Orientalist paintings of the European colonial era. The implication is that this kind of cultural traffic is one-way only and that Na’vi do not have the intellectual ability to integrate into an “advanced” and technologically-superior human society.

Jake is the exemplary Orientalist. As he pokes and prods at Pandora and records Na’vi “idiosyncrasies” into a video recorder he inadvertently emphasises their passivity in relation to the humans (and himself). He is the observer, and they are the observed. “The Orient and Orientals [are]… an ‘object’ of study… the ‘object’ will be, as is customary, passive, non-participating… above all, non-active, non- autonomous, non-sovereign with regard to itself”51 He becomes more and more fascinated by their culture (his “passions” roused). He begins to perceive himself as one of them. He tries to convince them that he alone knows their needs, for example, to leave Hometree or to “negotiate,” because he knows their culture so well. Along the way, he fulfils the Orientalist fantasy of “an untrammelled life free from the prohibitions of society back home… in forms of sexual excess” by sleeping with Neytiri in the middle of a forest.52 When he assumes leadership (“possesses,” “domesticates”—the Na’vi significantly look like cats, from their noses to their ears), he justifies his role in the same way that European imperialists once justified colonialism: “by claiming that Oriental peoples needed saving.”53 Sully’s message is, in essence, “you’re lost without me.” They are the children, and he will lead/parent them. It is not wholly coincidental that the term avatar itself is derived from the Sanskrit word avatāra, meaning to descend. As such, it ironically references Hindu

© 2012 Dominic Alessio & Kristen Meredith and The Johns Hopkins University Press religious mythology wherein Vishnu’s avatars/incarnations descended to earth to remedy difficulties, just like Sully, the great white god, saves the Na’vi.54

The overall presentation of Pandora is so seductive that many viewers have experienced post-Avatar depression.55 In an article for CNN Entertainment viewers were quoted as feeling dissatisfied with Earth whilst they longed for Pandora: “I really wanted to live in Pandora, which seemed like such a perfect place… real life will never be as utopian.”56 Such statements reflect a popular theme in imperial ideology, namely, the idea of a lost paradise or lost “Eden.” David Cannadine notes:

Insofar as they [the British] regarded their empire as ‘one vast interconnected world,’ they did not necessarily do so in disadvantaged or critical contrast to the way they perceived their own metropolitan society. Rather, they were at least as likely to envisage the social structure of their empire… by analogy to what they knew of home… in idealization of it or (even, and increasingly) in nostalgia for it.57

In other words, imperial ideology presented the periphery of empire as a world lost to the imperial power itself or an idealized version of the imperial culture prior to imperialism (ironically). Avatar is not unusual in promoting this vision; “the image of a lost Eden plays an important part in many of… the colonization novels [of SF]… tingeing them with a particular nostalgia.”58 There are certain obvious elements of such an “Eden” on Pandora: the leafiness, the exotic looking animals, the clear and active presence of a deity, the lack of urban structures But more importantly, Pandora as Eden appears as a promised land in which settlers might “avoid the pitfalls which had plagued the Old World,” in Avatar’s case, Earth.59 Such pitfalls could include “the vices of industrialization and class tension.”60 The way in which Cameron depicts the culture of the Na’vi is clearly influenced, if not directly, by this utopian image. Not only is Pandora “untouched” and unindustrialized, but unlike “humans” (of the Old World, Earth, or imperialists in general) the Na’vi, amongst themselves, share a single cognitive culture or worldview from which they uniformly derive their beliefs. There are no deviants, few troublemakers and there are no class or power struggles. There is, instead, a “natural” order. On Pandora, “all life is sacred, related as kin, and mutually dependent” (that is, the opposite of class tension).61 Although it

© 2012 Dominic Alessio & Kristen Meredith and The Johns Hopkins University Press casts them in a romantic light, Avatar thus de-individualises the Indigenous in traditional imperial fashion. “Orientalism [is]... an ideology of de- individualization.”62 The Other is a singular, faceless entity whose “members” are indistinguishable from one another; this is especially apparent when the Na’vi start chanting/praying in unison. This contrasts with the actions of the individual Jake Sully, who arrives at the Omaticaya’s moment of crisis, parts the crowd like Moses parting the Red Sea, and awakens them from their defeatist stupor.

