On Mike White’s Primitivist Posthumanisms: Animality, Coloniality, and Racial Affect in The White Lotus

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Acknowledgements

I thank Dr Laura McMahon for her invaluable guidance in writing this article.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Fojas (2014, 102) for more on how Hawaii came to be positioned as alluring in its status as “the newest U.S. appendage.”

2 See also Cachola (2019) for more on the ways in which the US military presence in the Hawaiian Islands is also intertwined in these histories of Native Hawaiian displacement, although this is not addressed specifically in the series.

3 In The White Lotus, the figure of the animal also recurs through the series’ use of props—such as the turtle figurine seen in Armond’s office, or the turtle-shaped item of furniture in the Tradewinds Suite, where the Mossbachers stay. As the production designer for the series notes, “there is a lot of turtle art in Hawaii,” hence its incorporation into the series as a motif (see Tangcay 2021).

4 See also Christine Donnelly (1989).

5 The fact that Mark’s discovery of his late father’s AIDS diagnosis leads him to associate homosexual sex acts with animality perhaps also serves as an implicit gesture to the zoonotic origins of AIDS. See, for example, Shukin (2009, 205–206).

6 See also Puar (2007).

7 As David A. Chang notes, for instance: “It is a heritage to act upon through solidarity with antiracist movements such as Black Lives Matter and in solidarity with other colonized and dispossessed peoples. After all, the colonialism that occupied Hawaiʻi is inseparable from the colonialism that occupied the lands of other racialized people” (Chang 2019, 360).

8 It would go beyond the scope of this essay to outline all the resonances of The White Lotus with White’s previous work; however, part of the operational aesthetic at work, for those with foreknowledge of White’s oeuvre, lies in the unravelling of thematic commonalties across The White Lotus, Enlightened, and Beatriz at Dinner, in relation to posthumanism, animal rights, New Age thought, capitalism, race, and so on.

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Karim Townsend

Karim Townsend is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Film and Screen. His research interests focus primarily on questions of ecological relationality and the politics of community in the Anthropocene, as mediated in contemporary film and television.