23 March 1979, South Africa. Less than three years earlier, the murder of schoolchildren during the Soweto uprisings of June 1976 had drawn the apartheid state under international scrutiny. Only 18 months before, in September 1977, Steve Biko’s death whilst in police detention consolidated global solidarity against the country. In 1979, South Africa was in political turmoil: Umkhonto we Sizwe, the military wing of the African National Congress, was active with guerrilla attacks on South African strategic targets, particularly railway lines and police stations; South African troops were actively involved in conflict in Angola against the South-West Africa People’s Organisation, a socialist organization with ties to the Soviet Union; and neighboring Zimbabwe created a transitional government ahead of its first democratic elections in 1980.

Amidst these swathes of grand history was a banal event of 23 March 1979: the premiere of Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster science fiction film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977; hereafter CE3K) in South African cinemas. The mundaneness of this event gives us pause when we stop to consider the concurrent realities occurring in the country at the time. How did cultural behavior as superficial and banal as going to watch science fiction films occur in a country where, only a stone’s throw away from whites-only cinemas, Umkhonto we Sizwe guerrillas were putting their lives on the line daily to bring down the apartheid state? In the chapter that follows, the incongruity of this concurrent experience of Black and white life in South Africa during apartheid is extended to a broader scope in order to read the complicities of global cultural networks in their concurrence with South African apartheid.

In “Concurrences as a Methodology for Discerning Concurrent Histories,” Gunlög Fur elaborates the term “concurrences” as a concept that provides the “methodological and theoretical foundations for studies that allow multiple voices to be heard; stories that voice concurrent claims on geographical, temporal, political, and moral spaces” (Fur 2017, 40). What concurrences enables is simultaneous, if at times contradictory and conflicting, accounts of history to be placed in productive conversation with one another. While the concept lends itself specifically to subaltern voicings of suppressed histories, in this chapter, I wish to explore the relevance of the term for understanding the global reach of a violently dominant discourse: that of whiteness under South African apartheid of the 1980s. This investigation is prompted by Fur’s further observation that “[e]ngaging with ‘the global’ in whatever form it takes poses challenges […] to seek ways to interpret worldwide processes and interactions and to ask to what degree global perspectives can and will grapple with a legacy of universalizing expressions and underlying claims centred in the West” (Fur 2017, 37). I posit that South African whiteness during apartheid, which was overtly militarized, politicized, and violent, was—in its most banal and everyday forms—mirrored, sustained, and even confirmed by contemporaneous Western popular culture.

Following Hannah Arendt’s observation in Eichmann in Jerusalem that the “trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal” (2006, 274), this analysis looks at how the global complicities of whiteness—here via popular culture—enabled a banal maintenance of apartheid ideology in South Africa itself. This observation runs counter to a significant body of media scholarship that has pointed out the importance of global media and culture in shifting white South Africa’s commitment to the racist state (see Hyslop 2000; Nixon 1994). My argument here is that there were concurrent reiterations of racist and racialized discourse flowing through global channels that affirmed, rather than critiqued, South African white self-perception. In the spirit of the method of concurrent readings, this does not undermine or make a claim for greater authenticity over the analyses that see popular culture as one of the mediators of change in South Africa. Rather, this chapter aims to thicken that account by considering South African whiteness not in a state of exception or pure isolation but rather as in complex dialogue with global discourses of race and whiteness. To put it simply: South African white everyday life was not far removed from white life elsewhere during the 70s and 80s but rather intimately connected and entangled with it.

This question matters because global confirmation of the claims of white life through popular culture worked as an enabler of white South African blindness to the violence that was sustaining their everyday, middle-class, privileged lives. Indeed, one of the most alarming concurrences of white life in Southern Africa in the 1970s and 1980s was that while civil unrest and state violence had reached unprecedented proportions during these years, white urban South African life continued largely unperturbed by what was happening in the townships. The notorious Group Areas Act of 1950, which demarcated residential zones according to ethnicity, was the crucial piece of apartheid legislation that enabled this experience of parallel life in South Africa. The reality of Black life under apartheid was literally lived at a remove from white life. This is not to say that Black South Africans did not exist for whites at the time: on the contrary, Black South Africans constituted the country’s work force, from industry and mining to the intimacy of the domestic sphere of the home. But these workers were not transgressing the walls that apartheid established. Black life in the sphere of the white everyday under apartheid was what Giorgio Agamben has called “bare life,” and a host of apartheid legislation ensured that, even when forced to be in the same locality, Black and white South Africans would never share—or equally participate—in a fully human life together.

