By Emma Louise Backe
When War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) concluded, Caesar had successfully led his people to a place where they might be able to build a new ape society without the violence of human interference, one in which the motto of “Ape Together Strong” could provoke a different manner of politics and sociality entirely. Caesar’s death, given his central role throughout the rebooted Planet of the Apes franchise, seemed to indicate a conclusion to the narrative, one in which grief was also interspersed with hope for different kind of world without the hanging threat of mutually assured destruction. Seven years later, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024) is not particularly interested in what an alternative, communitarian society apes could have built in Caesar’s absence. Though we get brief glimpses of Noa’s clan—their falconry practices seeming to gesture at a nostalgic ideal of living in community with nature—the movie dispenses with any of the racial analytics about slavery, religious zealotry, or philosophical treatises on who or what constitutes the “human” proposed in the original movie series. Instead, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes retells a familiar narrative of conquest and control, centered around whiteness, the inevitability of political corruption and violence, and the imperative of white survival.
Perhaps, in a media landscape glutted with reboots and desperate attempts to rehash the same story over and over again so that IP can be mined for as much profit as corporations can extract, I shouldn’t be surprised that Kingdom follows the same tired tropes and narrative arcs as other contemporaneous post-apocalyptic fare—the world ends, there seems to be a brief opportunity to building a better, different kind of world, but the quest for survival devolves into violence, carving out small corners where (white) humanity can be protected from harm. The brief references to Caesar’s aphorisms if not political treatises—“Ape together strong”—employed by Proximus Caesar to justify his empire-building are intended to give cover to a film otherwise cobbled together by elaborate and poorly conceived action sequences clearly intended to set up a new direction, and slew of additional movies, in the franchise, one devoid of the political acumen previously deployed in the earlier films. But perhaps more importantly, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is illustrative of a trend in many post-apocalyptic and dystopian films and shows lately: they represent violence, selfish individualism and war as unavoidable, almost inherent impulses. This continued escalation into violence, even when initially presented with the prospect of peace, and an otherwise possible world, serves a very specific function—conflict makes money. Hollywood profits on endless wars—The Avengers becomes The Infinity War, the worlds of Predator and Alien, Godzilla and King Kong must collide into match-offs which themselves spin into new coalitions against new enemies. It’s an endless cycle fueled by a lack of imagination, yet one that is also indicative of how our horizons of empathy are shaped by highly racialized visual regimes.
Maurice teaching the young chimps, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Planet of the Apes (1968)—based on the novel by Pierre Bouille (1963)—was released on the heels of the civil rights movement and makes a quite pointed allegory about race throughout the five films. As Ahuja writes, “By ironically appropriating an animal guise, the performer unveils a historical logic of animalization inherent in processes of racial subjection […] and imperial biopower” (2009:558). When Captain George Taylor (Charlton Heston) and his crew crash-land on a foreign planet, they are quickly ensnared by an armed group of gorillas on horseback. The humans are collared and chained—in case the visual signifiers of slavery aren’t evident enough, the gorillas are seen to pose with their new captives, guns in hand, in the style of old colonial photography of the kind used in the Congo under King Leopold’s violent reign, as well as elsewhere. Humans, we come to learn, are treated as nothing more than animals, without the capacity for speech or higher thought—this animalization then serves as the justification for their capture and enslavement. The evident conceit lies in the racial reversal of roles—the white man is no longer ascendent and the “damn dirty apes” are the superior species.
