Really, really, really, really great
“Anytime we’re talking about cultural objects like Avatar, in a corporate dominant culture, we are playing with fire, clearly. When the so-called indigenous is so-called natural, the extraordinary naturalization of the indigenous, no matter how talented, no matter how really, really, really, really great, no matter how many inventions they may have invented – but it requires the other half of the equation. Which is a particular production of whiteness. Even though there were plenty of people of colour occupying the category of whiteness in that film. Whiteness is a space to occupy for those who are associated with the technologies of conquest, extraction, commerce, etc. and that strikes me. Both of those two require each other. And actual, living people believe these things of each other, to damaging degrees. Such that I know no small number of white people, some of whom I’ve found in my own skin, at various moments, you know, who somehow feel less able to speak up, in a critical way, in a conversation with someone who is produced as more natural. Whether it’s in an indigenous rights discussion, a discussion about who owns race, class, and gender properties, and so on, and so on. The very much in play ways that these story-fragments continue to set people out around these nature/technology contrasts, to perpetuate the trouble. People actually inhabit these imagined positions and do it to one another, including doing it to oneself. So, take the hyper-murderous, almost-impossible to kill – the machine enemy right out of the Alien sequence, you know that particular kind of killer robot that shows up, in how many films? It was in District 9, it was in Alien – it shows up, it’s a required visual object that does in my view, a whole lot of race production work. It is one of the technologies of the production of this thing I’ll call whiteness. Whether white people occupy that position or not, or so-called Euro-people.”
–Text: Donna Haraway, The Dialogical Avatar
Julia Featherstone 