Thus, while many commentators have noted the important role that increasing access to international media, television, film, and music in the country had on changing white perceptions of the Nationalist Party and its system of apartheid, I argue that such popular culture also operated as a kind of justification to maintain the status quo that secured middle-class white life at the time. The white, middle-class suburban lives lived out in American television programs, for example, confirmed white South Africans’ sense of belonging to a global community. Indeed, at this time, white South Africa obsessively orientated its cultural identity towards a projected and implied version of white life in the global north. Jonathan Hyslop has argued that this, along with the emergence of a “massive Afrikaner middle class and a strong and confident business class” (Hyslop 2000, 38) in the beginning of the 1970s, created a new consumerist Afrikaner identity with a greater investment in personal autonomy. Ultimately, this new consumer class “wanted to separate their Afrikanerness from the history of race conflict and to attain international acceptance as ‘modern’ people” (Hyslop 2000, 41). That international acceptance was largely formulated around consumerist participation in global culture, such as television and film, sports, popular music, and global media events.

In Broadcasting the End of Apartheid, Martha Evans argues that exclusion from global events was as determining for South African white identity as inclusion in them, since “the pleasure associated with media events converts into displeasure at exclusion from such events, and […] this was one of the contributing factors leading to white acceptance of reform in South Africa” (Evans 2014, 4). Evans discusses local responses to South Africa’s exclusion from the televised moon-landing to elaborate the significance of cultural exclusion for white self-perception. In 1969 in South Africa, however, television was still being held off by a government anxious about what exposure to international media would mean for (particularly English-speaking) white awareness of global critique of the apartheid system, and so South Africans could only listen to the radio transmission of the event. Evans notes that this “exclusion from this pinnacle of human achievement coincided with a more cosmopolitan and progressive sense of identity,” (32) which amplified white South African “fear of being perceived as ‘backward’” (33). Rob Nixon makes the same point when he writes that

For many whites—already rendered paranoid by the growing force of their exile from world affairs—South Africa’s inability to partake of such a singular moment of “global” community came to seem like an exasperating self-inflicted disinvitation. A Rand Daily Mail editorial captured this sense of let-down perfectly with the snappy headline “Out of this World”. (Nixon 1994, 74, cited in Evans 2014, 33)

The Rand Daily Mail’s headline, “Out of this World” captures, too, the global stakes of the space race in cold war politics, which is a factor I will return to in discussing the later relevance of science fiction film in South Africa in the 1970s and 80s.

What all of this amounts to is that white South Africans’ investment in media and popular culture from the global north was fueled by an anxiety about exclusion from a global community.Footnote 1 It is therefore not surprising that the international anti-apartheid movement pressed so hard for a cultural boycott on South Africa during the 1980s. But this aim to isolate the oppressive state through cultural boycott was far from successful: even when European countries or individual US music or film companies joined the boycott, popular culture still enjoyed relatively free (albeit sometimes pirated) circulation with the help of the contemporaneous technologies of the portable cassette and VHS recording devices. In the music world, when pirating was not an option, popular international songs that had not come to South Africa because of boycotts were recorded by local artists as cover versions and sold as compilation LPs (known as the Springbok Hit Parade albums). In some cases, this created a literal white-washing of songs by Black musicians, since the music of performers such as Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder were rerecorded by white South African performers. This culture of emulation was significant in relation to television too, as seen in another major media event discussed by Evans: the Royal Wedding of 1981. The British Equity ban “banned exports to South Africa of all recorded material involving British Equity members” (Evans 2014, 45). The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), however, “managed to find their way around the ban by importing programmes from other countries and even by adapting British programmes, for example the animated children’s programme, Rupert the Bear. To get around the ban, the SABC dubbed the programme from English into English, as it featured performances by Equity voice artists” (Bevan 2008, 167; discussed by Evans 2014, 45, emphasis in the original). The Royal Wedding involved performances by numerous British Equity members, and as such, while “the footage of the ceremony was shown, the music played by Equity members was withheld—a problem that the SABC, by now adept at the practice of dubbing, easily circumvented by playing pre-recorded music performed by non-Equity members” (Evans 2014, 48).