This sequence perpetuates the notion of the Other as an amorphous mass awaiting the arrival of heroic (Western) individuals, who will then have conquered the Lost Eden and will be able to claim it and engage with it in the way that European imperialists desired. Avatar is the expression of the imperial fantasy of the discovery and conquest of a Lost Eden. It portrays a world—Pandora—with the values and appearance of a utopia and renders this utopia available to outsiders. The explicitness of this image in a film like Avatar shows that imperial fantasies remain popular in the twenty-first century. The appeal of a Lost Eden awaiting colonization thus persists, and no amount of postcolonial rhetoric has managed to deconstruct it. Pandora is accordingly more “pigmentopia” than utopia.63 It does not proffer a postcolonial re- imagining or a transfigurative vision of hope. Even the film’s conventional representation of Jake and Neytiri’s sex scene is further evidence of this traditionally conservative/Orientalist viewpoint. It could have been radicalised if the coupling was between him as a human being and she as a Na’vi. Instead, they both remain in alien form, far too similar to other Hollywood conventions of same ethnic partnering. Cameron is not alone in stereotyping Indigenous peoples in this way in SF: “when it comes to Indians, even the best science fiction writer is often caught up in the traditional American literary dichotomy between writers like James Fenimore Cooper and his ‘Noble Red Man’ and Mark Twain and his ‘Ignoble Savage’.”64

Throughout the film, Cameron instead presents several binary opposition structures: human/non-human, core/periphery, white/non-white, and most problematically, good culture (Na’vi)/bad culture (humans). These are replicas of traditional imperialist binaries. As Žižek points out, “The film teaches us that the only choice the aborigines have is to be saved by the human beings or to be destroyed by them.”65 Likewise, the only apparent response to the human invasion is a violent

© 2012 Dominic Alessio & Kristen Meredith and The Johns Hopkins University Press one, a solution that in the long term often causes more problems than it resolves, “the violence originally directed against the outside imperialists can easily become a violence directed internally against domestic minorities or neighbouring tribes, ethnicities, religions, or nature.”66 By contrast, the deconstruction of binary structures is one of the fundamental goals of postcolonialism. Nyoongah Mudrooroo, author of Writing From the Fringe: A study of modern Aboriginal literature (1990), notes that abandoning the binaries, which have largely dominated the discourse on human culture (and consequently the study of it), is necessary in a postcolonial world.67 This echoes Homi K. Bhabha whose work on cultural hybridity highlights the interdependence of colonising and colonised cultures.68 Avatar suggests that the impulse to impose binaries has hardly disappeared, that there is no place “between xenophobia and xenophilia.”69 It might be argued that Sully’s avatar form promises a way forward, a chance of reconciliation and equality since he is half-human, half Na’vi. However, the insistence on armed insurrection rather than dialogue renders this hope null and void. Indeed, criticism about the military conflict at the finale of the film was expressed by an Ecuadoran tribal leader, who informed Cameron: “This movie needed a better message.”70

Postcolonial uncertainty surrounds Jake’s human allies as well. On the one hand, the chief scientist in charge of the Avatar program, Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), and a few of her colleagues, are sympathetic to the Na’vi and critical of the RDA’s agenda. They serve to dispel notions that all humans are complicit in the imperial project, harking back to the theme of anti-imperial voices from within the imperial core. These characters also try to lessen the destructive impact of the RDA’s commercial-militarist impact. As such, they evoke the missionaries who worked for the abolition of slavery. The name Grace Augustine alludes to both a state of Christian Grace (a call by God to free oneself from sin) and one of Christianity’s greatest missionaries, St. Augustine, who brought the Christian Gospel to Britain. In this case, Grace Augustine helps Jake to convert. Nor is it coincidental that the majority of these human allies are either women and/or representative of other minority cultures on Earth, suggesting historical examples of mutual support amongst similar dominated groups. Yet at the same time, Dr. Augustine’s work is financed by the RDA and assists the corporation to know its enemy. Thus her presence raises problematic ethical considerations about the

