Prisons of the Imagination: Governmentality and Race in Science Fiction Film and TV Policing and Prison Narratives

Who owns the imaginative space of the future? Who controls, shapes, and influences the narratives and images that we as a culture are offered as raw materials for the play of the imagination? What might be the social, discursive, and ideological bounds upon the popular imagination that restrict what kinds of dreams are permissible, or even possible, within the neoliberal order? This project proposes that some insight into these enormous questions may be gleaned through asking a narrower question about how representations of future spaces operate within visual media. Specifically, the present study concentrates on TV and film texts that connect racial formations to depictions of policing and incarceration. Through a combination of textual analysis, representational analysis, and media industry and production analysis, this project seeks to shed light on the “disimaginative” (Giroux 2014) potential of futuristic crime and punishment narratives. Case studies include racial representation and technopolicing in the RoboCop reboot movie (2014); the theme of punishment as a public mass-media spectacle in episodes of the TV series Black Mirror (2013, 2017); and themes of imprisonment and criminality in the utopian universe of Star Trek. The thesis concludes by considering how independent and Afrofuturist media open new ways of imagining restorative and transformative justice in future imaginary spaces. This thesis argues that the future imaginary space is a contested territory, and paying attention to how this contest plays out within visual media can offer insights into cultural dynamics surrounding racial formations, political economics, and the workings of the carceral state. Even as science fiction is often celebrated (or at least nominated) as a space to challenge hegemonic power, it is simultaneously a space in which those same ideological forces can be bolstered and made to seem inevitable. At its heart, this project seeks to understand the failure of our visually mediated modes of future imagination-making to realize their potential to open new ways of visualizing social justice. Highlighting the narrowness of the popular-media future imaginary can facilitate a reconsideration of what that space could be: a site for progressive visions that challenge dominant power structures. This investigation can help shed light on where, precisely, the limits of future-imaginary potential lie within popular media, why those limits lie where they do, what precisely lies beyond those limits, and why that space indeed appears to be off-limits even as other progressive themes are permitted to appear. This tension between the liberatory rhetorical potential of futuristic progress narratives and the reality of the sort of future narratives that get made into movies and TV shows lies at the center of this investigation.