The practice of dubbing was indeed not only a way of maintaining the government’s demand for an Afrikaans quotient on television, thereby aiding the apartheid culture industry, but also a way to remediate the flows of global culture, sometimes reworking them entirely. A fascinating example is discussed by Cobus van Staden in his discussion of the dubbing into Afrikaans of a Japanese animated version of Finnish children’s writer Tove Jansson’s Moomin novels. Van Staden writes:

Quantum Productions, the dubbing house, did not receive the customary full script in German, French or English but only the Japanese original, with a simple skeleton outline for each episode. While several of the scriptwriters were fluent in German and French, none of them knew any Japanese. They also did not have the time to consult the original Moomintroll novels. The production team therefore used the skeleton outlines they received to write new dialogue and even subplots to fit the animation. In addition, they renamed the characters and invented their motivations, personalities and modes of expression from scratch. (Van Staden 2014, 6)

This amounted to a major rewriting of the animated series to the extent that, as Van Staden notes, “the character of Too-Tickey (Tjoek-Tjoek in Afrikaans) [who] is female in the original novels as well as in the Japanese version, [became] male in the Afrikaans version, due to her short hair” (Van Staden 2014, 7).

The tenacity of white South Africa to keep up-to-date with Western popular culture ensured that these alternative routes of cultural circulation remained open. These examples complicate the idea that “Television programmes reflecting the relatively liberal ethos of the 1970s in America were dramatically out of kilter with prevailing white South African representations of race, gender and sexuality” (Hyslop 2000, 39). While this was certainly part of the story, I will focus on the concurrence or simultaneity of global culture and its South African mediations to show how particularly U.S. popular culture both challenged and upheld racial representations in South Africa. To this extent, I agree with Hyslop’s argument that “[c]onfronted with a new set of racial representations, white viewers somehow had to reconcile them with their pre-existing conceptions. And at the same time as white South Africans were absorbing and internalizing the consumerist values of the American soap operas, during the 1980s, television was also bringing them news of their increasing rejection by the US, as support for sanctions mounted” (Hyslop 2000, 39). But the extent to which these cultural products echoed local racist conceptions of blackness and whiteness and the extent to which the apartheid cultural industry mediated viewers’ experiences of these productsFootnote 2 suggests that the concurrence of whiteness in popular culture in South Africa was a far more complex matter than Hyslop’s argument accounts for.

Thus, despite international calls for the cultural isolation of the country, international popular culture flowed relatively freely, if mediated in various ways, in South Africa, and in turn played a crucial role in mediating white projections of what constituted European and American life. This global concurrence of white life—facilitated by popular culture—fractures the idea that apartheid was a limited, geographically and politically contained and isolated event. To articulate this idea through a theoretical register, we can turn to Jacques Derrida, who in his preface to Spectres of Marx (which was dedicated to South African communist party leader, Chris Hani)Footnote 3 touches on the global dimensions of apartheid (Derrida 1994). As Monica Popescu has pointed out, Derrida—articulating a philosophy of global responsibility—viewed events taking place in apartheid South Africa as standing “in metonymic relation to those in the world as a whole” (Popescu 2007, 2). Derrida writes: “At once part, cause, effect, example, what is happening there translates what takes place here, always here, wherever one is and wherever one looks, closest to home” (1994, xv). Derrida’s collapsing of geo-political space insists on a sharpening of global responsibility. While the anti-apartheid solidarity movement certainly felt a sense of responsibility to respond to the immorality of what was happening in South Africa, Derrida’s version of responsibility was never fully potentiated in that movement that tended, on the whole, to see the South African state as an exceptional one, rather than one that was sustained by international relations, as well as cultural and ideological resonances. In the analysis that follows, I attempt to potentiate Derrida’s metonymic reading of South African apartheid by considering the ways in which apartheid, as a political and cultural formation, was folded into its concurrent global context. I will, thus, be reading whiteness in apartheid South Africa as concurrent, rather than isolated, as resonant with, rather than radically different to, global forms of whiteness that dominated popular culture at that time.

