History at the end of the world: decolonial revisionism in Taika Waititi's Thor: Ragnarok

ABSTRACT

From 19th-century novels to contemporary computer-animated adventure films, popular media culture provides no shortage of representations that subserve colonialist attitudes and perspectives. Thor: Ragnarok (2017) provides a rare decolonial fantasy, which is especially surprising given that it does so through the veneer of the big-budget superhero film. Registering a deep concern with public memory, the film spotlights and challenges the various uses of public memory in the maintenance of colonial legitimation. In doing so, Thor: Ragnarok offers an incisive and uncompromising indictment of colonization and colonialism, one that ends not with a call for reform but with the end of the world.

KEYWORDS:

• cultural studies
• decolonization
• public memory
• rhetoric
• settler colonialism

Acknowledgements

Both authors contributed equally to this article. They wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their feedback during its development and the guidance of the Editor. Author order was determined by the number of letters in the headline of the January 13, 2022, New York Post.

Notes

1 James S. Murphy, “How Mr. Robot Killed the Centerpiece of Prestige Television: Capitalism,” Vanity Fair, September 2, 2015, https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/09/mr-robot-capitalism; Omar Lizardo, “Fight Club, or the Cultural Contradictions of Late Capitalism,” Journal for Cultural Research 11, no. 3 (2007): 221–43; Bryant W. Sculos, “Sorry to Bother You with Twelve Theses on Boots Riley's ‘Sorry to Bother You’: Lessons for the Left,” Class, Race and Corporate Power 7, no. 1 (2019): Article 4, https://core.ac.uk/reader/212915352; Chauncey K. Robinson, “‘They Live’: The Horror Classic That Exposed the Monster Called Capitalism,” People's World, November 5, 2018, https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/they-live-the-horror-classic-that-exposed-the-monster-called-capitalism/.

2 Tim Worstall, “Star Trek Economics Is Just True Communism Arriving,” Forbes, October 5, 2015, https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/10/05/star-trek-economics-is-just-true-communism-arriving/#10b2658cef64.

3 Hannah Flint, “What Was Thor: Ragnarok's Production Budget?” Screen Rant, November 6, 2017, https://screenrant.com/thor-3-ragnarok-cost-production-budget/.

4 Taika Waititi, “Day One on Thor: Ragnarok,” Facebook, July 6, 2016, https://www.facebook.com/taika.waititi/posts/1075491172497448.

5 Allan Clarke, “The Director of the New Thor Movie Made Hiring Aboriginal People a Priority,” BuzzFeed, August 1, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/allanclarke/thor-ragnarok-director-hires-aboriginal-people.

6 Hugh Armitage, “Thor: Ragnarok's Taika Waititi Reveals the Adorable Easter Egg Hidden in the Film's Spaceships,” Digital Spy, February 27, 2018, https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a851005/thor-ragnarok-taika-waititi-reveals-adorable-easter-egg-hidden-spaceships/.

7 “Taika Waititi on Racism, Star Wars and His Award ‘From Our Colonial Oppressors,’” Stuff, July 23, 2020, https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/celebrities/300064555/taika-waititi-on-racism-star-wars-and-his-award-from-our-colonial-oppressors.

8 Tobi Akingbade, “Taika Waititi Signs Group of Māori Writers for Three Film and TV Projects about Colonialism,” NME, June 26, 2020, https://www.nme.com/news/film/taika-waititi-signs-group-of-maori-writers-for-three-film-and-tv-projects-about-colonisation-2696529.

9 Adrienne Tyler, “The Original Ragnarok: What Thor 3 Looked Like before Waititi,” Screen Rant, October 21, 2019, https://screenrant.com/thor-ragnarok-original-movie-plan-before-waititi/.

10 Barry Brummett, Uncovering Hidden Rhetorics: Social Issue in Disguise (Los Angeles: Sage, 2008), 2–5.

11 Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1994), 11.

12 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 2.

13 Ibid., 10.

14 Ibid., 23 original emphasis.

15 Ward Churchill, “The Earth Is Our Mother: Struggles for American Indian Land and Liberation in the Contemporary United States,” in From a Native Son: Selected Essays in Indigenism, 1985–1995, 2nd ed. (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2019), 89. Although Churchill is unquestionably an Indigenous activist in the sense of pushing for Indigenous rights, his “Indigenousness” has been called into question. For an examination of the controversy and its implications, see Casey Ryan Kelly, “Blood-Speak: Ward Churchill and the Racialization of American Indian Identity,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 8, no. 3 (2011): 240–65.

16 Katherine Franke, “Making Good on the Broken Promise of Reparations,” New York Review of Books, March 18, 2019, www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/03/18/making-good-on-the-broken-promise-of-reparations/.

17 Eva Mackey, “Unsettling Expectations: (Un)Certainty, Settler States of Feeling, Law, and Decolonization,” Canadian Journal of Law and Society / La Revue Canadienne Droit et Société 29, no. 2 (2014): 235–52.

18 Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (London: Earthscan Publications, 2003), 96–97.

19 Matthew Houdek and Kendall R. Phillips, “Public Memory,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Communication and Critical Cultural Studies, ed. Dana L. Cloud (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 1405.

