Septopia and the wastialized Other: Allegorizing neo-liberalism in the age of COVID-19

ABSTRACT

Sepsis, septic tank, septum – these terms help to locate phantasmatic representation of waste spaces in cinema, which is here termed “septopia”. Those who inhabit septopia are positioned as broken, fractured, or discarded identities. Amid COVID-19, septopia becomes more relevant to political realities, where people rebel against sanitized spaces and lockdown policies. Using Fredric Jameson’s concept of the political unconscious and theorization of allegory, this article navigates how media and film can map anxieties and clashes surrounding pandemic measures. It first explains the concepts of septopia as a mode of political commentary in the 2000s post-apocalyptic movies: Wall-E, District 9, and Land of the Dead. It then explores how “septopia” and wastiality contribute to expressions of the political pandemic’s unconscious, superstructurally mediating peoples’ responses to lockdown. The article argues that attempting to understand why people protest against COVID measures can help avoid counterproductive responses and counter increased social abjection.

KEYWORDS:

• Waste
• dystopia
• otherness
• COVID-19
• race
• post-apocalyptic film

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Notes

1. The horrific conditions in India in 2020, where workers were forced to make their way home by foot, often travelling across state lines and struggling to find shelter for the night, captures something of this sense of labour’s violent expulsion. India, however, is too complex to discuss here due to its relationship between neo-liberal precarity, statism, class, and caste.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Aleks Wansbrough

Aleks Wansbrough is a Sydney-based writer and cultural theorist, who lectures at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney and at Bennett University, India where he is an adjunct professor. The author of Capitalism and the Enchanted Screen: Myths and Allegories in the Digital Age (2021), his current research concerns the ideology of digital media and film. He is an editor of the Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture published by Penn State University Press and co-editor of the journal, Alterity Studies and World Literature.