The ‘Other’ as an Alien: A Postcolonial Reading of the Movie District 9

Orientalism (1978), which draws attention to the power of the medias in uniformizing information and reinforcing stereotypes, thus to the problem of representation and to the cultural industries, is regarded as a founding text that inspires post-colonial studies covering a wide range of domains including literature, cultural and gender studies. Based on this work of Edward W. Said, rather than being geographical concepts, East and West are thought be a duality which illustrates the ability of the West to create a distinction, and then to present it as inevitable. Assuming that the starting point of the orientalist discourse is a strategy of creating an ‘other’ by reference to which the supremacy of the West will be assessed, it can be claimed that ‘wild Blacks’ and ‘mysterious Easterners’ represented by the gigantic cultural industry Hollywood cinema, are constructions of the ‘other’ that originate from different social contexts but serve the same purpose. The aim of this article is to understand how the discourse of the other - along with the other’s other - is constructed in the movie District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009) through fictional characters which are neither Easterner nor Black. We also want to discuss if this “South African Hollywood film” - as described by its director - inverting some important clichés like ‘invader alien’ ends up by creating another cliché at one point or not. In this film reading, our guide will be the common notions of post-colonial literature, the ‘hybridity’ in particular