Auto-ethnography is experienced first hand when the main character starts evolving into a Prawn. "A text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations other have made of them" (Pratt …show more content…
"This abstract idea of the speech community seemed to reflect, among other things, the utopian way modern nations conceive of themselves as what Benedict Anderson calls "imagined communities" (Pratt 525). Within Pratt's Arts of the Contact Zone, imagined communities are described as a utopian society; where its members are all considered equal. In Benedict Anderson's book, he calls the utopian society "primordial villages" and claims that the reason they are an imagined community is by the style in which they were imagined; that is how they were distinguished. This is not the case within the movie's plot. In District 9, the prawns and the humans try to coexist with their existence on their planet. The human's imagined community did not involve alien prawn invading their planet. Therefore, when the prawns invaded they were subjected to segregation. They were pushed into living in poverty in a section within the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa. The humans from a private company called MNU were racially oppressing the alien species. Not only were they the ones to cause the segregating, but later one, they wanted to relocate the prawns from their moderately sized poverty, into a new district where their areas of expansion was much …show more content…
"They're here, we don't like them, get them out of town. There doesn't seem to be a lot like. In appearence, they're loathsome, in behavior disgusting and evoke so liitle sympathy that killing one is like, why, like dropping a 7-foot lobster into boiling water" (Ebert). The merging within the people of Johannesburg and the prawns created a racial border within the two species; just like the Spanish and the Andean. Within both you would find a hybrid, a person who has the characteristics of both and understand the two sides of the same story. For District 9, it was Wikus, because he was a human that was converted into a praqn. He saw the ways humans like himself treated the very thing he was becoming. For Pratt's Arts of the Contact Zone, its was Guama Poma, because he was half Spanish and half Andean. His understood not only the Andean culture but the Spanish culture as well, which led him to fight for his people against the king using a technique that among his people was not