Gorilla colonial hunters, Planet of the Apes (1968)
The project of white supremacy underlying imperialism, settler colonialism, genocide, and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade relied upon a racist theory of unilinear evolution (aided and abetted by anthropologists) that characterized non-white communities as not simply “Other” but animal, inhuman (Jackson 2020, Weheliye 2014, Wynter 2003). As Frantz Fanon put it: “When the colonist speaks of the colonized he uses zoological terms…his explosive population growth, those hysterical masses, those blank faces, those shapeless, obese bodies, this headless, tailless cohort, these children who seem not to belong to anyone, this indolence sprawling under the sun, this vegetating existence, all is part of the colonial vocabulary” (Fanon 1963, quoted in Ahuja 2009). Those deemed non-human were summarily “incapable” of adopting the civilizing project, and could be exterminated or put to other uses. Throughout the film, the repeated violence and slaughter of humans—entirely white—was a less than subtle reminder of the ongoing abuses meted out against Black and Brown Americans at the time of the film’s release, particularly the use of police and military violence against civil rights protestors and the struggles for decolonization throughout the Global South.
In the later movies, including Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) these racial parallels are drawn out into even more stark relief, when apes are being trained in prison complexes to become the servants and slaves of their human Masters. Crowds of chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans—clad in recognizable prison jumpsuits—watch as their instructors qua wardens teach them to conduct domestic chores. Highly “domesticated” apes are then brought out to literal auctions where the highest bidder can bring them home. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007), Michelle Alexander (2010) and Orisanmi Burton (2023) remind us, the abolition of slavery simply transmuted one form of captivity into another—the growth of the prison industrial complex in the United States still serves to confine hundreds of thousands of people of color and profit off of their surplus labor.
When Caesar ultimately leads an ape uprising, these racial parallels are again explicitly telegraphed to the audience. Caesar’s singular ally in escaping arrest is MacDonald, the one Black character in the movie. “How do you propose in gaining this freedom?” MacDonald asks Caesar, as they try to determine a viable escape route. “By the only means left to us…revolution,” Caesar replies simply. “But it’s doomed to failure!” MacDonald chides. “Maybe this time, and the next. You above everybody else should understand.” Caesar speaks directly, though implicitly, to MacDonald’s racial status as a Black man—even in this alternative envisioning of Earth’s future, where apes will eventually rule, the past remains one implicitly marked and marred, through Caesar’s statement, by slavery, if not racial discrimination.
A prison guard dragging an chimp into the ape education and “domestication” facility: Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972)
When Caesar later confronts his former Master, the Governor, he asks what differentiates apes from dogs and cats, why their “domestication” was so much more violent. “Because your kind was once our ancestors. Man was born of the ape, and there’s still an ape curled up inside of every man, the beast that must be whipped into submission, the savage that has to be shackled in chains. When we hate you, we’re hating the dark side of ourselves,” the Governor responds. The speech isn’t necessarily subtle, calling back to the argument made in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) that Blackness—and anti-blackness—could not exist without the social construction of whiteness as its anti-thesis. But like Frantz Fanon, the film takes this argument further, arguing that liberation, and decolonization, can only occur through violent revolution—“the only means left to us.” Before the group of apes can kill the Governor, however, MacDonald intervenes, shouting at Caesar, “what right have you to spill their blood?” “By the slave’s right to punish his persecutors,” Caesar responds. When MacDonald tries a different tact, calling upon Caesar’s potential “humanity,” this moral entreaty is also dispensed with—“I am not human,” Caesar reminds him. In so doing, Caesar also refuses to engage with the premise of MacDonald’s ethical argument, a politics of respectability which asks the oppressed to forgive (like in South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission), to cede yet more of their own humanity to their perpetrators. The “grid of intelligibility” offered by humanity is insufficient to grant the apes true equality, respect or dignity, or as Jackson (2020) puts it, the recognition humanity does not annul the animalization of blackness. Later on, in Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), MacDonald’s brother again invokes history to try to instruct Caesar on the ethics of good and evil. “That’s human history, not ape history,” Caesar rebuts, yet again encouraging the audience to consider what kinds of histories they have been taught, which ones are considered to be instructive guideposts for the present and future.