An Incomplete Isolation: Censorship and the Cultural Boycott

There were two processes driving South African isolation under apartheid. The first was the apartheid state’s paranoia about the transformative—even revolutionary—potential of the media, as reflected in the state’s censorship board; and the second was the increasing intensity of the call for a cultural boycott and economic sanctions by the international anti-apartheid solidarity movement. The state’s paranoia about mass media is nowhere more evident than in the following statement by the minister of defense, Magnus Malan, in 1981:

The primary aim of the enemy is to unnerve through maximum publicity. In this regard we will have to obtain the co-operation of the South African media in not giving excessive and unjustified publicity to the terrorists and thus playing into their hands. (cited in Tomaselli 1988, 20)

This anxiety about the media’s complicity with the “enemy” was part of a longstanding wariness of the apartheid state towards mass media. A pertinent example is, as mentioned above, the state’s refusal to implement television in the country until as late as 1976, making South Africa one of the last countries in the world to get TV. As television scholar Ron Krabill notes, the denial of television as an “…explicit attempt on the part of the apartheid regime to resist transnational media flows—particularly representations of the civil rights movement in the United States—… exacerbated many White South Africans’ (particularly English speakers’) sense of exclusion from the international community” (Krabill 2010, 11–12). Thus, by the time that television was introduced, it became invested by white South Africans with a sense of global participation. Given the severe economic imbalance that marked South African social life in the 1970s and 80s, the projected audience of television was for the most part white: a point reinforced by the fact that “as late as 1986 approximately three-quarters of television viewers were White South Africans” (Krabill 2010, 6), and the fact that when television started, it was broadcast only in Afrikaans and English and in white urban areas (Evans 2014, 37).

Despite the various mediations discussed earlier, television in South Africa in the 70s and 80s was the standard fare of, largely, US sitcoms and series enjoyed all over the English-speaking world. During the years of South Africa’s increasing global disrepute, white South Africans were coming home from school and work to shows like Dallas, Dynasty, Silver Spoons, Growing Pains, Family Ties, and Who’s the Boss; to action dramas like The A-Team, Airwolf, Macgyver, Knight Rider, Magnum P.I., and Miami Vice; to sci-fi series like Star Trek, Mork and Mindy, V, Tales from the Dark Side; and to a host of children’s animated series based on European classics.Footnote 4 Because the apartheid state was deeply anxious about the extent to which alternative racial forms of social organization might appeal to white South African audiences, it saw the representational sphere of popular culture as a significant threat in this regard. This anxiety had a longer legal history in South Africa, where, as early as 1931, film scenes representing the “intermingling between Europeans and non-Europeans” were banned (Tomaselli 1988, 14). This was amended in 1974, where the racial basis of censorship was cancelled, but the right to restrict films “to persons in a specific category…or at a specific place” (Tomaselli 1988, 24) was retained. Thus, Black South Africans would not see films representing the civil rights movement, for example. Also, content representing sexual relationships across the color bar was still banned, as were shows/films that were overtly critical of the apartheid state.

Interestingly enough, this flood of popular television that graced South African screens in the 1970s and 80s, all of which was carefully vetted by the state before being cleared for airing, seldom transgressed even the draconian laws of 1931. The state’s paranoia towards popular culture is clear in the 1974 amendment to the censorship act, where we read: “The more popular the material, the more likely it is to be undesirable” (from “Guidelines with regard to section 47 (2) Act 42 of 1974. Addendum to Appeal Board Case 43/82,” cited in Tomaselli 1988, 24).Footnote 5 Yet, despite this anxiety about the popular, it is extraordinary to note that most of the content on white television and film theaters in South Africa under apartheid actually met with the censorship board’s approval. The first dimension of this observation is that there was a significant amount of television content coming into the country that confirmed a structured absence of Black life. The second dimension, as I try to illustrate in a close-reading of CE3K below, takes this structured absence as a given, but also suggests that we must read South African reception of this popular culture in ways that were specific to that particular time and location.

