One of the most terrible facets of eighteenth and nineteenth slavery in the Americas was the constant and continual campaign to dehumanise slaves. Frederick Douglass in his book The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, describes the horrifying, dehumanising actions taken by slave holders. The text served as a great tool for emancipation and highlighted both the effects on slave and slave holder alike of such savage treatment of another human.
When looking at cinema’s take on technology (cyborgs, robots, and dystopian futures), we are usually presented with technology that is humanised in some way. Servile technology that rebels (Bladerunner, Westworld), technology taking on human characteristics (2001, A Space Odyssey, I, Robot), and technology that enslaves (The Matrix, Terminator). What are the roots of our relation to technology and human characteristics?
Thanks for this reflection Martyn. Did you notice in the second film with the cute robots that it was the little white robot who got to go fulfil his dream while the little black robot drove the mouse? That really bothered me when I thought back on it–not just human vs robot enslavement, but within robot ‘societies’.
I didn’t see it, but I can imagine that it was present in the film, talking about white robots it reminded me of Wall-E! Wall-E’s love interest Eva is also a sleek white, whilst Wall-E is a kind of pastiche of Short Circuit. If I’m not mistaken, usually black robots are military, dangerous, and destructive, thinking back to portrayals of machines in The Matrix… It would be a really interesting avenue to investigate for film studies. There’s an interesting chapter by Richard Dyer from The Matter of Images about serial killing that investigates the depiction of white serial killers in the cinema and I haven’t had a chance to read it but there’s a whole book called White: Essays on Race and Culture.
I really like this post Martyn – it’s great to see short reflections on ideas, and the lifestream is definitely intended for this kind of content.
Also, these notions of ‘dehumanising’ activity are really important to raise, and it’s super to see this here. With all the focus on cybercultures, cyborgs and artificial intelligence this week, it might be easy to assume that we’re just reflecting on technology. What you highlight well here is that cyborgs and robots always imply certain ideas about what it means to be human, and that is ultimately their value to cultural studies. Your example of slavery also illustrates how the boundary between ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ has been different in times past.