In Tim Burton’s failed attempt to reboot the franchise in 2001, however, the movie was marketed as a commentary on “animal rights” rather than an allegory for race. Indeed, Paul Giamatti’s character, a slave auctioneer, is repeatedly played for laughs, a bumbling orangutan whose industry of buying and selling human slaves for profit is roundly softened and dismissed. In the 2010s reboot, staring with Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) many criticized the “color” or “racial-blindness” of the movies, which several scholars interpreted as a response to the “post-racial” sentiment of the Obama administration(Loza 2017, Watson 2021)—the idea that racism, essentially, had been “solved” by electing a Black president. This new iteration of Caesar (Andy Serkis) is not descended from Zira and Cornelius, who escaped the destruction of their earth when the sub-terranean humans deployed a nuclear bomb. Instead, he was born in a lab, the result of a scientific experiment aimed at developing a cure for Alzheimer’s.
Primate Colonies and the Extraction of Value, Donna Haraway, Verso (2017).
As Dorothy Roberts (2011) and Ruha Benjamin (2015) repeatedly remind us, “objective” and scientific practices often reinforce problematic racial fictions and discriminatory practices against non-white patients. Indeed, modern science and medicine was built upon the exploitation of Black and brown bodies (Washington 2008), treating African colonial subjects and slaves as a “living laboratory” (Tilley 2011). This experimentation was guided by intense fears of illness and disease—concerns about the “contaminating” presence and sickness carried by people of color was often used to justify racial systems of separation like apartheid in South Africa (Packard 1989). Primate science, too, also has imperial roots, dead simians used as the “raw material” to study the colonial “Other” (Haraway 1989). The medical experimentation on communities of color, often for pharmaceutical profit, throughout the 20th century is most emblematically illustrated by the story of Henrietta Lacks (Skloot 2011), and scholars like Kim TallBear (2013) continue to highlight how genetic attempts to qualify and quantify race only serve to further scientific racism. Yet in Rise and Dawn, this history is all implicit sub-text—the potential opportunities to read racial parallels is never offered explicitly to the audience (as it was in the early movies). This absence or silence itself speaks volumes. As Susanna Loza argues, by eliding and refusing to engage with the legacy of racial violence which informs the visual registers of apes in cages—apes formerly coded as Black—”Rise’s postracial revisionism of the imperial past reminds us that the rhetoric and imagery of colonialism are highly flexible; they survive the demise of imperial rule” (2017:117).
Nevertheless Caesar, like his predecessor, does eventually rise up; distribute the same serum he received to activate and enhance the intelligence of other apes he’s imprisoned with at a “Primate Sanctuary;” and lead these scientifically enhanced apes into the woods beyond San Francisco, where they eventually try to settle. Humans have already begun to succumb to the Simian Flu—the perils of contamination by the “Other.” In Dawn, humans have presumably been driven to the edges of extinction and a different kind a racial politics emerges—the “quintessential settler colonial scenario. The apes live in wooden huts, hunt for food, and speak monosyllabic English” (Loza 2017:118) that some critics indicated seemed to echo earlier Hollywood stereotypes of the “noble Indian” (MacNab 2014, Newitz 2014, Orr 2014).
Loza argues that Dawn of the Planet of the Apes could be read as a “reverse colonization” narrative in which the former colonizer finds his life pushed to the brink of survival by the very subjects he tried to colonize himself. Yet, as Loza continues, “While reverse colonization narratives certainly harbor such critical potential, they typically function in a more reactionary mode or engage in what Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang call ‘settler moves to innocence.’ Settler moves to innocence are strategies, positioning, or evasions that “attempt to relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility without giving up land or power or privilege.” Rise attempts to reconcile settler guilt and rescue settler futurity by making humans the survivors—and not the perpetrators—of genocide” (2017:120). The reversal essentially side-steps any responsibility for the anger exhibited by a character like Koba, who was experimented upon for years within the lab, his scars a constant reminder of the torture he experienced as a scientific subject. Indeed, Koba ends up getting cast as the central villain of Dawn in his pathological desire for vengeance against humans. The story becomes one about a “liberal humanist approach in which speciesism/racism is not about entrenched inequities and imperial dominance but rather a personal prejudice that can be addressed by building trust across racial groups” (Loza 2017:121). The violence that ultimately leads to War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) is primarily instigated and blamed on Koba, rather than the humans—we are only supposed to sympathize with Caesar, the leader who attempts to peacefully negotiate with the humans and avoid war at all costs, not the more militant approach employed by Koba. This also means that the story of the Planet of the Apes reboot is essentially how violence is unavoidable, inevitable, that two competing factions will never be able to come to a fragile armistice, if not peaceful co-habitation. Without war, how will Hollywood drive the narrative forward?
By Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, this “race-blindness” is so severe that the franchise dispenses with any of the potential lessons of the prior films to instead focus on the story of a white girl, May. She, unlike the other humans of the world impacted by the Simian flu, retains her power of speech and thought and seems to possess an encyclopedic knowledge of human technology and history from multiple generations ago. While the lessons of Simian history have been forgotten, and the apes have also lost their ability to read—a central instructional premise of Dawn and the earlier Planet of the Apes films—Proximus Caesar must rely on white human interlocutors and translators in his vision of building a new empire. There is no consideration, here, of the forms of différance (in the Derridian sense) initially employed so effectively in the original Planet of the Apes movies—the allegory of race relied upon attributing animalistic qualities to (white) humans, of transposing characteristics of the non-human historically assigned to people of color onto their “Masters.”
Even in Escape from the Planet of the Apes, when veterinarian Zira and her husband Cornelius (an archaeologist) crash into Earth’s past, where humans remain the dominant species, they serve as instructive doubles for their white counter-parts at the Los Angeles Zoo—scientists Dr. Stephanie Branton and Dr. Lewis Dixon. After being tortured, Zira admits to experimenting on humans, both alive and dead, a revelation that serves to justify the decision to kill Zira’s unborn baby. Here, too, the history of eugenics, experimentation on Black bodies in obstetrics in gynecology, and the forced sterilization of people of color, serve as instructive parallels. In Kingdom, rather than having to confront the complicity and perpetration of violence against people of color, the audience is encouraged to identify with May and her struggle to help humans regain their ascendency on the planet. The entire conceit and political allegory about the perils of militarization and human hubris collapses in on itself, returning the very precept that the original films and the book aimed to critique. In yet another Hollywoodized take on post-apocalyptic storytelling, we are meant to direct our focus and empathy to the strong, independent and self-sufficient white person. Nor should we be distracted by the “claims to innocence” of these white women, even if they are depicted as heroines (Katniss in The Hunger Games, Lucy in Fallout, Furiosa in Mad Max, the list goes on). Depictions of white women as survivalists in “hostile territory”—like the Volksmoeder of the Afrikaner settlers in South Africa (McClintock 1995)—have historically been used as another way to signify the importance of defending white ways of life and white occupation of land and territory, what Sophie Lewis refers to as imperial feminism, especially when military women get depicted as “feminist” by mainstream news outlets.
Given the current context of the War on Gaza, this race-blind and ahistorical approach doesn’t feel incidental. As many Palestinian scholars, journalists and activists have had to constantly remind politicians and the mainstream media, the attacks on October 7th need to be understood within the broader history of settler colonialism and the ongoing catastrophe of the Nakba (Erakat 2013, Khalidi 2021, Pappe 2007). Starting the historical clock in October 2023 serves to elide the legacies of violence and dispossession which inform Palestinian demands for the right of return. As Loza argues, Rise and Dawn converts “human settlers into innocent victims of the dark savagery of the apes. By naturalizing colonial genocide as the inevitable outgrowth of intelligence, Rise retroactively absolves the human settlers for past acts of imperial violence. Rise depoliticizes and deracializes the founding violence and continued colonization of native peoples by European colonizers” (2017:120). The same can be said of the strategic manipulation of history and storytelling that has been mobilized around October 7th, in particular to justify the use of genocidal violence—aided, abetted and endorsed by the US military and government—against Palestinians.
