Transforming mind and matter, James Cameron’s prodigious motion picture of 2009, Avatar, begins with a sound of beating drums. Then, the voice of the protagonist Jake Sully calmly details to all about dreams, unrelinquished and impossible to realize because, as he says, “you always have to wake up”. The nature of dreams become a conceptual template for Avatar. They become a way of correlating the reality of human experience to the seemingly surreal world of Pandora and its featured humanoid natives, the Na’vi. Furthermore, the dream state evolves into a medium, a sort of signifier as the humans transition their consciousnesses into that of their respective “avatars”.
The echo of a foreign human psyche in an avatar vessel, resembling a native Na’vi, is trivial when considering that the case is actually inverted; the Na’vi serve to reflect the humans, not vice versa. Toni Morrison, by the agency of her critical piece Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, composes the logic of such a reflexive presence –– an unprecedentedly and previously under-spoken common backboard that must be unearthed throughout the grand American literary canon and possibly beyond. She illustrates this concept as the “Africanist presence”. The implications of the …show more content…
His encounters on Pandora are ultimately the narrative implied to be the most necessary to portray. So, Jake finds himself as a foreigner in a strange place and in a strange avatar body. The experience liberates him because he has reinvented himself in a state more adept than his disabled human form. His adoption of native attributes gives him power, or as Morrison quips, “control of one’s destiny” (35). Competence in transitioning from a foreign condition to a native one evolves into authority over his own being, and ultimately authority over the
The echo of a foreign human psyche in an avatar vessel, resembling a native Na’vi, is trivial when considering that the case is actually inverted; the Na’vi serve to reflect the humans, not vice versa. Toni Morrison, by the agency of her critical piece Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, composes the logic of such a reflexive presence –– an unprecedentedly and previously under-spoken common backboard that must be unearthed throughout the grand American literary canon and possibly beyond. She illustrates this concept as the “Africanist presence”. The implications of the …show more content…
His encounters on Pandora are ultimately the narrative implied to be the most necessary to portray. So, Jake finds himself as a foreigner in a strange place and in a strange avatar body. The experience liberates him because he has reinvented himself in a state more adept than his disabled human form. His adoption of native attributes gives him power, or as Morrison quips, “control of one’s destiny” (35). Competence in transitioning from a foreign condition to a native one evolves into authority over his own being, and ultimately authority over the