District 9, race and neoliberalism in post-apartheid Johannesburg

Abstract

District 9 is a sci-fi film, ostensibly concerned with the arrival of extraterrestrials in Johannesburg, that explores notions of regulatory control and economic supremacy in twenty-first century neoliberal South Africa. This commentary and political resonance are found beneath, and also work with the action and CGI special effects. This essay attempts to identify many real world features as allegories within the film: post-apartheid racism, economic subjugation and urban poverty and how, despite past economic constraints due to colour, the new neoliberal rhetoric of innovation and self-adjustment has replaced the white-centred nationalism of an older capitalism, but with devastating consequences. District 9 is, the author argues, a powerful film through which to think about the structural, spatial and cultural failures of post-apartheid South Africa. The indifferences by the South Africans in the film carry strong ideological and social signification to the past: the extraterrestrials encode the urban landscape which is then decoded by audiences as they interpret the haunting remnants of segregation and urban poverty now reanimated by immigrant aliens (doubling for Nigerians and Zimbabweans) in the narrative. More importantly, via the substitution of subservient extraterrestrials for black immigrants new to South Africa, the film throws up for discussion many discourses over race, politics, remembrance, inequality and reveals decades-old problems recalibrated in District 9's sci-fi dystopia.