To elaborate my opinion of the whole RE5 thing, N’gai Croal has a point. If you are a member of the norm, default race and culture in US or Japan, you probably won’t see the racial imagery of the trailer unless you have actually examined past racial images and depictions of white men against the Others. Color blindness is a privilege of people who never have to worry about meeting people ethnically different than themselves. This is unfortunately the case in the gaming community.
This is how I saw the trailer.The “zombies” in the trailer don’t look like zombies, they look like raucous black people with full human articulation and ability to use machetes, grappling hooks and megaphones. Even before the “zombie” phase the locals are depicted as the hostile Others.
It should be noted that the RE5 trailer took inspiration from Waste the Motherfuckers Part Deux. That should tell you something about the racial imagery that inspired the RE5 trailer. So when we see the trailer, were not just seeing things that aren’t there, we see the legacy and prevalent currency of Europeans dehumanizing, oppressing and murdering the Other in their own communities.
It remains to be seen whether the setting on the full game is blatantly exotified like in the trailer. Because this is a unique setting, Capcom has the chance to analyze exploitative practices of the past and present in African communities. The real enemy in the series is after all a corporation.
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One response to “Native Evil”
Have you ever talked with Ethan? For a seminar we took with Erin last semester he did a lot of work with conceptualization of the other in RE4 and would have done 5 had it been out at the time.