Zionists have strategically manipulated history to suit narratives which justify the destruction and displacement of Palestinians. As Nadia Abu El-Haj (2008), Alejandro Paz (2023), and others have noted, archaeology has been used as a means to assert the right to establish Jewish settlements throughout Israel. Many of these archaeological expeditions and excavations are funded by the IDF, a nationalist project that is also used during tours to Jewish settlements for visitors to further reinforce a narrative that tries to erase Palestinian history within the land. Indeed, his instrumentalization of archaeology is a central premise of the original Planet of the Apes movie. Cornelius, a chimp archaeologist, has gone against official ape policy and conducted covert excavations in the Forbidden Zone, an area that has been officially restricted by the government. The sanctioned and official national narratives undergirding the ape society completely erases any history or memory of human society preceding the ascendence of the apes. Apes are subsequently led to believe that humans were never intelligent and that apes have always been the dominant species. When Cornelius uncovers evidence of earlier human civilization, his findings threaten the nationalist narrative—members of the council intervene by destroying the caves where his discoveries were excavated. The alternative, if erroneous, version of ape history remains secured. Indeed, amidst the bombing of Gaza, “at least 200 archaeological sites and buildings of cultural and historical significance in the Gaza Strip” (Al-Houdalieh 2024) have been destroyed, crucial elements of Palestinian heritage and cultural history that can never be recovered. Some forms of history are treasured and tightly controlled, while others that don’t suit particular ideological political narratives are considered acceptable losses.
Cornelius explains the “paradox” of his human archaeological discoveries in Planet of the Apes (1968)
Throughout the escalation of violence against Palestinians in Gaza, the visual politics of this war and the imaginative opportunities for identification or alienation matter. Just as African Americans have been referred to as “monkeys,” and anti-semitic imagery of Jewish people as animals was used by the Nazis, the Israeli Defense Minister referred to Palestinians as “human animals”—another Israeli lawmaker referred to Palestinians as “insects” and “dogs.” This language is employed to justify the killing of civilians whose humanity gets called into question through the discursive and visual recoding of what counts as a human rights violation, what kinds of containment are considered “necessary” to those whose dehumanization marks them as a threat. American actor Michael Rapaport traveled to Israel to share videos wandering around disparagingly asking, “Where’s the apartheid? I’m looking. Where’s the apartheid? Do you guys know where the apartheid is?” As many on Twitter were quick to point out, the structural layout of the West Bank and Gaza’s security check-points which determine when and where Palestinians are able to move about the city, high walls covered in barbed wire and electric fencing, and Israel’s control of basic resources like power and electricity all quite visibly and evidently demonstrate the systems of segregation that accompany the term of apartheid. Indeed, as a scholar of South Africa, these visual signifiers all feel incredibly familiar, especially given the long relationship that South Africa’s apartheid government has with the Zionist project (Polakow-Suransky 2011, Stevens 1971).
