Doctor Who and Race - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783200367 ISBN 13: 9781783200368

Publisher: Intellect, 2013

Synopsis

Doctor Who is the longest running science fiction television series in the world and is regularly watched by millions of people across the globe. Though its scores of fans adore the show with cult-like devotion, the fan-contributors to this book argue that there is an uncharted dimension to Doctor Who. Bringing together diverse perspectives on race and its representation in Doctor Who, this anthology offers new understandings of the cultural significance of race in the program—how the show’s representations of racial diversity, colonialism, nationalism, and racism affect our daily lives and change the way we relate to each other.

An accessible introduction to critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and other race-related academic fields, the 23 contributors deftly combine examples of the popular cultural icon and personal reflections to provide an analysis that is at once approachable but also filled with the intellectual rigor of academic critique.

About this title

About the Author

Lindy Orthia is a lecturer at the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, the Australian National University. She has examined intersections between science, ideology and Doctor Who in several publications.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Doctor Who and Race

By Lindy Orthia

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78320-036-8

Contents

Acknowledgements, 
Introduction, 
PART I: The Doctor, his companions and race, 
Chapter 1: The white Doctor Fire Fly, 
Chapter 2: Too brown for a fair praise: The depiction of racial prejudice as cultural heritage in Doctor Who Iona Yeager, 
Chapter 3: Conscious colour-blindness, unconscious racism in Doctor Who companions Linnea Dodson, 
Chapter 4: Doctor Who, cricket and race: The Peter Davison years Amit Gupta, 
Chapter 5: Humanity as a white metaphor Quiana Howard and Robert Smith?, 
Chapter 6: "You can't just change what I look like without consulting me!": The shifting racial identity of the Doctor Mike Hernandez, 
PART II: Diversity and representation in casting and characterization, 
Chapter 7: No room for old-fashioned cats: Davies era Who and interracial romance Emily Asher-Perrin, 
Chapter 8: When white boys write black: Race and class in the Davies and Moffat eras Rosanne Welch, 
Chapter 9: Baby steps: A modest solution to Asian under-representation in Doctor Who Stephanie Guerdan, 
Chapter 10: That was then, this is now: How my perceptions have changed George Ivanoff, 
Chapter 11: "One of us is yellow": Doctor Fu Manchu and The Talons of Weng-Chiang Kate Orman, 
PART III: Colonialism, imperialism, slavery and the diaspora, 
Chapter 12: Inventing America: The Aztecs in context Leslie McMurtry, 
Chapter 13: The Ood as a slave race: Colonial continuity in the Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire Erica Foss, 
Chapter 14: Doctor Who and the critique of western imperialism John Vohlidka, 
Chapter 15: Through coloured eyes: An alternative viewing of postcolonial transition Vanessa de Kauwe, 
PART IV: Xenophobia, nationalism and national identities, 
Chapter 16: The allegory of allegory: Race, racism and the summer of 2011 Alec Charles, 
Chapter 17: Doctor Who and the racial state: Fighting National Socialism across time and space Richard Scully, 
Chapter 18: Religion, racism and the Church of England in Doctor Who Marcus K. Harmes, 
Chapter 19: The Doctor is in (the Antipodes): Doctor Who short fiction and Australian national identity Catriona Mills, 
PART V: Race and science, 
Chapter 20: "They hate each other's chromosomes": Eugenics and the shifting racial identity of the Daleks Kristine Larsen, 
Chapter 21: Mapping the boundaries of race in The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood Rachel Morgain, 
Chapter 22: Savages, science, stagism, and the naturalized ascendancy of the Not-We in Doctor Who Lindy A. Orthia, 
Conclusion, 
About the contributors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The white Doctor

Fire Fly

Since the screening of Series 3 of the new series of Doctor Who in 2007, there has been considerable critical analysis and discussion among Doctor Who fans, particularly amongst fans of colour, of Martha Jones as a Black female character; especially of how her characterization reflects on the social position of Black women. However, there has been less discussion of the racial characteristics of the Doctor. Although the Doctor is, within the series, an alien, the character is informed by whiteness and the racial anxieties of the show's white British creators, such that the Doctor embodies a number of characteristics of whiteness.

