District 9 by Neill Blomkamp: Derrida's Spectrality and the Alien Migrant Crisis

ABSTRACT:I explore the relation between Neill Blomkamp's science fictional District 9 and Derrida's philosophy in the light of South African history. My aim is to show that this film tells the story of the twenty-first century migrant crisis in Johannesburg, exploring past, actual, or future xenophobic/racist experiences and events, especially those of apartheid and of possible future systems of segregation anticipated in the movie. While Blomkamp was filming District 9 in Johannesburg in 2008, the logic of apartheid was reactivated during a migrant crisis, proving that the ghosts of the past continue to haunt the country. Many South-African natives were hostile to newcomers from Zimbabwe in search of job opportunities and arriving by the thousands every month. I use Derrida's notion of spectrality to shed a new light on the dialectical construction of historical temporality in Blomkamp's aesthetics. On the same subject of history, I unveil the allegorical dimension of the two main characters in District 9, Christopher Johnson and Wikus van der Merwe, to show how their destiny echoes those of the South African freedom fighters, thus telling implicitly the story of this country. They propose a solution to a "3.0 version" of apartheid possibly in the making. I finally show that xenophobia transcends eras, borders, and races in District 9, as an ultimate lesson from Blomkamp to avoid errors of the past.