Apocalypse Now: Eurocentric Fictions and Afrofuturist Reflections on Nuclear War
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CHAPTER 6 APOCALYPSE NOW: EUROCENTRIC FICTIONS AND AFROFUTURIST REFLECTIONS ON NUCLEAR WAR INTRODUCTION Given the violent and genocidal nature of white supremacy (Leonardo 2005) Critical Race Theory has frequently examined the role of apocalyptic events in racial oppression and resistance. These have been fictive, from Du Bois’ ‘The Comet’ (1999, originally published in 1920) which takes the destruction of New York as a liberation from racial oppression to Bell’s (1992) Space Traders where an apocalyptic scenario for African Americans is considered salvation for ‘white folk’, and real, for example in the case of Hurricane Katrina (Ladson-Billings 2006; Marable 2008). In this chapter I consider a, perhaps dated form of apocalypse (nuclear war) through what I call ‘Eurocentric’ fictions contrasting this with Afrofuturist and CRT reinterpretations of nuclear catastrophe. I choose nuclear war as apocalyptic event due to its supposed racial neutrality (e.g. that as there would be ‘no survivors’ that ‘race’ is of no importance). As my own racial positioning is as a ‘so-called white’ I make no attempt to pretend that my own use of Afrofuturism and CRT is not to some degree a form of ‘eating the other’. However, I indulge this mode of writing in preference to ‘regurgitating the self’ (a tendency in whiteness studies for whites to dwell self-indulgently on their own whiteness) hoping that in some way this piece, even coming from a white author, has legitimacy in identifying some problems of Eurocentrism. To begin. the development of nuclear weapons has taken place across a range of economies but all aspects of the nuclear project from design, construction, implementation, targeting, deployment, proliferation, civil defence and protest have been racialised. Fundamentally, the project of constructing nuclear weapons was also a project concerning ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ racialisations:- …the invention of the atomic bomb transformed everyday life, catching individuals within a new articulation of the global and the local, and producing social imaginaries drawn taut by the contradictory impulses of the technologically celebratory and the nationally insurgent, as well as the communally marginalized and the individually abject (Masco 2006, p.1) The nuclear bomb was constructed as a racial project for American foreign policy but also as a racial project of American domestic policy. Intentions of using the bomb against Germany at the end of World War II were ruled out, given the 73 John Preston - 9789460918735 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 12:54:24AM via free access CHAPTER 6 alleged racial and cultural similarities between Americans and Germans (Sharp 2007). The Japanese, however, were racialised as being militaristic and inhuman, a fair target for testing another American weapon of mass destruction. More recently, there is a distinct racial orientation in American foreign policy of those nations which are ‘civilised’ enough to have the bomb (America, UK, France, South Africa – a legacy of the apartheid era - Israel and, with reservations, Russia and China) and those which are not (India, Pakistan, North Korea and Iran). Whilst nuclear weapons define racial boundaries overseas they also define them domestically. The Manhattan project and the construction of the bomb were conducted on native lands which have experienced radioactive pollution lasting tens of thousands of years (Masco 2006). The ethnic composition of these areas is one of the areas in the US where there are very few whites (Masco 2006, p.164). These weapons were also tested on native lands as part of the Nevada testing sites and have been designated a supra-legal status in American law (Paglen 2007). The making of supra-national territories can be seen as part of the making of American power where the protection of the law would not take place (for example, the existence of white community lynchings of African Americans, formally outside of the state). The racial fallout of the bomb pervades popular discourse and current homeland security policy. In Eurocentric (more properly Anglo-American) fictions of nuclear attack fantasies of the death and disease of the white body and the survival of a (sometimes mutated) whiteness are ‘played out’. As discussed elsewhere (Preston 2007; 2008; 2009a; 2009b) a number of British and American civil defence films of the cold war centre whiteness in their narratives. There is little difference between these social guidance films and fictional accounts of nuclear attack either in terms of global nuclear war in film or in terms of terrorist nuclear attack on television. Eurocentric cinema on the apocalyptic is inflected by the techniques of social guidance film (the correct behaviours to adopt in nuclear attack, frequently stylised representations of nuclear attack so as to mitigate against its horrors, a moral foregrounding of characters who adopt the correct behaviours). So whilst the focus in this chapter is on films which are ‘fictional’ the Cinéma-vérité style in which they are produced would make them properly ‘factional’ in that the presentation includes pedagogical lessons concerning homeland security which are little different from those contained within social guidance or public information films. The ideological orientation of the writers, producers and directors of these films is sometimes liberal and pacifist (Threads, The Day After), sometimes militaristic and nationalist (24), and often one intent hides another latent one. For example, although Threads indicates strong pacifist sentiments in terms of its portrayal of nuclear attack it betrays strong nationalist sentiments in terms of its portrayal of quintessential Britishness (the bumbling, blimpish emergency planning officers, the Coronation Street style of the script pre-attack) and somewhat militaristic in its foregrounding of statistics and imagery of devastation (albeit with the intent of shocking the viewer into pacifism). 74 John Preston - 9789460918735 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 12:54:24AM via free access APOCALYPSE NOW: EUROCENTRIC FICTIONS INTO THE WHITE: NUCLEAR WAR IN THREADS AND THE DAY AFTER Threads (1984) and The Day After (1983), both made for television films, have been grouped together both for the similarity of their narrative arc and their political and cultural significance. There is some debate as to whether one film ‘copied’ the other, but as their production times were roughly sequential there is little evidence to support this. In each film, made from a pacifist and anti-nuclear perspective, the nuclear attack is the turning point in the disruption of the ordinary lives of the subjects (Threads cuts from mushroom clouds to the ‘faces’ of subjects agape and being blinded – similarly a little boy in The Day After looks at the mushroom cloud and is blinded). Neither film ignores inequality (particularly in terms of class). There are suggestions that civil defence and ‘reconstruction’ would be unequal acts. However, what cuts across both films is an understanding that these are ‘ordinary folk’, being white folk, whose ‘souls’ are literally (in the case of The Day After showing them turn to skeletal figures) exposed. It could therefore be said that both films are ‘about’ race in that both concern themselves with various groups of white people and the absent / present paradox of racial representation in film whereby whiteness is both visibly foregrounded and invisible (as if it represents the absence of ethnicity) (Bernadi 2008, p. 360; Nama, 2008, p. 42 – 69). In Threads this means that outside white nuclear families there are only fleeting glimpses of ‘people of colour’. A particularly vivid portrayal of this is in the scene in the centre of Sheffield when the sirens sound to announce the British ‘four minute warning’. The reaction of most people that we see is panic, but with some kind of (albeit) futile purpose behind it. For example, hurriedly removing doors to construct the fabled ‘inner refuge’ of Protect and Survive, ducking and covering’ under a lorry or running into shops for protection. Into this scene which is filmed with actors a second of stock footage is added, which shows a number of Black people on an estate running along the street. There is no ‘purposeful’ activity in this footage and its incongruity with the rest of this scene makes it particularly notable. Its purpose may have been representative during the editing of the film which given its concentration on whiteness may have been a strong possibility. A deeper conceit may be that it reflected a pedagogical purpose, that although the content ‘message’ of the film was that nothing really could help you survive a nuclear war, the latent message was that there are differences in the manifest strategies used by social groups which give some individuals greater chances of survival than others. Threads is explictly pedagogical in that frequent teletype messages appear on the screen to inform us about ‘facts’ concerning nuclear war. One of these is that after a nuclear war, children and old people would be the least likely to survive radiation poisoning. However, the post-war absence largely of people of colour is not explained in Threads. Has there been some kind of targeted policy of extermination by the authorities?. Has there been some kind of ‘race war’ with white supremacists wiping out people of colour? Does the film suppose that people of colour are spuriously less genetically likely to survive? The absence of people of colour after the exchange is not explained (maybe it does not need to be as they were not particularly represented in the film pre-exchange). 75 John Preston - 9789460918735 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 12:54:24AM via free access CHAPTER 6 However, one pedagogic message of Threads is that racially things would be the same before and after a nuclear exchange in that the narrative focus of the apocalypse remains with white individuals. White death is about white lives. The Day After (1983) is set in the fictional town of Lawrence Kansas, portrayed as an ‘ordinary town’ with ‘ordinary families’ (being white families).