![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
This article explores the relationship of Afrofuturism to the intersection of race, religion and biopolitics within the Black public sphere. The article examines representations of emerging genomic technology in the film District 9 and the ethical questions regarding DNA surveillance and DNA phenotyping. These technologies are central to an emerging biopolitics that actively constructs a future racial order based upon the lasting inequalities of slavery and the biological assumptions about race that rationalized it. In addition, the article argues that these concerns are eschatological.
Notes
1 For the purpose of this article I use the term “Afrofuturism” drawing on Mark Dery's article “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose” as a discourse that “treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture – and more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future.” See Mark Dery, ed., Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 180.
2 Elaine L. Graham, Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press), 35.
3 Ibid., 39.
4 Ibid., 36.
5 Ibid.
6 Kyle Galbraith, “Responsible Genetics: Examining Responsibility in Light of Genetic Biotechnologies,” Vanderbilt University dissertation, May 2010.
7 Ibid., 9.
8 Graham, Representations of the Post/Human, 110–11.
9 Ibid., 119.
10 Ibid., 23–24.
11 Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century (New York: The New Press), x.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., 57.
14 Ibid., 58–60.
15 Ibid., 76.
16 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 139.
17 Ibid.
18 I specify this point as scholars have a significant range of responses to the Michel Foucault's corpus as it relates to race. For Foucault's most significant engagement with race see Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College De France, 1975–1976 (New York: Picador, 1997).
19 Timothy K. Beal, Religion and its Monsters (New York: Routledge, 1971), 4.
20 Ibid., 5.
21 Ibid., 8. For further elaborations on the relationship between monsters and religion see Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (New York: Routledge, 2011), Stephen T. Asma, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worse Fears (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
22 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology: Volume I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 17.
23 Paul Tillich, The Religious Situation (Pittsburgh: Meridian Books, 1956), 34.
24 Ibid.
25 Victor Westhelle, Eschatology and Space: The Lost Dimension in Theology Past and Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 1–2.
26 Ibid., xv.
27 Ibid., 78.
28 In particular see “The Spaces of Utopia” and “Dialectical Utopianism” in David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
29 Luke 17:37, Bible New Revised Standard Version.
30 Neal DeRoo and John Panteleimon Manoussakis, eds., Phenomenology and Eschatology: Not Yet in the Now (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 69–70.
31 Ibid., 70.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.
34 The claim regarding transcendence is rooted in a phenomenological account of the structure of experience where some experiences present themselves to our conscious life as self-related and others as other directed. See Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann, The Structures of the Life World V2 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1983), 103.
35 Adilifu Nama, Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 10.
36 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge, 1962), 163–64.
37 Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1952), 90–92.
38 Ibid., 93.
39 William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 8.
40 For an excellent overview of the concept of moral panics see Charles Krinsky, The Ashgate Research Companion to Moral Panics (Irving: University of California Press, 2013).
41 District 9 directed by Neill Blomkamp. Sony Home Pictures, Culver City, CA. DVD. 2009. 52:30.
42 Eric D. Smith, Globalization, Utopia and Postcolonial Science Fiction: New Maps of Hope (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 146.
43 Ibid., 149.
44 Ibid., 130.
45 See Ivan Petrella, Beyond Liberation Theology (Long Lane: SCM Press, 2008), 10.
46 Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), xi.
47 Roberts, Fatal Invention, 264.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid., 264–65.
51 Ibid., 260.
52 Keith Wailoo, Alondra Nelson and Catherine Lee, Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 25.
53 Ibid., 25.
54 Ibid., 26.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid.
57 For a broader overview of the ecological fallacy and DNA phenotyping see Pamela Sankar's “Forensic DNA Phenotyping: Reinforcing Race in Law Enforcement,” in Whitmarsh and Jones, What's the Use of Race? Modern Governance and the Biology of Difference (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010).
58 Ibid., 27.
59 I employ the term “genetic suspect” as articulated by Jennifer Hamilton in “The Case of the Genetic Ancestor,” in Wailoo, Nelson and Lee, Genetics and the Unsettled Past.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Christophe D. Ringer
Christophe D. Ringer, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Theological Ethics and Society at Chicago Theological Seminary in Chicago, IL. He received his PhD in Religion, Ethics and Society from Vanderbilt University. His dissertation, “Necropolitics: The Religious Situation of U.S. Mass Incarceration,” examined the religious and cultural meanings that sustain mass incarceration. His research interests include African American religion and cultural studies, religion and politics, social ethics, and public theology. He is particularly interested in African American religion as a site for understanding the relationship of self, society and the sacred as it concerns human flourishing. Ringer has presented his research in many settings including the American Academy of Religion (AAR), the Southeastern Commission for the Study of Religion (SECSOR), the Center for Research on Social-Cultural Change in Manchester, UK and the Political Theology Symposium in Geneva, Switzerland. Ringer has taught courses at American Baptist College, New Brunswick Theological Seminary and Christian Brothers University.