Antagonism or not in fictional nations

Another short post. I spent the work part of the day reading others' contributions to the roundtable on polarization.

A recurrent idea keeps cropping up, not as a thing we advocate but as something we detect: a zero-sum game of politics. Dani Snyder-Young paraphrased Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's concept of antagonism: I cannot be me if you exist. That sense--you or me, but not both of us--seems installed into our (humans'? only Western, modern humans'?) sense of politics.

"You will not replace us," chanted the (white, male) marchers in Charlottesville, certain that the "you" they addressed was dead set on eradicating them. In other zones you have various strains of Afro-pessimism (Frank Wilderson, for example), a perspective that black oppression is baked into the cake of white identity. As long as there are white people, racial justice for people of African descent is impossible. (This is not, pace Charlottesville marchers, a genocidal argument; it is a pessimistic one.)

On the list of fantasy projects I'll probably never do is a comparison-contrast between the fantasy worlds of Aztlán (the Mexican territories annexed by the US in the nineteenth century that functions for many Chicano groups as a symbol of resistance to settler-colonial practices) and Wakanda (the quasi-utopian, technologically advanced African nation of Black Panther that masquerades to the world as a stereotypical third-world country).

White people (I'm generalizing) love Wakanda. Black Panther's popularity inspired even white suburban children to cross their arms and shout Wakandan war chants. White people could love Wakanda. Even in the Marvel cinematic universe, the country exists alongside white-controlled countries. Indeed, T'Challa (the eponymous Black Panther) defeats the villain whose grand plan involves sharing Wakanda's sci-fi weaponry with oppressed peoples of the African diaspora worldwide. Wakanda poses no threat to white supremacy, even in the world of the movie.

Aztlán, on the other hand, cannot exist so long as the USA retains those lands it stole from Mexico (and by extension from the indigenous peoples of those lands). Its existence, even in fiction, is a zero-sum antagonism to settler-colonial American whiteness. I cannot be me if you exist. A movie about a hero from Aztlán--well, that'd be a very different movie than Black Panther.

More tomorrow,

JF