Monsters, Catastrophes and the Anthropocene

A Postcolonial Critique

Gaia Giuliani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351064842
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Monsters, Catastrophes and the Anthropocene: A Postcolonial Critique explores European and Western imaginaries of natural disaster, mass migration and terrorism through a postcolonial inquiry into modern conceptions of monstrosity and catastrophe.

This book uses established icons of popular visual culture in sci-fi, doomsday and horror films and TV series, as well as in images reproduced by the news media to help trace the genealogy of modern fears to ontologies and logics of the Anthropocene. By logics of the Anthropocene, the book refers to a set of principles based on ontologies of exploitation, extermination and natural resource exhaustion processes determining who is worthy of benefiting from value extraction and being saved from the catastrophe and who is expendable. Fears for the loss of isolation from the unworthy and the expendable are investigated here as originating anxieties against migrants' invasions, terrorist attacks and planetary catastrophes, in a thread that weaves together re-emerging 'past nightmares' and future visions.

This book will be of great interest to students and academics of the Environmental Humanities, Human and Cultural Geography, Political Philosophy, Psychosocial Studies, Postcolonial Studies and Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, Gender Studies and Postcolonial Feminist Studies, Cultural Studies, Sociology, Cultural Anthropology, Cinema Studies and Visual Studies.

1 The past devours the present

Fears of invasion and the repressed memory of colonial violence

1 Introduction

The ‘we’s’ hegemonic imaginary of the human and environmental apocalypse is filled with famished and desperate, aggressive ‘floods’ of migrants and refugees escaping from poverty, climate change effects and wars (Bettini 2013). Mental pictures of migrant Others as a rapacious invading ‘horde’ draw on the same material found in apocalyptic narratives about anthropophagic monsters. In fact, the ‘body spectacle’ reaching its climax with the devouring and dismemberment that accompany the uprising of rabid monsters in a paroxysm of violence conjures up the idea that invaders are tearing apart the (white) body of the imagined community of the ‘we’ (Williams 1991). Discourses of human and post-human deadly invasions evoke and reveal a long tradition of describing barbarians (be they indigenous or enslaved) as cannibals, rationalising invasion and occupation, torture and death in the ‘elsewhere’ as a means to prevent the godless and uncivilised almost- or post-humans from ‘devouring’ the God-fearing and reason-driven finer specimens of humankind. Likewise, the hegemonic understanding of migration as a monstrous invasion may be read as being the product of the ‘we’s’ ‘guilty conscience’ about colonial violence and fears that the horrors of colonialism and slavery may strike back. Europe and the West’s repressed colonial memory is linked to painful emotional records of past regimes of segregation, sexual violence, forced reproduction and death affecting both victims and perpetrators, which transcend the individual but rather refer to a collective experience mirroring the repressed psychopathological experience of colonial violence shared by the colonised (Fanon 1952).¹

Repressed memory is the result of historical processes of collective denial and a society’s refusal to confront the past. Although long dismissed as an exclusively American phenomenon related to the slave trade or as affecting only those who had a direct experience of colonialism, these memories haunt the present of all peoples, cultures and countries that directly contributed to, benefited from, were created through or influenced by colonialism and slavery. Tracing the genealogy of the anthropophagic monster in literature, in political theory and in popular culture, I will explore the relation between the cannibal in colonial imagination and monstrous representations of postcolonial migrants and refugees in contemporary news media.

Focusing on the genealogy of current processes of de-individuation, massification, animalisation and de-subjectivation that make the body in motion ‘monstrous’, I will trace out connections and disconnections between past and present ‘scenes of subjection’ and between signifying processes at work in the plantation and at the border. Through a contrapuntal reading of the slave ship crossing the Atlantic and what I see as its reverse chronotope – the migrant boat crossing the Mediterranean – I will show that the archive of ‘figures of race’ that informed relations of subjugation during slavery and colonialism is still active despite a fundamental difference between old and new bio- and necropolitics of the Middle Passage: migration is the result of an autonomous decision. I will explain how the semiotic power of the border is crucial to associating the autonomous journey of the body in motion and its symbol – the boat – with images of catastrophe and death to create white anxiety and moral panic and legitimise the Mediterranean border regime. Finally, through the concept of ‘semiotic border’, which I will discuss in more detail in the next section, I will examine the relation between colonial figures of race, migrant crossings and moral panic.

