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Abstract
Through a discussion of the film Lilo and Stitch the author provides a description of three different discursive practices that define race for Africans within the United States. The first discursive construction describes social, political and economic distinctions between groups of persons, not individuals, as specific families, cultures, races and species. The second discursive construction is the description of social behaviour as the sole responsibility of the individual and therefore as a social type. The third discursive construction is that of the importance placed on the physical and aural description of persons in the definition of race. The articles concludes by discussing an alternative description of social community and belonging using the work of Octavia Butler.
Notes
1. Levinas describes this act of the subject as the moment when ‘Something comes to pass whereby the spontaneity of the subject finds itself broken’ (Levinas Citation2000, p. 185).
2. The politics of a way of thinking about race that could oppose the discursive practice of racial subjection. On this idea of learning as a form of thinking, of acting in experience see Levinas (Citation1998, p. 81). Foucault, in his lectures published in The Hermeneutics of the Subject, states that the description of governmentality, power relations and the relationship of the self to self occupy locations on a chain of practices that allow for the development of a connection between politics and ethics. Here this would describe a form of thinking between the self and its discursive construction as central to addressing the problem of race (Michel 2005, p. 252). See also Alcoff (Citation1996, p. 148).
3. ‘The fact that in representation the same defines the other without being determined by the other’ (Levinas Citation1969, p. 125).
4. See the discussion of the concept of the wild and the wild man in White (Citation1978, pp. 150–182).
5. Disney animated films rarely depict African Americans as themselves. In this case Bubbles is not a person with complexity, but a concept, one that borrows its substance from a motion picture comedy about alien visitation (Byrne Citation1999, pp. 152–153).
6. The large council chamber with hundreds, if not thousands, of representatives allows the collective to investigate and gaze upon the individual petitioner. As a metaphor for democratic governance this brings up the issue of the protection for minorities, in this case a minority of one in the society.
7. The film thereby takes the discussion of the politics to resolve epistemological scepticism in a new direction. Race and reproduction, and the obligation of civil behaviour become the conditions for the definition of the ‘human’ being and thereby subsume within this social description the potential crisis of the existence of the Other. See Cavell (Citation2005, p. 150).
8. The very arbitrariness of the decision, based on a single opportunity in conversation to prove 626's ability to reject his programming, reminds the audience of the fragility of the approval given by the society of their actions. The assumption is that a degree of social vigilance is required.
9. This is not a love between equals and so therefore this situation between humans and aliens implies a form of subservience, of obedience for Stitch to the family, the nation, and to the conception of Whiteness that he is defined as always already different from (Levinas Citation1998, p. 109).
10. See Critchley (Citation1999), p. 251.
11. The problem of family and the role of race in The Lion King is addressed in Barker and Austin (Citation2000), pp. 105–119.
12. See the essays in Friedlander (Citation1992).
13. The implication is that the identification of the social ideal, of the nation, community and race, requires the subservient love of that defined as Other. Silverman (Citation1996), p. 79.
14. Bakhtin mentions the importance of protrusions from the body, exaggerated features of the eyes, mouth, nose and ears in the description of the grotesque. Bakhtin (Citation1981), pp. 316–317, 321. Stitch has an exceptionally large mouth and teeth, large ears that move like a hare's, and enormous eyes. He has four arms, two of which he can retract into his body to ‘simulate’ a dog. He has antennae, and is blue with spots. The ridiculousness of the idea that humans would not realize this alien in their midst is of course the point: as long as he behaves like a dog his differences are controlled. Race in this practice is therefore about ensuring social control so that differences of the body, and therefore important biological type, though identified, remain unimportant for social outcomes.
15. Critchley (Citation1999) p. 70.