One example of how popular culture became refracted by the prism of apartheid can be elaborated through considering some of the seeming contradictions to the structured absence of Blackness on South African television—think, for example, of Webster, Miami Vice, The A-Team, and The Cosby Show, all of which had Black protagonists that made overt in-character statements resisting apartheid ideology. Ron Krabill observes that one of the most notable contradictions was that “at the height of apartheid’s States of Emergency in the mid-1980s, the most popular television show among White South Africans was The Cosby Show” (Krabill 2010, 1). Krabill’s discussion covers the contradictions inherent in this fact, most significantly the absurdity of the fact that because images of Nelson Mandela were banned at this time, “most South Africans could recognize Bill Cosby’s face, but almost no one knew what the figurehead of the anti-apartheid struggle actually looked like” (Krabill 2010, 1).

For Krabill, the popularity of The Cosby Show speaks to the transformative potential of the medium of television during this time. He writes that

First, television made possible a transformation in the subjectivities and identifications of White South Africans, and this transformation in turn altered the nature of politics in late-apartheid South Africa and continues to reverberate through current efforts towards democratic consolidation. Second, television served as an initial site of negotiation in which the absence of Black South Africans in public life was first dismantled, thus allowing for White South Africans to imagine themselves as part of the same polity with Black South Africans long before the formal inclusion of Black South Africans in institutional practice. (Krabill 2010, 5)

This point is significant but should be tempered by a second factor: that is, white South Africa’s almost obsessive orientation of its cultural identity away from Africa and towards the global north. It was this cultural orientation towards the global north that created the largest fracture in what apartheid Prime Minister P.W. Botha called South Africa’s “total strategy” to meet the “total onslaught” by an international community increasingly critical of apartheid (cited in Tomaselli 1988, 20). What Botha and others did not fully account for was the extent to which white South Africa’s desire to be included in an international community might undermine—albeit inadvertently—its commitment to the project of apartheid (as argued by Evans 2014; Hyslop 2000; Krabill 2010; Nixon 1994).

While Krabill argues, then, that American television allowed white South Africans to “appropriate the language and attitude of ‘racial tolerance’” (2010, 13), I would argue that a more obvious point of identification was these shows’ popularity in the U.S. Key to my point here is the fact that this need to identify with “the people of the world”—as a project of performing a distinctly non-African modernity—was not always at odds with the racist tenets of apartheid that construed Black life as “pre-modern” and saw whites as the bearers of modernity to Africa. This is where we start seeing the consequences of the mise en abyme of global whiteness: South African whiteness might have imagined transformative relations across the color bar because of American television, but it did so in part to articulate its distance from its own historical situation and to establish a troubling distinction between African Blackness (posited as pre-modern) and American/European Blackness (posited as “civilized”). As one (anonymous) commentator puts it in Krabill’s book: “I don’t think that The Cosby Show was in any way subversive of late-apartheid ideology. I don’t think it made the government of P.W. Botha or the SABC in the least bit uncomfortable. The Huxtables—so charming and approachable, so respectably middle class, so segregated (very few Whites in the show to my recollection, the Huxtable kids going to black colleges)—sat very well with how White South Africa wanted to see Black people…. Theo’s [‘Free Nelson Mandela’] posterFootnote 6 was a small price to pay for these messages” (Krabill 2010, 104).

Complicity and Concurrence

Before embarking on my reading of how CE3K accrued meaning in its reception in apartheid South Africa, I wish to distinguish between complicity, which I see as an active participation in the continuation of the apartheid regime through economic or political support, and concurrence of whiteness, as I am using it here.