Race is a recurrent theme in Series 3. It's used as a cipher to develop the Doctor's character and to reveal new information about the Time War and the genocide of the Time Lords. At the same time, however, race is treated in a supremely naïve manner in the season, with outright historical inaccuracy portrayed in order to reassert a normative white moral centre for the show.

The Doctor's whiteness, and the white perspective of the series, is manifest in a number of ways, but particularly in the characters for whom compassion is cultivated, the Doctor's lack of accountability in his transient adventures, and the context in which the series was created and has developed.

Race is set up as an implicit theme in Series 3 before the beginning of the season proper, in the denouement of the 2006 Christmas special episode The Runaway Bride. When the Doctor reveals to the Racnoss Empress that he is from Gallifrey, the Racnoss Empress protests that Gallifreyans wiped out the Racnoss, leading to their present predicament in having no home planet. When the Empress rejects the solution the Doctor proposes – to take all the remaining Racnoss to another planet – the Doctor chooses to commit genocide instead, completing the task his ancestors began.

This is a rather grim conclusion for a character who is typified by his willingness to give second chances, and his belief that all forms of life deserve the opportunity to survive. He has even given the Daleks such opportunities, and many others, specifically in contrast to his human companions.

However, in making the Doctor's unresolved grief, guilt and self-blame over the genocide of his people the central dramatic theme in the series, the series makes the grief, guilt and suffering of real human beings due to racial violence a vehicle for the personal angst of the Doctor. His acts of genocide are treated as important because of what they reveal about the Doctor's pain; the Racnoss' pain is not given such treatment, nor is any enemy species the Doctor chooses not to believe in, setting up clear categories of characters worthy of compassion versus those who are not. The Doctor's inconsolable grief over the death of the Master in Last of the Time Lords (2007) contrasts tellingly with his dismissiveness towards the Racnoss. It is clear that, for Russell T Davies, characters who do not resemble white men aren't important enough to grieve or feel guilt over.

In the past decade and a half in Australia this has been how issues around genocide have played out. White Australia has grappled with trying to displace guilt over committing and benefiting from the genocide of Aboriginal people, a programme that Britain shares culpability for. The national Apology to the Stolen Generations in February 2008 characterizes how white society would like to address its culpability for genocide against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia: words without efforts behind them, just as the Doctor moves on from committing genocide without remaining answerable to the societies he intervenes in.

In the second episode of the season, The Shakespeare Code (2007), the Doctor advises Martha to "just walk about like you own the place. It works for me" after she expresses concern that she might be abducted and sold as a slave because she's Black. The Doctor then retorts that he is an alien, implying that real racial inequality among humans is analogous to fictional differences between species.

This exchange betrays the ignorance of the writers about both historical racial violence and contemporary white privilege. The episode is set in 1599, while Portugal and Spain were transporting African slaves to the Americas, and Britain was establishing its colonies. Black slaves were present in London since early in the sixteenth century, making it entirely reasonable for Martha to feel anxious about her security. Furthermore, by implying that anyone could "walk about like [they] own the place" the role of whiteness is normalized – nobody else could "own the place."

It is telling that one of the greatest injustices on Earth of the last 500 years hardly merits notice from the Doctor, who'll jump at a chance to depose tyrannical regimes in alien societies; injustice in human society is natural and normal to the Doctor Who writers, as is a white man's capacity to move about anywhere unmolested.

This is particularly apparent since Doctor Who was originally conceived as a family television series that would educate school-age children about history. As it began in 1963, there were considerable cultural and intellectual upheavals around race and Britain's involvement in colonialism, accompanied by migration programmes to attract Black and South Asian migrants to Britain. Most British colonies became independent by the end of the 1960s. Postcolonial theory, multicultural education, and anti-racist social movements challenged white-centred ways of looking at the world. Yet, at the same time, nativism, Merchant-Ivory films, and the National Front gained popularity. While colonialism was being challenged politically, economically and culturally, there was an equally strong white supremacist backlash, and Doctor Who needs to be situated in terms of that conflict.

