The movie I want to analyze today is Blade Runner. Made in 1982, the movie is a dystopian science fiction movie set in 2019 LA. The plot of the movie is that there are ‘synthetic humans’ made by a large company called Tyrell. The synthetic humans, also known as replicants, are used essentially as slaves on other planets in work colonies. A group of these replicants escapes from the planet they were working on and have returned to Earth, where they are tracked and killed by Rick Deckard(who is played by Harrison Ford). At the start of the film, Deckard meets a replicant named Rachel who has been given false memories and believes she is human. The key here is that replicants and humans are virtually indistinguishable other than a test Deckard has that does not necessarily always give the correct answers. The main premise of the movie works around the replicants that Deckard finds and the emotional struggle he goes through regarding the ethics of killing the replicants and possibly Rachel as well.

I think the movie really hits an idea of what it means to distinguish humanity, whether through race, gender identity, or in this case what defines a human. The replicants’ work is justified by the Tyrell corporation as they are engineering and not truly human, but their sentience and ability to live is very real as well as their impact on those around them. I think that the movie looks at the injustice of what happens to the replicants as a way of showing how we can be cruel and assume intentions for those who we dehumanize. We often focus on clear lines of an Us vs Them, a Self vs Other, and as those lines get blurred people see how those lines are often drawn in violent and cruel wats. From looking at the way race has been dealt with in the world, we see that as more people realize that race is a social construct the violence and oppression that has been placed on folks of marginalized races is senseless and systemic. But it is only when those who are in power make the connection to start including those who they classified as Other as themselves that they can start to understand the ways that oppression works. Deckard starts off the movie set in the idea that he can distinguish himself from replicants. He truly believes that their struggles and needs are those of an Other that he does not need to care about. But as he meets more of the replicants and learns of their struggles and pains he starts to blur that line and struggles to make the Self vs Other that allowed him to hunt the replicants in the first place.

Hi, my name is Sri (He/him), and today I am going to be providing some context to the excerpt of Aijaz Ahmad’s work on Jameson. Specifically, I am going to be looking into the Three Worlds Theory which is referenced several times in Ahmad’s work, and then I will be providing some more specific reference towards Jameson. Within both areas, the theme of Self vs. Other is prevalent and understanding its use in the Three Worlds theory and then Jameson’s use of the Three World theory helps connect to what Ahmad discusses.

The origins of the Three Words Theory lie in the cold war and the allies of the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The specific usage of the word ‘Third World’ is credited to Alfred Sauvy in a French paper. Sauvy references the idea of a First World that was the U.S. and its allies, a Second World which was the Soviet Union and the communist allies, and lastly the Third world which was all remaining nations. Due to the lower socioeconomic class of many countries in the defined Third World, the term gained new meaning as undeveloped, or poorer nations. Already, we can see the idea of Self vs. Other driving these concepts. In an effort to separate out a large other to strength the Self for each side of the Cold War, an Other was made in the Third World. After the context of the Cold War becomes less relevant the Other remains, and now misclassifies numerous ‘Third World’ countries as impoverished and undeveloped. Ahmad looks at this impact on Jameson’s classification of literature from these Third Worlds as lower than that from the First or Second world. Jameson’s work focused postmodernism, which is a philosophy that looks at our current state after modernizing and criticizes our current state. He laid the basis of his work in the economic impacts of modernism and capitalism. This directly leads into what Ahmad sees in Jameson’s rhetoric regarding Third World literature. As when viewed from a purely western, capitalist point of view the Third World countries have been defined into an Other, that when set up had a lack of development on the scale Western countries were measuring. Ahmad connects many of these so called Third World countries through the colonialism that often caused them to change their development to a Western standard and thus be considered undeveloped. Overall, we can see how a system that was made to define a Self vs. Other for the Cold War helped perpetuate the effects of colonialism to modern day.

Citations:

Silver, Marc. “If You Shouldn’t Call It The Third World, What Should You Call It?” NPR, NPR, 4 Jan. 2015, www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/01/04/372684438/if-you-shouldnt-call-it-the-third-world-what-should-you-call-it.

Felluga, Dino. “Modules on Jameson: On Postmodernity.” Introductory Guide to Critical Theory. Jan. 31, 2011. Purdue U. 8/28/2020. <http://www.purdue.edu/guidetotheory/postmodernism/modules/jamesonpostmodernity.html>.