To begin with complicity: the United Nations committed itself early to a cultural boycott on South Africa, requesting in 1968 that “All states and organizations suspend cultural, educational, sporting, and other exchanges with the racist regime and with other organizations or institutions in South Africa which practice apartheid” (U.N. Resolution 2396, adopted by the General Assembly on December 2, 1968; cited in Beaubien 1982, 7). Yet, as Camille Bratton (1977) and Michael Beaubien (1982) establish, in the entire voting history of the United States on the question of sanctions and boycott, the country was singular in its refusal to back calls for sanctions against South Africa during the 1970s and 80s. Gail Ann Reed further notes: “It was the only country that did not vote ‘yes’ on a single southern Africa resolution put to a roll-call vote” (Reed 1977 in Beaubien 1982, 8). This voting record is less surprising when one considers American economic interest in South Africa at the beginning of the 1980s, when the “United States [was] South Africa’s largest foreign market and its leading source of imports” (Beaubien 1982, 9).Footnote 7

The lines of such complicity in the economics of the distribution of popular culture to South Africa will keep emerging as I begin my reading of concurrent whiteness through an analysis of a single scene in CE3K. As Arnold Shepperson and Keyan Tomaselli point out, film attendance had plummeted in South Africa after the introduction of television in 1976. But after the merger of two of the largest distribution houses, by 1979 (when CE3K was released in South Africa), “the cinema-going public had increased to levels greater than before 1976” (Shepperson and Tomaselli 2002, 65–66). It is probably fair to say that as the events of 1976 in South Africa intensified international critique and calls for sanctions, so too were white South African anxieties about cultural isolation deepened. A consequent dialectical fetishizing of cultural products from the global north could, in part, explain the surge in film going in the late 1970s.

We should further note that the late 1970s were the years of Hollywood’s science fiction boom, with films like Star Wars (1978) and Superman (1978) generating “a modern movie phenomenon [that rewrote] the economics of the Hollywood blockbuster and…heralded the age of […] the ‘megabuck’ movie” (Tomaselli 1988, 154).Footnote 8 The product was not only the film, but the merchandise that accompanied it. And the consumption of these products represented South Africa’s inclusion in global flows and consumption of culture. Keyan Tomaselli discusses a pertinent example of the unique merchandising strategy for the film Superman (1978), where merchandise was sold in advance of the film’s release. In this case, Warner Brothers sold local manufacturing licenses on the Superman brand to various South African manufacturers. The products included “Superman play suits, pajamas, T-shirts, sheets, duvet covers, pillowcases, transfers, mugs, cups, plates, dolls, toy guns, bubble bath, soap, hair shampoo, toothpaste, bumper stickers and so on. […] Local manufacturers found consumer response so great that they were able to export Superman merchandise to countries like the United Kingdom, Australia and the Philippines” (Tomaselli 1988, 155). While the South African consumer purchased this merchandise as a confirmation of his or her participation in the economies of a distinctly anti-communist global whiteness, the international consumer of South African products, even if unwittingly, supported apartheid’s economy.

This is the context in which CE3K arrived in South Africa, itself already embedded in the fetishized commodity culture that this sci-fi era spawned.Footnote 9 Indeed, if we recall the profound disappointment that South Africans felt at their exclusion from the moon-landing, we can also speculate that fictional space worlds spoke directly to a sense of global participation in space technology. Furthermore, that the film was directed by Spielberg, whose Jaws had enjoyed massive success in South Africa, and that it was scored by John Williams (and 1979 was the year that Dolby Stereo sound was released worldwide), all added to the film’s reputation as an exemplar of the most advanced technologies in the industry. Because the film was released with a two-year time lag in South Africa, it arrived with all these credentials—including two Oscar awards—already in place.Footnote 10

Furthermore, to a white South African audience, this popular-cultural phenomenon was a projected alternate reality, one which allowed a radical dissociation from the contemporary realities of apartheid. This flight from reality cannot be seen in neutral political terms. The hyper-technology promised by films of the sci-fi boom resonated with white South African discourses of modernity that posited Africa as existing in a time before modernity. Technology was the overdetermined signifier of 1980s modernity: from the Walkman to the computer-game console, and what these mediated for white South Africa was culture from elsewhere. Add to that the aesthetics of science fiction and the movie theatre—a womb of sound and spectacle—becomes utterly dissociated from the concurrent historical circumstances existing outside its technological membrane.