The Doctor himself as a character represents a very nineteenth-century ideal of technical mastery and intellectual detachment. He travels alone, never becoming too attached to a place or its people, and is unburdened by caregiving responsibilities. He can inhabit an imperialist Enlightenment ideal of objectivity, with no emotional attachment to the people he meets in his travels. Yet the audience is still supposed to judge that he has a sound moral compass, despite the fact that he's a mass murderer, often lies, steals and leaves people to suffer or die, usually without seeming to really care.

Series 3 re-establishes this characterization of the Doctor, but this time he works through his guilt around genocide by subjugating Black characters. Human Nature/The Family of Blood (2007) and Last of the Time Lords feature all the Jones family women as maids to Time Lords. This is deeply significant, as a major field that Black women were employed in, as slaves, indentured servants and underpaid workers, was domestic service – a site of physical, sexual, economic and cultural violence for many Black women through history. In these roles, not only were Black women economically dependent and exploited by white people, but they played a secondary role in wealthy whites' domestic life as providers of home comfort and stabilizers of family relationships, forever deferring their emotional needs and those of their families. Continual invocation of this past in contemporary media tends to reinscribe this role for Black women: the Mammy stereotype.

The Doctor's silent acceptance of Martha, her mother and sister in subservient roles, echoes the position wider white society prefers for people of colour: even in the process of liberation, even anti-racist liberation, they are secondary to white, male heroes. Like Martha walking the Earth for a year to liberate humans from the Master's tyranny in Last of the Time Lords, people of colour are expected to laud the power of white male heroes to liberate – to be maids, not masters, of liberation.

After Series 4 screened there was considerable speculation that Black British actor Paterson Joseph would be cast as the Doctor. It turned out to be unfounded after Matt Smith was announced as the next lead for the series. The dominance of the white perspective in Doctor Who indicates why the Doctor continues to be played by a white, male actor. While a Black actor would be able to portray the same tropes and narratives, the writers might not be able to dismiss genocide and slavery so casually as they have done. The Doctor might not be able to blithely 'walk about like he owns the place', which would make for a very different story. But perhaps it's a story that needs to be told.

CHAPTER 2

Too brown for a fair praise: The depiction of racial prejudice as cultural heritage inDoctor Who

Iona Yeager

1988, Remembrance of the Daleks: the Seventh Doctor ponders how the craving for sugar has influenced Humankind's destiny. The black British waiter tells the Doctor the history of his African ancestor's capture and enslavement. The Doctor expresses his sympathy and respect without judgement.

Twenty-first century: the Tenth Doctor's fair-complexioned companions, Rose Tyler and Donna Noble, protest humanity's abuse and exploitation of the fictional enslaved species, the Ood.

2007, The Shakespeare Code: Martha Jones, the Doctor's companion most likely to be directly affected by the British slave trade, voices her concern about visiting Elizabethan London: "I'm not exactly white," Martha notes. "I'm not even human," the Doctor retorts, then adds: "Elizabethan England is not so different from your time." On cue, two black actresses dressed in modest period costume walk onto the set. As we don't see these women or any other character of colour in this episode again, the characters' narrative purpose is mere reassurance to Martha and her audience, that Martha's fears of being captured as a slave are groundless.

It is unclear if the writers intended to deny the existence of the British Slave Trade or suggest that it is ongoing in 2007. Historically, in 1596, Queen Elizabeth I issued this statement: "there are of late divers Blackmoores brought into the Realme, of which kinde of people there are all ready here to manie", and then proceeded to award Dutch merchant Caspar Van Senden licence to detain "Blackamoores here in this Realme and to transport them into Spaine and Portugall."

