Dangerous Others: ‘Race’ and Crime after the Apocalypse

Abstract

This chapter explores a common theme in the apocalyptic imaginary of crisis, that of overt or covert racial conflict. Projecting anxieties about the racialised ‘dangerous other’, post-apocalyptic culture maps such fears onto a world where the majority are no longer ‘safe’ from the ‘dark’ criminal element. These range from racialised fantasies about black masculinity and its sexual ‘contamination of white femininity, to the figure of the post-apocalyptic ghetto gangster, recuperating urban white anxieties about the threat of ‘black criminality’. In other fictions, the racialised other is metaphorically coded as radioactive mutant, ape or zombie. Such fictions, it is argued, are inextricably bound-up with a constellation of commonplace discourses on the intersections between crime and ‘race’, and reflect ongoing social conflicts about ethno-racial ‘otherness’ in a globalised, post-colonial world.