At the same time, members of IDF upload videos celebrating the targeting of civilians and the torture of hostages—making this genocide one we can literally livestream in real time—all while strategically targeting and killing Palestinian journalists to ensure that only one side of the story is told. Palestinians have had to take to social media begging for assistance, demanding an audience, a witness, to their suffering. Meanwhile, the media is working overtime to offer counter-narratives, arguing that we should disbelieve what we’re seeing with our own eyes. Visual frames instead train us to perceive the keffiyeh as a sign of “terrorism” (backed by the Islamophobia that rose during the “War on Terror”) and interpret demands to divest and dismantle the apartheid state as anti-semitism, despite Jewish Voices for Peace’s arguments to the contrary. Many accused the attempt to ban TikTok in the US as evidence that Zionist factions were trying to regain power over the narrative, fearful that their version of events was no longer treated as hegemonic or factual. Throughout GW’s student encampment, I myself saw no evidence of hate speech or violence—most students took naps in their tents, helped one another with homework, and made signs simply asking for a ceasefire. We had a strong and vocal contingent of Jewish students who reiterated the message “Never Again” and “Not in Our Name.” Nevertheless, Lauren Boebert and other representatives instructed us to see these student encampments as inherently dangerous and a threat to the general public, all while GW’s President sent out email after email qualifying the protest as “hateful,” “degrading” and “unsafe”—“the protest ceases to be peaceful or productive,” she stated in an email sent on May 5th. Meanwhile, many protestors at the student encampments complained that the media failed to follow protestors’ calls to keep their eyes on Rafah, to direct their gaze to Gaza, rather than focusing on the students themselves.
As Nicholas Mirzoeff writes, “The authority of coloniality has consistently required visuality to supplement its deployment of force. Visuality sutures authority to power and renders this association ‘natural’” (2011:6). Miriam Deprez takes this argument a step further: “questions of visuality are neither just about the capacity of certain people to see and be seen nor just about the tactical deployment of visual methods (and violence against vision) to maintain Israel’s control over Palestine. They also pertain to the role that visuality plays in the very constitution of this unjust structure of occupation” (2023:3). The visual necropolitics and violence employed against Palestinians extends not only to the visual techniques and frames employed to justify and legitimate targeted violence—innocent civilians become human shields, rendering the telegenetically dead into alleged perpetrators, martyrs into terrorists. It also encompasses how visual regimes of seeing serve “as a means of delineating those who are granted the freedom to live and those who are relegated to the status of the ‘other,’ enabling and legitimizing their oppression. As such, the tactical deployment of visual violence should not only be thought of as the actualization of a strategy used to uphold the occupation but should also be understood as a constitutive dimension of the occupation itself, which the occupation cannot endure without” (Deprez 2023:6). All of this to say, these visual frames and repertoires—including the kinds of media which encourage us to either identify with the “Other” or continuously employ violence as the only option—cannot be separated from these systems of violent military occupation and destruction.
Hollywood and the military have been intimate bedfellows for decades—while there are the more evident pieces of military propaganda like American Sniper, Marvel has been working closely with the US military throughout the Avengers franchise. When I attended Awesome Con in Washington DC in 2019, I perhaps shouldn’t have been surprised that the military was using the convention as a recruitment strategy given the Pentagon’s involvement in the film industry, especially after 9/11 (Wilkinson 2022). These relationships shape the kinds of stories and imaginaries we are told about certain longstanding, “immutable,” “tribal” enmities that are irresolvable, and too complex for the average citizen to understand. Marvel, of late, has repeatedly cast their villains as “terrorists” (Captain and the Winter Falcon, Secret Invasion)—the demands for equity and political recognition leveraged by these baddies (who would otherwise be relatively sympathetic and understandable) instead dissolves into outright violence, with clear lines of “good” and “bad.” These “terrorists” are also predominantly played by people of color. Even in Black Panther 2: Wakanda Forever, I was hopeful that in the hands of Ryan Coogler, we’d get to see a more nuanced story of sub-altern solidarity in opposition to the US’s military industrial complex (which initially seemed to be the evident villain of the plot). Indeed, quite early in the film, Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) is summoned to the UN only to put France and the US in its place for attempting to illegally seize and extract vibranium resources from Wakandan research facilities. Instead, however, we see the Wakandans pitted against the kingdom of Talokan—why tell a story of anti-colonial coalition building when there remains a franchise to build and maintain, including the future debut of Israeli military superhero Sabra. Stories of endless wars are not only profitable and contribute to the visual necropolitics of genocide—they also structure consumers’ horizon of imagination.
