Speculative Imperialisms: Monstrosity and Masquerade in Postracial Times by Susana Loza

Author:Susana Loza [Loza, Susana]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2017-12-04T16:00:00+00:00

Neoliberal Multiculturalism: The Whoniverse, Multiracial White Supremacy, and the Imperial Future

Race, like H2O, can take many forms, but unlike H2O it can transform itself in a nanosecond. It takes time for ice to boil and for vapor to condense and freeze, but race can be simultaneously Janus-faced and multifac(et)ed—and also produce a singular dominant social hierarchy. Indeed, if we make the fundamental mistake of reifying any one of those states as more real than another, we will lose basic insights into the nature and character of racial stratification.

—Troy Duster, “The Morphing Properties of Whiteness”

Race is a social construct. Fluid and fixed, it morphs and mutates, fades and flames. Doctor Who has—and continues to—enthusiastically embraced the values of liberal humanist whiteness but the place of race in the Whoniverse has undeniably shifted since the sixties. While the original series was resolutely monochromatic, the reboot is awash in color. The new series represents “Earth’s past as a place of happy and benign diversity. Depression-era New York contains mixed-race shanty towns led by a black man, while black women populate the streets and royal courts of Victorian England and Enlightenment France.”71 The 1920s, 1940s, 1950s, even slavery-era Elizabethan England is inhabited by well-to-do people of color. These multicultural tableaus establish “human diversity as an unremarkable and timeless fact.”72 The reinvented Doctor Who is a postracial world in which humans differ in color but are “united in all other respects.”73 The appropriate metaphor for this brave new realm, opines Orthia, “comes from Doctor Who’s most famous foodstuff: humanity is so many colored jelly babies inside a colorless (white) paper bag.”74 But, as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Austin Ashe caution in “The End of Racism? Colorblind Racism and Popular Media,” audiences should not settle for symbolic inclusion within the neoliberal white supremacist imaginary. It is not sufficient that the reboot incorporates more people of color “because the issue that matters most is how [they] are represented and what kind of racial messages are conveyed.”75 Instead of prematurely celebrating the cosmopolitan and colorblind visions of the latest iteration of Doctor Who, we must remember that the symbolic inclusion of diversely hued humans does not “necessarily challenge the logic and the structure of an unequal racial order.”76 In fact, the multi-racial cosmopolitanism of the revamped series often bolsters the white supremacist imperialist status quo by obscuring the lingering effects of racism and colonialism on screen and in real life.77 Doctor Who’s sanitized representations of past, present, and future erase the material realities of a postcolonial world profoundly “shaped by exploitative trade practices, diasporic trauma and racist discrimination.”78 Since I have already documented how contemporary Doctor Who obscures the racist past of British slavery, I would like to conclude by turning my attention to the pivotal role that people of color play in operating the forty-second century’s imperial machinery and how the serial’s multicultural futurism masks the racial inequities of the neoliberal present.

Much like the actual British Empire, which strategically incorporated neocolonial subjects to reinforce racial hierarchy, the Second

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