Considering that Martha's concerns were supported by history, the Doctor's attitude appears insensitive and recklessly naïve. Whatever the Doctor's reasoning, the script silences Martha's opportunity to voice her opinion regarding the institution of slavery, and denies the character agency to view her black British ancestors' experience in context.

The Doctor's dismissal of Martha's concerns becomes censorship when Shakespeare, floundering for a suitable complement for Martha's beauty, uses a spate of archaic terms. The Doctor describes Martha's reaction as "political correctness gone mad" and suggests the only offence is Martha's hypersensitive reaction.

The Doctor's response confirms his ignorance of dark-complexioned Britons' exclusive journey. In spite of period portraits depicting Africans as servants in King James IV and Elizabeth I's court, or historical records of existing African Kingdoms, the Doctor informs Shakespeare that Martha Jones comes from the fictional country of Freedonia.

Freedonia is the name of the fictional, despotic nation in the 1933 Marx Brothers' film, Duck Soup(Director: Leo McCarey). This would not be the only instance in which writers use questionable terms and references in relation to Martha Jones. In a now deleted scene from The Lazarus Experiment (2007), Martha asks if she looks alright in her evening dress. The Doctor ignores the question and pulls out a draft of the Declaration of Independence, and speaks of inspiring Jefferson. Jefferson's disparaging remarks on the appearance of Africans are often quoted by white supremacists in the United States and United Kingdom. It is unclear as to whether these potential slights were intentionally inserted into the scripts, however the writers do not shrink away from the possibility that Doctor may share human bias. In Utopia (2007) Jack Harkness informs Martha that the Doctor is less likely to abandon a blonde companion, and later he accuses the Doctor of prejudice when he refers to Jack's difference as "wrong."

Evidence of cultural or familial heritage rather than 'racial incident' connects an audience to historical drama, yet a few minutes into The Shakespeare Code, the Doctor deprives Martha of any tangible connection to any earthbound nation; nor is she allowed to explore the journey of her African British ancestors. When Donna and Rose travel to the past, they meet persons of all social classes who resemble them. At one point the Doctor and Rose acknowledge that they met the ancestor of Torchwood cross-over character Gwen Cooper. As neither Rose nor Donna is Irish, Welsh or Scottish, there is no need to stress that they are meeting the persons who helped shape their cultural and political history. However, fair-complexioned companion Amelia Pond, as both a child and young adult, speaks often of her Scottish heritage and her dislike of English culture.

The journey of African Britons encompasses Britain's involvement in slavery, and the violent oppression of African nations during Britain's colonial period. Critics and fans may argue that portraying these elements of British history would either be too disturbing for family viewing, or serve as instigators of ethnically divisive dialogue. Why, however, is it not possible for the Doctor and his companion to confront racial prejudice and oppression as they would any other form of adversity?

In The Shakespeare Code the Doctor employs a nonsense diagnosis to describe suspicious death because he explains "this lot has still got one foot in the dark ages." Would not the same explanation serve to explain – not justify – Elizabethans' xenophobia and seeming acceptance of slavery?

Denial of the existence of the British slave trade subverts the knowledge of Queen Elizabeth I's outrage upon hearing reports of John Hawkins' brutal slave raids. "[I]t would be detestable," she declared, "and call down the vengeance of heaven upon the undertakers."

The Queen would later – slavery was profitable – become a silent partner with slavers. And although she would forbid slavery in England, she did try to deport Africans from England on the basis of faith. Queen Elizabeth's edict to deport her African subjects failed. Van Senden suffered bankruptcy when fair-complexioned Britons rushed to defend their 'Blackamoor' neighbours and servants. When Van Senden appealed to the Crown for help, Sir Robert Cecil's concerns about the welfare of his servant, Fortunatus, found more favour with the ageing Queen.

Martha Jones inspired Shakespeare's Dark Lady Sonnets, yet she never encountered an historical Briton who shared her blended heritage.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Doctor Who and Race by Lindy Orthia. Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Intellect
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1783200367
• ISBN 13: 9781783200368
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256
• Editor: Lindy Orthia