I use imagination because this was the language Ezra Klein deployed when he spoke to Tareq Baconi for the podcast “This is How Hamas is Seeing This.” In discussing the political demand of Palestinian right of return, Klein asked “is this something that people can really imagine happening here” (my emphasis added) or is it “simply a recipe for eternal conflict?” Klein goes on to state that displaced peoples who tried to return to their lands hasn’t worked in the past, an argument he uses to then claim that “There is not now or at some point in the future going to be a return.” There is a violent narrowing of imagination here—because we haven’t seen something like this work before, it is either considered frightening or impossible. Tareq pushed back against Klein, arguing that this ideological refusal to engage with the political demands of the Palestinians has only foreclosed opportunities for negotiation—is it not the West’s duty, Tareq chided, to envision political alternatives?
In these representations, we have moved beyond the possibility of photographs and footage of violence in war-zones as potential empathy machines (Sontag 1973, 2003), a hopes that a particular iconography of suffering would beget collective identification, political accountability and action (Kleinman and Kleinman 1996). Instead, the combined approach of dehumanization and disidentification has created a derealization and insensitivity to suffering: “If violence is done against those who are unreal, then, from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated” (Butler 2004:34). The violence is not simply framed as justifiable, but is not really violence, not really genocide at all because of the “inhumanity” of the targets in question. As Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) tells Furiosa (Anya Taylor Joy) at the end of Furiosa, “There will always be wars”—the most important thing is to “make it epic,” escalations upon escalations which draw us deeper and deeper into the perils of numbing and desensitization. This cycle of endless wars, especially when presented as the only option for survival, is an economic stimulus both for Hollywood and the ongoing project of US empire. As Jasbir Puar (2017) argues, the “twinning of working and warring” are central to the debilitation of Palestinian bodies, the creation of injury within the financial circuits of disaster capitalism. If there is no other political imaginary of possibility beyond defense through collective punishment, if no other kinds of worlds are deemed probably or possible, we diminish our ability for ethical outrage and we remain stuck in the cycle. And we risk treating certain kinds of violence as the only effective way to “return us to the human rather than consummate our own inhumanity” (Butler 2004:151).
A decolonial, abolitionist framework does require a more capacious and expansive politics of imagination. adrienne maree brown has discussed how the worldbuilding in Octavia Butler’s Parable trilogy has informed her own thinking around emergent strategy. Longtime abolitionist organizer Andrea Ritchie describes the work as Practicing New Worlds, one that demands “imagination to dream the worlds we long for into being.” This is perhaps why Ruha Benjamin recently released Imagination: A Manifesto—part memoir and part reminder that the future we inhabit tonight might have been unimaginable decades, if not centuries ago. In her earlier article “Racial Fictions, Biological Facts: Expanding the Sociological Imagination through Speculative Methods,” offered a small treatise on why imagination is so important:
novel fictions that reimagine and rework all that is taken for granted about the current structure of the social world— alternatives to capitalism, racism, and patriarchy—are urgently needed. Fictions, in this sense, are not falsehoods but refashionings through which analysts experiment with different scenarios, trajectories, and reversals, elaborating new values and testing different possibilities for creating more just and equitable societies. Such fictions are not meant to convince others of what is, but to expand our own visions of what is possible. This is not to say that imagining alternatives is sufficient, or that all things possible are even desirable. But how will we know if we do not routinely push the boundaries of our own thinking, which includes the stories we tell about the social world? (2016:2)
I have often been compelled, if not slightly perplexed by the Octavia Butler quote, “There is nothing new under the sun but there are new suns!” Using Benjamin, I take Butler to mean that so long as our imaginative center of gravity continues to move along one organizing axis point, one canon, our scope of imagination and possibility will remain limited. It’s only by directing our attention from the center to the periphery (to borrow Appadurai 1986), that we are able to critique current and longstanding visions of human and inhumanity, that we might encounter worlds more interested in dismantling, rather than upholding, military empires and perverse forms of inhumanity.
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