“Anytime we’re talking about cultural
objects like Avatar, in a corporate dominant culture, we are playing
with fire, clearly. When the so-called indigenous is so-called natural,
the extraordinary naturalization of the indigenous, no matter how
talented, no matter how really, really, really, really great, no matter
how many inventions they may have invented. But it requires the other
half of the equation, which is a particular production of whiteness.
Even though there were plenty of people of color occupying the category
of whiteness in that film. Whiteness is a space to occupy for those who
are associated with the technologies of conquest, extraction, commerce,
etc. and that strikes me. Both of those two require each other. And
actual, living people believe these things of each other, to damaging
degrees. Such that I know no small number of white people, some of whom
I’ve found in my own skin, at various moments, you know, who somehow
feel less able to speak up, in a critical way, in a conversation with
someone who is produced as more natural. Whether it’s in an indigenous
rights discussion, a discussion about who owns race, class, and gender
properties, and so on, and so on. The very much in-play ways that these
story-fragments continue to set people out around these
nature/technology contrasts, to perpetuate the trouble – people actually
inhabit these imagined positions and do it to one another, including
doing it to oneself.”
http://tripleampersand.org/donna-haraway-the-dialogical-avatar/
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