As I will argue, besides delegitimising the autonomous journey of racialised migrants, the semiotic border’s monstrification of migration from the Global South relieves the ‘we’ of any responsibility for its causes. In the ‘we’s’ hegemonic narrative, the evil effects of the Anthropocene and the violence of the uncivilised are the real culprit in the unrelenting invasion that will make the ‘boat sink’. Europe and the West instead are often praised for their benevolence – the immaculate effect of white moral superiority. Because if Europe and the West had no role in causing historical colonial violence, far-flung disasters and morally distant wars (i.e. led by fanatics as opposed to reason-driven), then providing shelter to the desperate might only represent an act of charity on the part of the white saviour. This same benevolence, however, is always accompanied by dire warnings of the catastrophe looming behind more permissive borders: the hungry, uncivilised and ungrateful ‘poor’ refugees may soon turn into a dangerous internal enemy, envious of the ‘we’s’ well-being, civilisation and culture and set to devour ‘us’. In the double-sided discourse surrounding the border, mobility is at once criminalised and regarded with pity – a symptom of colonial duress in our neoliberal present.

Drawing on theoretical articulations and debates in political philosophy and in gender, postcolonial, critical race and whiteness studies, which have provided a rich framework for my previous work on constructions of race and gender in colonial and postcolonial settings, I will read visual news media representations and horror films in light of connections and disconnections between colonial modernity and the neoliberal present. My analysis will develop around the key concepts of ‘suppressed memory of colonial violence’, ‘figures of race’, ‘human’, ‘humanness’, ‘de-humanisation’ and ‘post-humanness’ to reveal the main discursive effects of demonising the threat represented by migrants and refugees and describing environmental disasters only in terms of their impact on migration. The outcome is that the West, and Europe in particular, is re-centred in the history of human progress as a mere victim of global phenomena. If the nature and consequences of disasters elsewhere are considered only in terms of their potential negative impact on Europe, it follows that Europe can once again be seen as the bastion of white/Western civilisation besieged by monster invaders, environmental disasters and fanatic wars.

This section is organised as follows. Chapter 2 presents a brief history of Western representations of cannibalism, symbolising evilness and monstrosity of the gendered and racialised Other than antiquity through the present – where monsters, and cannibal monsters in particular, are used to demonise individuals and groups as well as non-human entities perceived as threatening. Once considered an inherent trait of indigenous savagery and closely associated with Satan, anthropophagy is a mark of the zombie’s ‘anonymous fury’ in today’s popular culture. I will argue for a connection between the widespread revival of cannibalistic mobs and rabid zombies on one hand, and the depiction of migrant landings and terrorist threats in news media and films on the other, inasmuch as the imagery used to represent migrations as deadly invasions signals the white coloniser’s repressed memory of his own past cannibalistic invasions into territories that would become the peripheries of his empires.

Chapter 3 connects the repressed memory of slavery to contemporary constructions of whiteness and monstrosity. Specifically, it focuses on the dispositifs that in the slave ship, the slave auction and the plantation were used to de-humanise and turn people into slaves and connects them to current practices and discourses il-legalising migrants. After exploring the symbolic materials underpinning the construction of migrants as illegal – that is, the materials feeding representations of the unruly mobility of the racialised monster that is believed to be at the root of terror attacks and economic, social and environmental crises in the receiving countries – I will connect such representations to Europe’s repressed memory of colonial and postcolonial violence and capitalist exploitation.

Chapter 4 traces the genealogy of the cannibalistic undead in cinema through a ‘political philosophy of the zombie’ that outlines its evolution into today’s fast-running and devouring post-human. Finally, it introduces the films and TV series that will be discussed in detail in Chapters 5 and 6: Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) and Juan C. Fresnadillo’s sequel, 28 Weeks Later (2007); Yannick Dahan and Benjamin Rocher’s The Horde (original title La Horde) (2009); Dominic Mitchell and Jonny Campbell’s BBC drama series In the Flesh (2013–14); Francis Lawrence’s I am Legend (2007), Marc Forster’s World War Z (2013), and Frank Darabont’s ongoing TV series The Walking Dead (2010–).

