White Supremacy, Climate Crisis, & the Reverse Colonization Narrative

• In Event: Liberating Popular Aesthetics: Race & Revolution in Film, TV & Literature

Abstract

This paper looks to explore the contemporary narrative of “reverse colonization” and nostalgic fear that is at the heart of many contemporary science fiction projects. The idea of “reverse colonization”, which Anna Lee Newitz use to critique the racial horror of H.P. Lovecraft, has shifted in its focus and approach with the rise of catastrophic climate change, breakdown of neoliberal economics, and the rise of revanchist white supremacy. This paper looks to two examples of reverse colonial white fear in the television series Stranger Things and The Walking Dead.



Using the work of Fredric Jameson, Michael Rogin, and cultural studies more broadly I look to the nostalgic politics of Stranger Things, which I contend is related primarily to middle class white climate anxiety. In the series, Anthropocene monsters attempt to colonize our world in a way that links racial and environmental anxiety. In contrast, the zombie apocalypse of the Walking Dead retells white anxiety stories about colonization, in ways that resemble the current debates over undocumented immigration. In these narratives, white, middle class, economic order is undermined and destroyed by the spread of monsters, effectively destroying liberal institutions and plunging society back into the Hobbesian state of nature. The struggle of “man” versus both nature and invader recreates the frontier narrative and re-inscribes racial capitalism. Even though climatic changes will unequally impact the poor and those in the developing world, due to institutional white supremacy and capitalism imperialism, the ontological threat of climate change impacts middle class white communities more. Since most of the rest of the world has lived in dystopian environment for decades, if not centuries, white anxiety is about the loss of relative power. Both series are examples of the ways in which anxiety around climate change and ecologic crisis in contemporary popular culture intersects with race, gender, and coloniality and fears of an emerging future that possibly reverses the systems of oppression that have stood as the bulwark of American Society from the colonial period onward.

Author

• Sean Parson, Northern Arizona University