To consider what it meant, then, for white South Africans in 1979 to watch this film, as an enactment of their participation in global media flows, I turn to Mieke Bal’s notion that the site of political analysis of a work of art is the moment of “sentient engagement,” which is to say, art is “empty as long as the act of viewing is not inherent to it, and that act is called upon to do political work” (2007, 23). If we use this idea as our starting point, asking what the sentient encounter of the white South African viewer with the film CE3K might have been, we enable a complex reading of the affective significance of participating in a global cultural space that imagined cultural life beyond the borders of the apartheid state. This might have included transformative moments, as discussed above, but the popularity of these films suggests that the affective experience had very little of the discomfort that the challenge of ideological transformation would surely include. Instead, the ease with which these “sentient encounters” occurred must speak to a harmony between white South African viewers and these American blockbuster films. That is, these films did not only appeal to the urge to flee the political realities of life in South Africa but also upheld the fantasy of a white suburban ideal that, I argue, was the banal substrate of apartheid life.

In this reading, I am not interested in the intentions and contexts of the film’s production so much as in the limits those meanings collide with in the context of the film’s screening in apartheid South Africa. That is to say, one would be hard-pressed to show that the film is in any way overtly complicit in apartheid ideology. Indeed, Spielberg himself is and was clearly no supporter of apartheid. In 1987, he co-signed a letter sent to Ronald Reagan requesting a cultural boycott of South Africa.Footnote 11 Furthermore, CE3K is notable for its conscious resistance to prior science fiction tropes of imperial conquest. In this film, it is the aliens that seek out humans, rather than the bold travel to the frontier that we recognize in films and television programs like Star Trek from this era. The aliens also turn out, here, to be peaceful beings whose intelligence and technologies far surpass those of their human counterparts. The film operates against the grain of both colonial metaphors and, one might argue, the ideal of the white middle-class American family. The male adult protagonist of the film, Roy Neary (played by Richard Dreyfuss), is not happy in his family circumstances and ultimately leaves this safe, domestic sphere for an adventure into outer space, while the lead female protagonist is a single, divorced mother, Jillian Guiler (played by Melinda Dillon).

More importantly to my discussion here, the film is not racist in its depiction of Black characters; on the contrary (and partly justifying my choice of it), it could even be said to provide a transformative representation in a scene in which an African American actor plays the role of an air traffic controller, something that would have been unthinkable in apartheid South Africa. Yet, this scene loses significance when we consider the fact that it is one of only two scenes representing African Americans in the film. The second scene representing African Americans in CE3K is the one that I wish to concentrate on here, keeping in mind what sort of “sentient engagement” a South African audience may have had with it.

In this scene, the protagonist, Roy Neary, obsessed with a mysterious hill that, he will later discover, is to be the site of the humans’ close encounter with the aliens, starts to build a replica of the mound in his home. Desperate for materials to build with, Roy goes outside into the entirely white (if we judge from the neighbors presented in the scene), newly built suburb and starts throwing dirt, garbage, the neighbor’s goose fence, anything he can get his hands on, into the house. That this is a newly built suburb highlights the suburban, capitalist promises of the era: the neighbors have a boat in their driveway; the family’s television is on, drawing our attention to it; the children all have bicycles; the Neary family car is parked directly outside the house. In his desperate attempt to find materials for his structure, Roy Neary breaks all the codes of suburban life, and his wife’s response shows this: rather than showing concern about what is ostensibly a total psychological breakdown, she is embarrassed by his behavior (and the scene ends with her packing her children into the car and driving off, never to be seen in the film again).

If we zoom in on one particular aspect of this scene, we notice something that might go unseen altogether: at one point, Roy struggles with a garbage collector, pulling a full garbage can out of the man’s hands so that he can use the contents in his replica. The man gives up the struggle, lets Roy empty the garbage, shrugs, and continues towards the neighbor’s house. It is a very short moment in a sequence of far greater significance in terms of the protagonist’s psychological development, but one that warrants reflection. Both of the garbage collectors are Black. This might not be worth commenting on except for the fact that, as I mentioned above, other than the traffic control scene, these are the only Black characters represented in the film. The scene, a tableau of aspirant suburban, modern life in an entirely white neighborhood, with the detritus of that life being managed by Black men in tattered, dirty, overalls, could have been taken directly out of white suburban life in South Africa in the 1970s. The scene would glide smoothly and without disjuncture into the racial imaginary of South African audiences. The sentient engagement, in Mieke Bal’s sense, of white audiences with a scene like this one (and these of course pervaded American film and television at the time), was one of implicit confirmation of their lives, lives lived at a remove from South Africa’s Black majority who lived only under the conditions of a “bare life.” The scene is only remarkable insofar as it would have gone entirely without notice in South Africa’s racial imaginary at the time, as with so much else in the racial assumptions of popular culture coming into the country.

