Unstable Allegories of Eviction and Othering in District 9 Anonymous College

As Hollywood’s first and only science-fiction blockbuster set in South Africa’s economic capital, District 9 was subjected upon release to cursory analyses by critics who are superficially familiar with the history and modern social context of the film’s country. These reviews unilaterally assumed the film’s central message to be an allegorical recapitulation of apartheid, the system of institutionalized racism that was officially upheld from 1948 to 1994. Exemplary reviews from Washington D.C.’s NPR, London’s The Guardian, and Johannesburg’s Mail & Guardian respectively refer to District 9 as “an apartheid allegory,” a film with “allegorical overtones” of apartheid, and an “allegory of apartheid and xenophobia.” In all three articles, the insistence on an allegorical reading is drawn from the film’s focus on a segregation-motivated forced eviction of a non-human population and a proposed historic parallel with evictions of South Africa’s urban non-white populace. Academic articles written later, such as Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’ “Apartheid, Spectacle and the Real: From District Six to District 9,” and Michael Valdez Moses’ “The Strange Ride of Wikus Van de Merwe,” also fall into the same pattern of assuming allegorical...