© 2012 Dominic Alessio & Kristen Meredith and The Johns Hopkins University Press relationship between academia and the imperial project, especially the “soft-power” counterinsurgency operations run by anthropologists for the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan known as Human Terrain Teams (HTT): “…These teams employ rapid appraisal-type ethnographic techniques… to help improve decision-making by commanders on the ground so as to avoid potential ‘kinetic’ engagements.71

Conclusion Stieg Larsson (1954-2004), author of the famous Millennium Trilogy crime novels, declared that SF exhibited “some of the most politically progressive writing” to be found anywhere.72 Richard Luckhurst, reviewing the British Library’s SF exhibition Out of this World: Science fiction but not as you know it, suggested that “It is better… to think science fiction is less about futurology than a device for ‘Othering’ the present. It defamiliarises the contemporary world, often for satirical or political ends.”73 Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan state that authors interested in postcolonialism and SF have been playing with the theme of colonisation for this very purpose, namely: to “critique it, pervert it, fuck with it, with irony, with anger, with humour, and also, with love and respect for the genre of science fiction that makes it possible to think about new ways of doing things.”74 While Avatar, given its Orientalist stereotyping, might not be as politically progressive as Cameron had intended, the film has taken on a political life of its own. Like Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, culture has the potential to sustain the status quo as well as to evolve also into “a site of struggle, as plural subjects under the sway of [this] hegemony… assert their multifarious and contradictory forms of social consciousness.”75 This is especially true given the way in which Avatar’s storyline and meanings have been appropriated globally by the victims of other colonial injustices.

In India, the Dongria Kongh who number about eight thousand and who “have left the trees on the mountain [where they reside] untouched as they believe that a god inhabits the forest,” have utilized the film a way to gain public attention to their plight against the mining company Vedanta.76 At the start of 2010, Palestinian protesters in the village of Bil’in near Ramallah dressed as Na’vi characters to gain global attention to their opposition to Israel’s separation barrier. In China bloggers have suggested that the government’s near total ban on Avatar was not only a way to protect the

© 2012 Dominic Alessio & Kristen Meredith and The Johns Hopkins University Press Chinese film industry (the official statement) but also a reflection of the authorities’ concern that the film’s focus on relocation might incite rebellion amongst the tens of thousands of Chinese being forced to make way for massive hydro electric projects. In addition, Chinese leaders might have perceived the film’s storyline as problematic or provocative considering that nation’s history of contested occupation in Tibet and Xinjiang. In Canada too, the film has been used by critics of Alberta’s tar sands projects who have drawn direct comparisons between Shell, BP and Exxon and the RDA. Full-page adverts in North American publications have talked about “Canada’s avaTAR Sands.”77 In a case of life imitating art, the Ayoreo tribe in Brazil have taken to attacking a local company’s bulldozers whose machines are being used to cut down trees in the rainforest to make way for ranchers.78 On one environmental listserv they were reports that “audiences as far apart as Brazil and Malaysia left theatres energized and mobilized, discussing imperialism, globalization, capitalism, struggles over natural resources, and modes of resistance.”79 “Decolonising Pandora” is itself a product of such a discussion amongst students in an undergraduate history class on empire.

The politics of Avatar has ramifications, therefore, that extend further than just Cameron’s critique of US foreign policy. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to say what influence the film has had, if any, on the American domestic political situation, and even if such an influence can be measured accurately, Avatar does have a political impact. As Richard Schiff who played Toby Ziegler on the award-winning political drama The West Wing (1999-2006) suggested, it is not impossible to conclude that media can have a direct impact on politics.80 Other commentators echo such views. Steven Thomas has stated, “movies like Avatar and Star Wars make an anti-empire argument more convincingly for the average person and especially for young people than a lot of the postcolonial theory.”81 Similarly, Michael Lerner has declared, “Avatar is one of the first movies to tell the story of western colonial/imperial arrogance from the standpoint of its victims in a way that may affect the mass consciousness in the western world.”82 Such conclusions account for the outspoken critiques that were voiced against Cameron’s film by those on the right of the political spectrum, worried what impact the film’s message might have upon American and international audiences. Certainly the way in which Pandora’s various Na’vi groups united to combat the RDA-human invasion is a lesson for success in any

