Sunday, February 07, 2010  Dances with Avatar  I finally saw
Avatar this afternoon. I'm a couple months behind everyone else,
but since I'm 400 years behind in my reading, I wouldn't worry
about a couple months.  A couple things struck me. First, it
felt like a movie that knew colonialist fantasy narratives are a
problem, and yet it just has so much desire that it does
colonialist fantasy anyway. It's like when you're hanging out
with someone who doesn't want to be a sexist, and doesn't think
of him/herself as a sexist, but just can't resist telling sexist
jokes. And then s/he excuses the jokes, because they're just
jokes, and so on.  The colonialist fantasy narrative is
powerfully appealing to white folks, isn't it?*  (*And by
"white" here, I mean dominant white Anglo-American culture,
though there were some people of color represented within that
dominant culture.)  So we get the white guy who goes native and
becomes a better native than the natives, and so can save them,
but look, there's a strong female n