As I will explain in Chapter 7, the fact that all these films and TV series feature fast-running and devouring post-humans – that is, the zombie’s latest evolution into a rabid human looking more like an animal than an undead – was one of the determining factors in my selection, as it allowed me to explore the relationship between the monstrification of the threat, the speed and anthropophagic nature of neoliberal capitalism, and the fast and devouring nature of global wars and climate change. By global wars, I mean an assemblage of discourses and securitisation practices implemented in Europe and the West after 9/11 and, in line with Talal Asad (2007), Judith Butler (2009) and Ann Laura Stoler (2016), a symptom of persisting colonial attitudes. Another determining factor had to do with understanding the popularity of colonial biopolitical dispositifs (Stoler 2016) in horror culture – camps, colonies and carceral archipelagos that together with borders and walls are established by the survivors to escape and fight – and the extent to which the colonial imaginary goes unchallenged or, on the contrary, counter-narratives to neo-colonial discourses are provided.

In the conclusion, I will summarize the reasons for employing the fast-running and devouring monster to investigate the persistence of figures of race in neoliberal reconfigurations of colonial biopolitical dispositifs within the frame of the war on terror. I will then expand my reflections on the symbolic materials shaping the imaginary behind European hegemonic fears of migrant monsters and catastrophes.

2 Hic sunt cannibals

Monstrosity appears to have signalled a limit, a boundary, or a border since the very beginning of human life. For centuries it was associated with representations of chaos, nature and the finis mundi, the end of the world and of what was considered ‘right’ in Western society (Foucault 1961; Nuzzo 2013, p. 56). In antiquity, monstrosity epitomised the border between those who were considered a direct emanation from God and all the rest – excluded from the polis or from the reign of God-like beings (Del Lucchese 2019) – such as women, non-human beings (animate and inanimate nature, including animals), demons and devils.² The anthropophagic monster can be traced back to the Middle Ages, when the act of cannibalising the flesh and souls of sinners and infidels was associated with Evil and the anti-Christ. Connecting human-flesh eating to animals and some animals to Satan, cannibals were seen as closer to the reign of Evil than they were to the reign of God in the hierarchy of Creation.

With six eyes he was weeping and over three chins dripped tears and bloody foam. In each mouth he crushed a sinner with his teeth as with a heckle and thus he kept three of them in pain; to him in front the biting was nothing to the clawing, for sometimes the back was left all stripped of skin.

(Dante, Inferno, Canto XXIV, pp. 1304–1321)

Beast-like representations of cannibalistic monsters dominated scholastic iconography and the descriptions of indigenous populations in fifteenth-century travel memoirs by scientists, sailors and pirates who rounded the Cape of Good Hope towards the Pacific. Africa, the Caribbean, Amazonia and the Pacific were thought to be simultaneously Heaven and Hell – a contradiction that was still characteristic of twentieth-century Western culture, from Joseph Conrad’s (1899) portrait of the land of cannibals in Heart of Darkness to Ruggero Deodato’s heavily censored Cannibal Holocaust (1981), a proto-snuff film about young American anthropologists exploring the Amazon rainforest to study cannibals.

In early modern colonial discourse, cannibalistic monstrosity was the last evil on the path to creating overseas utopias where the righteous could build the City of God. Monstrosity and utopia became virtually inseparable terms of the narrative sanctioning not only colonialism (Said 1978, 1993) but also enslaved (Allen 1994) and indentured labour (Banivanua-Mar 2005, 2007; Biber 2005; Berglund 2006) as manifestations of God’s will.

Allegations of cannibalism and multiple conflicting myths about the indigenous peoples were a matter of debate among scientists, merchants and churchmen who for varying reasons were involved in the New World utopia. Sixteenth-century mythologies depicted Native Americans as either godless humans in need of protection (de las Casas 1565) or ‘worse than bloodthirsty beasts’ who ‘devoran carne humana, andan desnudos […] entregados a los más vergonzosos delitos de lujuria y sodomia’,³ and for that reason must be annihilated (de Acosta 1577, cited in Langer 2010). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they were alternat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The past devours the present: fears of invasion and the repressed memory of colonial violence
• 2 Alien-ing the migrant: on Anthropocenic geographies of monstrosity
• 3 Lifting the veil on the monstrous Anthropocene: a postcolonial analysis
• Conclusions
• Index