Seventh International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

In this paper, I frame the January 6, 2021 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol Building as the predictable culmination of decades of agitation felt by the white settler class in the U.S. I offer a theory of settler colonial media psychology, a mode of narrative production that relies on the manufacture and circulation of colonial subjectivities to order the sets of political relationships between land, people, and governing institutions. In this mode, the settler subject, endowed with unlimited individual sovereignty, commits to a life of “self-defensive” violence against perceived threats to their freedom: violence against non-white others, violence against the environment, and violence against the central government. I describe how the third violence especially has become a common trope in popular U.S. narratives, particularly in the extraterrestrial invasion genre where the anxieties and hopes of a ruined government at the hands of alien invaders usually manifests in a brighter settler future. I look at films like Mars Attacks! (1996), Independence Day (1996), and Dark City (1998) as evidence of a decades-old anti-government attitude and the genre as the vehicle for the narratives of settler agitation. Finally, I compare the narratives undergirding these films with those leading up to and emerging out of the events of the January 6th insurrection to make a case that popular culture is often inscribed with cultural coding for colonial subjectivity.