Thanatopolitics and colonial logics in Blade Runner 2049
- 14 September 2021
- journal article
- research article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Thesis Eleven
- Vol. 166 (1), 109-117
- https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136211043944
Abstract
This article critically engages with Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, focusing on the relationship between colonial logics and biological engineering that understands the natural world as property. First, it discusses the connections between the film and the shifting status of biopolitics becoming thanatopolitics, prompted by advances in synthetic biology. It argues that the film’s preoccupation with the reproductive capacity of its replicants retraces a racialized (post) colonialism and reconfigured slavery, or the voluntary labour of the occupied – as normalized in synthetic biology and the ongoing processes of devaluing of some lives over others for socioeconomic reasons. Second, and relatedly, the film reveals how deeply the thanatopolitics of a biopolitical economy is rooted in an intensification of racialized and colonial logics. The film thus doubles as a medium in which to grasp the centrality of colonial and racial logics to the ongoing real subsumption of life by capital, and the ways in which it continues to shape the present.Keywords
This publication has 14 references indexed in Scilit:
- The Afterlife of Reproductive SlaveryPublished by Duke University Press ,2019
- Synthetic Biology: A Very Short IntroductionPublished by Oxford University Press (OUP) ,2018
- The Intimacies of Four ContinentsPublished by Duke University Press ,2015
- Blade Runner and the Right to LifeTrans-Humanities Journal, 2015
- Improper LifePublished by University of Minnesota Press ,2011
- Reframing RightsPublished by MIT Press ,2011
- The Apocalyptic Vision of Philip K. DickCultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 2003
- NecropoliticsPublic Culture, 2003
- The Withering of Civil SocietySocial Text, 1995
- Of Living Machines and Living-Machines: Blade Runner and the Terminal GenreNew Literary History, 1988