© 2012 Dominic Alessio & Kristen Meredith and The Johns Hopkins University Press struggle against imperial aggression, one that George Custer learned very well in 1876 at the Little Big Horn. Avatar’s international political message consequently hints that popular culture can work politically to foster global conversations, akin to the sort of globalization processes envisioned by Hardt and Negri for resisting empire.83

It is Cameron’s insistence that empire still exists that is by far the more effective and intriguing aspect of the film, although he denies the possibility of a postcolonial future in which effective communication has replaced conflict. In interviews Cameron refutes allegations that Jake’s leadership is colonialist, stating, “When all you’ve got to fight back with is bows and arrows, there has to be intervention from the international community”;84 yet outside help is different from outside leadership. The world of Avatar thus remains largely colonial, except that planets have replaced regions or nations. Avatar’s representations of Indigenous cultures function then as self-portraits, shedding light on the imperial resonances that linger and still hold power. These images, stereotypes and preoccupations are deeply engrained in the modern public consciousness. Even with more than two hundred million US dollars in resources, the anti-imperialist Cameron is unable to produce a more innovative or progressive narrative that challenges such representations, let alone one that subverts them. Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus.85 However, Cameron is able to produce a film that serves as an historical marker for Bush’s muscular and militarist administration by linking imperial ambitions to US military action in the Middle East. As such Avatar can be seen as one of the defining motion pictures of George Bush Jr.’s Presidency.

Cameron’s explicit criticism of American policies with its focus on corporate power also sheds light on the need to re-examine the definition of empire for the twenty-first century. It reminds us that empires, despite post-World War II decolonisation, still exist, and that they do not have not to be state-led actors as some have suggested.86 Through Avatar it can be seen that other kinds of organizations can be imperial agents. Indeed, we must remember that in the early modern period of European maritime expansion, merchant organizations such as the Dutch United East India Company and Britain’s East India or Hudson’s Bay Companies, were the real global imperial players. The Hudson’s Bay Company was the de facto ruler of nearly

© 2012 Dominic Alessio & Kristen Meredith and The Johns Hopkins University Press a twelfth of the world’s land surface between 1670 and 1870. Likewise in US history it was the private interests of a clique of propertied plantation owners that were responsible for ending Native Hawai’ian sovereignty.87 Today variations of such practices continue to operate, as multinational corporations “are buying [or renting] swathes of property for long-term profit in land rich countries,” a process described as “Monopoly Imperialism” and akin to the late nineteenth century’s Scramble for Africa.88 Avatar is a timely reminder that in a world of growing multinational power the traditional definitions of empire need reformulating. Instead of the accepted “consensus definition,” namely that an empire is a “large political body which rules over territories outside its original borders,”89 a more relevant definition for the twenty-first century is needed. This new working definition might be the following: empire is a formal/informal correlation wherein any kind of individual or organization (political, religious, or commercial) dominates a people’s political autonomy, territory, culture, and/or economics.

For correspondence: [email protected]; [email protected]

Notes

1 Herfried Münkler, Empires: The logic of world domination from Ancient Rome to the United States, trans. Patrick Camiller (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 4. 2 Naomi Wolf, “Avatar and Empire,” Project Syndicate, 20 January 2010, accessed 6 April 2010, http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/wolf20/English. 3 Simon Sigley, “Film Culture: Its development in New Zealand, 1929-1972,” (PhD diss., University of Auckland, 2003) quoted in Barbara Brookes, “Which Barrier Was Broken? Broken Barrier and New Zealand cinema in the 1950s, New Zealand Journal of History 44.2 (2010): 121. 4 Myles Balfe, “Incredible Geographies? Orientalism and genre fantasy,” Social & Cultural Geography Vol. 5 No. 1 (2004): 75-6. 5 David Desser, “Race, Space and Class: The politics of the SF Film from Metropolis to Blade Runner,” in Retrofitting Blade Runner: Issues in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner

© 2012 Dominic Alessio & Kristen Meredith and The Johns Hopkins University Press and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, ed. Judith B. Kerman (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 110. 6 J.P. Tellotte, Science Fiction Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 3. 7 By contrast, fantasy is a narrative wherein “an extranatural power plays a fundamental role.” John Clute and Peter Nicholls, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (London: Orbit Press, 1999), 484. 8 For a discussion of definitions of SF, especially Suvin, see A. Roberts, Science Fiction: The new critical idiom (London: Routledge, 2000), 28. 9 Dana Goodyear, “Man of Extremes: The return of James Cameron,” New Yorker, 26 October 2009, accessed 2 April 2010, http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/delivery?vid=7&hid=5&sid=a5dd7 10 Erik Hedegaard, “The Impossible Reality of James Cameron,” Rolling Stone, December 2009, accessed 2 April 2010, http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/delivery?vid=7&hid=5&sid=a5dd7 11 Dave Itzkoff, “You Saw What in Avatar? Pass those glasses,” The New York Times, 20 January 2010, accessed 2 July 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/20/movies/20avatar.html?%2339 12 Goodyear, “Man of Extremes.” 13 David Brooks, “The Messiah Complex,” The New York Times, 7 January 2010, accessed 8 April 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/opinion/08brooks.html?scp=1&sq=David%20Nr 14 Antonio Casilli, “Les Avatars Bleus, Autour de trois stratégies d’emprunt culturel au coeur de la cyberculture,” Communications, 77 (2005): 183-209. Quoted in Emily Hodgon, “James Cameron’s Avatar: A postcolonial analysis,” (undergraduate paper submitted to Dominic Alessio for the module Cultures of Imperial Power, at Richmond University, the American International University in London, Spring 2010). 15 John Podhoretz, “Avatarocious: Another spectacle hits an iceberg and sinks,” Weekly Standard.com, Vol. 15 No. 15 (2009), accessed 8 March 2010, http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/017/350fozta.asp

16 James Fulford, “James Cameron has no Clothes” Maclean’s, Vol. 123 No. 6 (2010), 55-56. 17 Nagesh Rao, “Avatar: Anti-Imperiaism in 3D”, Green Left, 22 January 2010, quoted in Rjurik Davidson, “Avatar: Evaluating a film in a world of its own,” Australian Screen Education, 1 April 2010, accessed 16 September 2010, http://www.faqs.org/periodicals/201004/2059717391.html 18 Wolf, “Avatar and Empire.” 19 George Bush in an October 2001 address to the nation, quoted by John Pilger in “What Good Friends Left Behind,” The Guardian, 20 September 2003, accessed 27 March 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/sep/20/afghanistan.weekend7/print 20 Barbara Bush, Imperialism and Postcolonialism (Harlow, UK: Pearson Education Limited, 2006), 199. 21 Wolf, “Avatar and Empire.”

22 Notably, the Trail of Tears exemplifies the US government’s larger policy of removing and relocating Indigenous peoples and other groups throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the wide establishment of Native American reservations and the internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans during

WWII, among other examples. 23 Steve Kroft, “All in the Family,” CBS News, 21 September 2003, accessed 23 January 2006, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/04/25/60minutes/printable551091.shtml 24 George W. Bush, quoted in Richard A. Melanson, American Foreign Policy Since the Vietnam War (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2005), 312. 25 Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, secrecy, and the end of the republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004), paraphrased by Bush, Imperialism and Postcolonialism, 204. 26 George W. Bush, “2002 State of the Union Address,” retrieved from Charles Hauss, Comparative Politics: Domestic responses to global challenges (Belmont, CA: Cengage, 2009), 417.

27 James Cameron quoted in Ben Hoyle, “Movie’s Blue Skinned Aliens Seek to Open our Eyes to the War on Terror,” The Times Online, 11 December 2009, accessed 21 March 2010, http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article6952427 .ece 28 James Cameron, “Pushing the Limits of Imagination,” NPR.org, 18 February 2010, accessed 8 April 2010, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyID=123810319 29 Quoted in Charlie Rose, “Interview with the Av-Auteur,” Business Week, 4165 (8 February 2010), 54-56. 30 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972- 77 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980), 95. 31 Stephen Howe, Empire: A very short introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 88. 32 For a discussion on the relationship between the series and Vietnam see Franklin H. Bruce, “Star Trek in the Vietnam Era,” Science-Fiction Studies 21 62 (1994): 24-34. 33 Stephen M. Levin, review of Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between faith and irreverence, by Christopher Warnes (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), Journal of Postcolonial Writing 46 5 (2010): 574. 34 Ericka Hoagland and Reema Sarwal, “Introduction,” in Science Fiction, Imperialism and the Third World, eds. Ericka Hoagland and Reema Sarwal (London: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2010), 10. 35 Patricia Kerslake, Science Fiction and Empire (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), 15. 36 See Joseph Bristow, Empire Boys: Adventures in a man’s world (New York: Harper Collins, 1991). 37 James Belich, Replenishing the Earth. The settler revolution and the rise of the Anglo-world, 1783-1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 82. 38 John Reider, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (Early Classics of Science Fiction) (Middleton, Connecticut: Wesleyan, 2008), 47. 39 Reider, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, 123-124.