To be sure, this is just one scene in one film. Yet, part of the challenge of interpreting the political valence of whiteness is, as whiteness studies has often observed, isolating scenes for analysis in the thick, persistent, and pervasive stream of white dominance and privilege. This echoes what Lynn Spigel states of television depictions of space when she writes: “…more than just transmitting a privileged view of the universe, television offered the American public a particular mode of comprehension. It represented space, like everything else, as a place that the white middle-class family could claim as its own” (1991, 206). This scene, being set on earth, is even more overt in illustrating a ubiquitous assumption, in an American visual lexicon, that garbage collection is Black work. But more than that, those assumptions of race thicken as they flow into the prism of apartheid South Africa where the scene confirms the state’s ideological apparatus that wishes to keep Black South Africans in bare life. The fact that the garbage collectors go almost unnoticed in a film dominated by white representation speaks to a structural absence of Black characters that would have easily slipped into South African white life. Concurrences would read the complicities and overlaps of South African whiteness with global racial and racist views and, as a method, would require us to rethink the comforting narrative of South African apartheid existing in a state of moral isolation. It would be a form of Derridean responsibility towards understanding these lines of complicity and would encourage media studies to complicate the narrative that global popular culture simply played a consciousness-raising role for white South Africans.

Concurrent Whiteness

To mine the full significance of what it might mean to bring the concept of concurrences to bear on dominant ideology, I wish to turn, briefly and by way of conclusion, to Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the banality of evil in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Arendt notes Adolf Eichmann’s seeming stupidity, his inability “to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else” (2006, 47). What emerges in the gap between thinking and thinking from the standpoint of the other is, of course, morality. For Arendt, Eichmann’s “empty talk” (47) and tendency to express himself in “officialese” and clichés (46) evidences his incapacity for moral thought, a failure of moral imagination. The absence of moral imagination, paired with the reality that Eichmann was spared “the gruesome sights [, he] never actually attended a mass execution by shooting, he never actually watched the gassing process, or the selection of those for work” (87), means that Eichmann was able to sustain the immoral norm simply by not seeing, by not questioning, by not thinking. This is the banality of evil, to be sure, the total failure of imagining what is happening, concurrently, in parallel to one’s life, the failure to understand one’s moral responsibility for sustaining those parallel existences.

I do not want to draw facile comparisons between two very different, even if morally similar, systems as historically different as the Holocaust and apartheid. But Arendt’s observations about banal evil are highly pertinent to my topic. This is not only because like so many German supporters of the Nazi party, who failed—or rather refused—to see/imagine/think the parallel lives of Jews, South African whites built their lives in the easy parallel spaces that the apartheid system had enabled. As such, they belonged to what Arendt calls a “new type of criminal, who is in actual fact hostis generis humani, [who thus] commits his crimes under the circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong” (274).

My aim has been to illustrate the complicity of concurrent whiteness that dominated the flows of popular culture during apartheid, not because it was overtly racist at the level of representation but because it so blandly and banally reproduced the structural absence of Black life, which at worst confirmed the normalcy of segregated white life under apartheid. To live a concurrent life, establishing through whatever means possible a wall between oneself and the other who suffers as a result of one’s privilege, this is Arendt’s “word-and-thought-defying banality of evil” (250, emphasis in the original). While nowadays the afterlife of apartheid is often only depicted in extreme registers, for example, in Anders Behring Breivik’s reference to Afrikaner Nationalism in his notorious manifesto, or in the use of the term to describe the Israeli occupation in Palestine, these more extreme registers of apartheid’s legacies miss the banal versions of whiteness that enjoyed, and often still enjoy, unfettered circulation, and that are in their banality all the more difficult to pinpoint and mobilize against. To relegate the history of South African apartheid only to the spaces of extremism is to miss the banal—and global—registers in which such moral failures occur.