Riddles of representation in fantastic media

UnrestrictedMy dissertation examines fantasy and identity across a variety of media, and I analyze how their various forms interact with historical contexts and help us understand narratives of race. Science fiction films act as a valuable testing ground for theories of identity, as the creation of alienating worlds reveals the play of alienation and identification at work in the recent history of race and representation. In Chapter 2, for example, I focus on John Sayles' 1984 film The Brother From Another Planet, where the main character’s status as both extraterrestrial and black man lends insight into the black citizen’s relationship to an alienating urban environment in the context of a Reagan-era retreat from federal government support for inner cities. In Chapter 3, I argue that avant-garde film forms a fascinating relationship to science fiction in its similar displacement of time, place and narrative; yet the formal abstractions of the avant-garde, when utilized by filmmakers exploring racial and ethnic identity, reveals the specifically filmic codes used to construct identity on screen. Science fiction television has an equally fascinating structural relationship to representation in its use of seriality, long narrative arcs, relationship to domesticity, and commercial nature; for example, in Chapter 4, I discuss how The X-files uses the psychoanalytic and cultural associations of paranoia to build an entire series exploring fears of Others and outsiders, displacing multicultural anxiety onto a host of monsters and extraterrestrials. I end my dissertation with an exploration of the way various platforms of digital media reveal the way that the alleged erasure of identity, a futuristic idea embraced by some Critical Race Theorists, actually highlights its constant tangibility