40 Cameron’s Canadian background and that country’s frequent tendency to pursue a deliberately independent foreign policy vis-à-vis its more powerful neighbour, is a possible rationale. Cameron’s history of being bullied at school and a subsequent psychological desire to stand up against aggressors may also be relevant (Hedegaard, “The Impossible Reality of James Cameron,” 68-95.). When the Cameron family left Ontario and moved to the US, the director’s early blue-collar background (he used to work as a truck driver) might have contributed to an independent streak as well. Some of the strongest opposition to the Vietnam War came from the working classes, who also happened to comprise the majority of the conscripts. Cameron may also have had personal reasons for his anti-war position, as his younger brother John David served as a marine in Iraq during the First Gulf War. Significantly, the US joined the First Gulf War soon after members of Congress and the US public were deliberately misled. In order to win US support for Kuwait, Saud Nasir al-Sabah, the daughter of Kuwait’s Ambassador to the US, had misinformed the world that Iraqi soldiers during the Kuwait invasion had systematically murdered babies in hospital.40 Ultimately, Cameron may have chosen to make an anti-imperialist film simply because he had tired of pro-war propaganda. 41 Davidson, “Avatar” 42 Davidson, “Avatar.” 43 Dominic Alessio. “‘Things Are Different Now’? A postcolonial analysis of Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” The European Legacy 6.6 (2001): 738. 44 Will Heaven, “James Cameron’s Avatar is a Stylish Film Marred by its Racist Subtext,” The Telegraph, 22 December 2009, accessed 8 April 2010, http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/willheaven/100020488/james-camerons-avatar-is-a- 45 John McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism (New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), 41. Italics added. 46 Klaus Lubber, Born for the Shade: Stereotypes of Native Americans in the United States literature and visual arts, 1776-1894 (Amsterdam: Rodopi B.V., 1994), 41. 47 “Technology is associated with a dominating, controlling frame of mind, that harms the environment and obscures certain aspects of the human experience.” Charles E. Harris, Jr., Michael S. Pritchard, Michael J. Rabins, Engineering Ethics: Concepts and cases (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2005), 95.

48 The “acceptance” of death [by the Na’vi] carries with it the negative connotations captured in the infamous comment made by General Westmoreland in Peter Davis’s 1974 anti-war documentary Hearts and Minds: “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does the Westerner. Life is cheap in the Orient.” 49 Bryan S. Turner, Readings in Orientalism (New York: Routledge, 2000), 14. 50 McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism, 45. Italics added. 51 Anwar Abdul Malek on Edward Said, quoted in Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A derivative discourse (Tokyo: Zed Ltd, 1986), 36. Italics added. 52 McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism, 45. 53 McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism, 46. 54 Kirsten Stranger, “Reinventing the Inhuman: Avatars, Cylons, and Homo Sapiens in contemporary science-fiction television series,” Literature Film Quarterly 38 3 (2010): 196. 55 Jo Piazza, “Audiences Experience Avatar Blues,” CNN Entertainment Online, 11 January 2010, accessed 16 February 2010,