20 Stephen H. Browne, “Remembering Crispus Attucks: Race, Rhetoric, and the Politics of Commemoration,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 85, no. 2 (1999): 185.

21 Victoria J. Gallagher and Margaret R. LaWare, “Sparring with Public Memory: The Rhetorical Embodiment of Race, Power, and Conflict in the Monument to Joe Louis,” in Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials, ed. Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair, and Brian L. Ott (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010), 91.

22 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 257–58.

23 Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).

24 Raka Shome, “Race and Popular Cinema: The Rhetorical Strategies of Whiteness in City of Joy,” Communication Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1996): 506–509.

25 Bruce Gilley, “The Case for Colonialism,” Third World Quarterly (2017): https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2017.1369037. The essay has since been retracted by the publisher. See also George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! Or Slaves without Masters, ed. C. Vann Woodward (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960).

26 Mignolo and Walsh, On Decoloniality, 237–38.

27 Paulette Regan, Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada (Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2010), 11.

28 Hamish Dalley, “The Deaths of Settler Colonialism: Extinction as a Metaphor of Decolonization in Contemporary Settler Literature,” Settler Colonial Studies 8, no. 1 (2016): 30–46.

29 Lorenzo Veracini, “District 9 and Avatar: Science Fiction and Settler Colonialism,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 32, no. 4 (2011): 361 original emphasis.

30 Derek T. Buescher and Kent A. Ono, “Civilized Colonialism: Pocahontas as Neocolonial Rhetoric,” Women's Studies in Communication 19, no. 2 (1996): 129. See also Kent A. Ono (with Derek T. Buescher), “Civilized Colonialism: Pocahontas as Neocolonial Rhetoric,” in Contemporary Media Culture and the Remnants of a Colonial Past, by Kent A. Ono (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 89–112.

31 Kent A. Ono, “To Be a Vampire on Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Race and (‘Other’) Socially Marginalizing Positions on Horror TV,” in Contemporary Media Culture and the Remnants of a Colonial Past (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 17.

32 Katie Boudreau Morris, “Decolonizing Solidarity: Cultivating Relationships of Discomfort,” Settler Colonial Studies 7, no. 4 (2016): 464. See also Lynda Dyson, “The Return of the Repressed? Whiteness, Femininity and Colonialism in The Piano,” Screen 36, no. 3 (1995): 267–76.

33 David Uahikeaikalei‘ohu Maile, “Going Native: South Park Satire, Settler Colonialism, and Hawaiian Indigeneity,” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 17, no. 1 (2017): 65.

34 Aimee Carrillo Rowe and Eve Tuck, “Settler Colonialism and Cultural Studies: Ongoing Settlement, Cultural Production, and Resistance,” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 17, no. 1 (2017): 6.

35 Steven C. Caton, Lawrence of Arabia: A Film's Anthropology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 198. However, even Caton claims that many critics do not regard the film as anticolonial while others assert that it traffics in orientalist stereotypes, which may serve to further justify colonialism.

36 See Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, 248–85.

37 For an outline of Third Cinema's genre and political stance, see Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, “Towards a Third Cinema,” in Movies and Methods: An Anthology, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 44–64.

38 Indigenous peoples, almost by definition, still live within colonial states (colonized territories) and are more likely to have experienced forms of colonialism designed to eliminate their populations. These factors not only reduce the likelihood that Indigenous peoples will have the resources to create decolonial films but also that large audiences will be receptive to them.

39 See Veracini, “District 9 and Avatar.”

40 Laura M. Furlan, Indigenous Cities: Urban Indian Fiction and the Histories of Relocation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017), 2.

41 Joanna Hearne, Native Recognition: Indigenous Cinema and the Western (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), 285.

42 Julian C. Chambliss, William L. Svitavsky, and Daniel Fandino, eds., “Introduction,” in Assembling the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Essays on the Social, Cultural and Geopolitical Domains (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2018), 5–6.

43 Christopher Lebron, “Black Panther Is Not the Movie We Deserve,” Boston Review, February 16, 2018, bostonreview.net/race/christopher-lebron-black-panther.

44 Felicia L. Harris, “‘Tell Me the Story of Home’: Afrofuturism, Eric Killmonger, and Black American Malaise,” Review of Communication 20, no. 3 (2020): 283. See also Rachel Alicia Griffin and Jonathan P. Rossing, eds., “Black Panther in Widescreen: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on a Pioneering, Paradoxical Film,” themed issue, Review of Communication 20, no. 3 (2020): 203–85.

45 Godfried A. Asante and Gloria Nziba Pindi, “(Re)imagining African Futures: Wakanda and the Politics of Transnational Blackness,” Review of Communication 20, no. 3 (2020): 227.

46 Dorothy Kim, “White Supremacists Have Weaponized an Imaginary Viking Past. It's Time to Reclaim the Real History,” Time, April 15, 2019, time.com/5569399/viking-history-white-nationalists/.

47 Gilley, “The Case for Colonialism.”

48 Darren Franich, “The Real, Subversive Politics of ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier,’” Entertainment Weekly, April 6, 2014, https://ew.com/article/2014/04/06/captain-america-the-winter-soldier-hydra-shield-paranoia/.

49 Churchill, “The Earth Is Our Mother,” 89.

50 Darrrel Wanzer-Serrano, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2015), 16 original emphasis.

51 Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” 17.