AGATHE LOUIS
It is impossible to talk about The Little Mermaid without addressing the latest controversy. Earlier this year, Walt Disney Pictures announced that their upcoming musical fantasy film, a reboot of the animated film The Little Mermaid, would be released in May 2023. They also revealed that the main character, Ariel the mermaid, would be played by the black singer Halle Bailey. Following this announcement, trolls took the internet in fury criticising The Little Mermaid’s casting choice. The main criticism was that Bailey was black, unlike the original cartoon character, making this new version of the film “inaccurate”.
The backlash was clearly rooted in racism. Fans of singer, alongside other people, rapidly called this out defending Disney’s. They argued that Bailey had the credentials required to play the part. It was also highlighted that “accuracy” was a poor excuse for racism as black mermaids were part of pre-colonial folklore in various places, including Africa.
Beyond yet another pop-culture controversy, this event touched on two recurring topics. First, on the question of representation in the media, and second on how blackness remains seen as a “troubling vision” in the visual cinematic field, in the words of Nicole Fleetwood.
Discussions on the importance of representation, diversity and inclusion in the media suggest that representing diverse groups of people in entertainment, adverts or news reports, for instance, can disrupt harmful stereotypes – especially for people of marginalised groups. It bolsters children’s self-esteem and creates a sense of belonging in minority groups. Representation matters and it is political.
Understood within the US context, Bailey’s casting can be interpreted as a step forward in normalising blackness on the big screen. The film (re)centers black women, a historically marginalised social category, within Hollywood – a white-centric industry. Additionally, it transcends negative stereotypes often associated to black womanhood, such as that of “the servant”, “the angry black woman” or “single motherhood”, to name a few.
However, let’s be clear on one thing: representation will not resolve the negative cultural, political and material constructs of “blackness”. For instance, black people are still killed by police at a higher rate than other groups in the US. Analyses of federal, state and local data show that black people have experienced a disproportionate burden of COVID-19 cases and deaths. African American students are less likely than white students to have access to courses that will get them ready for university. The list goes on.
While having Bailey playing the role of Ariel may be a step forward by centering the visual presence of black women in a big production, it is only a starting ground. It does little to challenge a history of racist and gendered structural oppression which still affect black people’s lived experiences.
A failure of solidarity
In recent years I have been struck by the increasing number of social enterprises led by many colonial heirs/esses. I am happy to see the advent of some innovation, especially in the case of (arguably) sustainable processes. However, I can’t help but see these initiatives as performative and representing minimal efforts for societal transformation.
While all these social businesses central rhetoric revolves around engendering social change by establishing practices alleviating social inequalities, they fail to address the cause of Mauritians’ pauperisation throughout history. Many of these companies are self-described as social enterprises seeking to empower people by solving social and environmental issues. They argue to be motivated by values including, but not limited to, empathy and dignity.
Across their communication material, one thing is however simultaneously hyper-visible and invisibilised: our country’s social, economic and ethical foundations rooted in colonialism, alongside processes of dispossession and appropriation. For instance, Colette LePetitcorps engages with the ways in which many black creole women’s time and bodies have been appropriated through domestic labour in colonial households. Working long hours for a pittance, or for free at times, these women were left with little time to care for their own children, let alone gain access to means of production and accumulate capital. Colonial homes were therefore a site of alienation for these women who were denied empathy and dignity. As such, I interrogate what “empathy” and “dignity” mean for these social enterprises and their predominantly white board members, when their hegemony relies on the proliferation of white affective economies: emotions binding together subjects and communities through circulation and exchange.
This apparent disavowal of genealogies chimes with Gloria Wekker’s concept of “white innocence”: the claim of innocence by white people who claim not to know – but also refusing to know – that racial discrimination and colonial violence still coexist. In so-called “postcolonial”, or “post-racial”, imaginaries white innocence becomes a way of safeguarding hegemonic legacies by naturalising a way of being in the world. From naturalising organisational rules and silently cementing policies, to framing what (who) we find attractive and who deserves to live – or die. Often, this ignorance frames our conceptualisation of dignity, solidarity and self-determination without considering how colonial thought shaped them in the first place. Failing to acknowledge this while building a philanthrocapitalist project supporting those who have been historically marginalised and oppressed under racial capitalism is, in my opinion, misleading (at best); especially at a time when discussions around reparations are prevalent.
The continuation of the colonial ethos is not limited to white people. It extends to some members of our government and other politicians. Like some colonial heirs/esses, they also appear to capitalise on the legacy of racial capitalism under the guise of “solidarity”. This is evidenced by the countless times some politicians have made a spectacle of charity. Visually, these events are often characterised by the testimony of working-class black creole women expressing gratitude to their benefactors. These acts of “solidarity” have become one of the most prevalent ways of generating political engagement in Mauritius. Yet, they depend on the continued political economic and social exclusion of certain social categories and are tactic of soft power deployed to sustain political hegemony.
It can be said that those politicians and colonial successors reflect two sides of the same coin. They cultivate power by capitalising on sustained amnesia, erasure, dispossession and appropriation. They stand for a murderous system of extraction and indifference. Intertwined with neoliberalism, their praxis fails to show true solidarity while capitalising on historical social and racial hierarchies. Taken together, this redirects the conversation away from basic debates of skin colour. Instead, it refocuses it on these actors’ commitment to social justice to beg the question: how bad do they want to fix things?
Despite its shortfalls, The Little Mermaid’s centering of a black woman invites us to challenge and expand social imaginaries. Somehow, it gives us permission to imagine that leading characters can be (visually) reshuffled in favour of the underdogs for once. On the other hand, those holding economic and political power in Mauritius appear to foreclose the expansion of our imaginations on shared national politics, alongside the possibility of reimagining solidarity, dignity and self-determination for all.
A generative reading
I have been made to understand that I am a coward. A few weeks ago, I was reminded that leaving one’s country instead of staying and fighting for justice was an act of cowardice. Perhaps. I won’t lie, I decided to leave Mauritius a year ago to give myself the chance to expand my knowledge. I had lost my job and foresaw limited prospects. I often feel like I had no other choice: in Mauritius, people like me are a troubling vision, and we are rarely allowed to have much aspiration. I left without a safety net to start a new life. But I am also a firm believer in taking a step back when it is needed. So, I left to understand the causes of injustice in my country.
In that sense, this piece should be read as a generative, as opposed to an evaluative, piece. To Olivia Rutazibwa a generative reading is characterised by a certain open-ended, non-zero-sum game and non-competitive logic. It is an invitation to interrogate our world through a decolonial lens. Beyond using the term “decolonial” as that new cool buzz word, or as a rhetoric demanding to “go back” to pre-colonial times, this essay proposes to oxygenate our knowledge, expand it and bring conversations to the surface. From there, further insights can be cultivated.
I suggest rethinking notions of solidarity in a way that resists, ruptures and disrupts the naturalisation of colonial and neoliberal ethos. It is not simply a question of epiderma, representation, identity politics or culture wars. Social justice is a multi-sided process. It demands greater accountability, self-discipline, creativity and freedom from all of us, alongside material well-being.
It is perhaps in thinking of the (im)possibility of alternative social imaginaries – in our unfinished and complex relations – that we should commit to a new analytic framing of our social interactions. Beyond cosmetic changes and the colour line, the right to solidarity, empathy and dignity ought to be (re)imagined despite latent colonial desires hiding in plain sight.