62 Raymond L.M. Lee, The Tao of Representation: Posmodernity, Asia, and the West (Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 1999), 59. 63 Pigmentopia refers to a utopian discourse with a dominant racial theme; for a discussion of the term see Dominic Alessio, “Promoting Paradise,” 33. 64 Christine Morris, “Indians and Other Aliens: A Native American view of science fiction,” Extrapolation 20.4 (1979), 300, quoted in Judith Leggatt, “Critiquing Economic and Environmental Colonization: Globalization and science fiction in The Moons of Palmares,” in Science Fiction, Imperialism and the Third World, eds. Ericka Hoagland and Reema Sarwal (London: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2010), 133. 65 Slavoj Žižek, “Return of the Natives,” New Statesman, 3 March 2010, 45-6. 66 Rabbi Michael Lerner, “Obama and Avatar,” Tikkun 25 2 (2010), accessed 6 April 2010, http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?vid=8&hid=6&sid=51094a3f-a502- 4c34-8b93 67 Nyoongah Mudrooroo, Writing from the Fringe: A study of modern Aboriginal literature (Melbourne: Hyland House, 1990), 209. 68 Homi K. Bhabha, “Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences,” in The Post Colonial Studies Reader, eds. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 1995), 206-211. 69 Angelika Bammer, “Xenophobia, Xenophilia, and No Place to Rest,” in Encountering the Other(s): Studies in literature, history and culture, ed. Gisela Brinker-Gabler, (Albany: State University of New York, 1995), quoted in Patricia Kerslake, Science Fiction and Empire (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), 18. 70 Michael Cieply, “‘Avatar’ Director Emphasizes Environmental Message,” NYtimes.com, 23 February 2010, accessed 29 November 2010, http://carpetbanger.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/avatar-director-emphasizes 71 Robert Albro, “Anthropology and the Military,” Anthropology Today 26, 1 (2010): 22. 72 Graeme Atkinson, “Stieg Larsson, Our Stieg Larsson,” Searchlight (September 2010): 19.

73 Roger Luckhurst, “Other-Worldly Wise,” Times Higher Education, 12 May 2011, 46. 74 Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan, eds., So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial science fiction and fantasy (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004), 9, quoted in Judith Leggatt, “Critiquing Economic and Environmental Colonization: Globalization and science fiction in The Moons of Palmares,” in Science Fiction, Imperialism and the Third World, eds. Ericka Hoagland and Reema Sarwal, (London: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2010), 127. 75 Jane Hiddleston, Understanding Postcolonialism (Durham: Acumen, 2009), 12. 76 John Morgan, “USS Faces Ethical Dilemma Over Strip Mining Operation,” Times Higher Education, 4 March 2010, 7. 77 Editors, “Lost in a Fantasy World,” Maclean’s Vol. 123 No. 10 (2010), 4-4, accessed 8 April 2010, http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/delivery?vid=15&hid=3&sid=f487 78 Survival International, “Ayorea: Bulldozers move in on isolated Indian’s heartland,” accessed 4 April 2010, http://www.survivalinterntional.org/tribes/ayoreo/crisispoint 79 Bron Taylor and Adrian Ivakhiv, “Opening Pandora’s Film,” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 4, 4 (2010): 390. 80 Although not talking about Avatar, Schiff implies that The West Wing’s liberal ideology might have had a direct impact on Obama’s election victory. See Carr, Simon, “Spin Doctor in the House,” The Independent: Viewpaper, 22 April 2010, , 10-11. 81 Steven Thomas, (Theory Teacher’s Blog), “Avatar and Postcolonial Theory,” 28 January 2010, accessed 12 April 2010, http://engl243.wordpress.com/2010/01/28/avatar-and-postcolonial-theory/ 82 Lerner, “Obama and Avatar.” 83 See Bush, Imperialism and Postcolonialism, 198. 84 Taylor and Ivakhiv, “Opening Pandora’s Film,” 388. 85 “Sometimes even good Homer sleeps.” 86 See Bush, Imperialism and Postcolonialism,1-2; Alejandro Colás, Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 28, and; Howe, Empire, 14.

87 See: The Hudson’s Bay Company History, The Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, accessed 1 August 2011, http://www.gov.mb.ca/chc/archives/hbca/about/hbc_history.html, and; Steven Roger Fischer, A History of the Pacific Islands (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 140-1. 88 Dominic Alessio, “Monopoly Imperialism: How empires can be bought and leased,” Journal of Social Europe (21 May 2010), accessed 28 May 2010, http://www.social-europe.eu/2010/05/monopoly-imperialism-how-empires-can-be- bought-and-leased/ 89 Howe, Empire, 14. Italics added.