Updated: Colonialism, Diaspora, and Genocide in Avatar: The Last Airbender

Primary Text:

Ehasz, Aaron. Avatar: The Last Airbender, created by Michael Dante DiMartino, and Bryan Konietzko, Nickelodeon Animation Studio, 21 Feb. 2005. 

Yang, Gene Luen, et al. Avatar, the Last Airbender: The Promise. Dark Horse Books, 2020.

Secondary Sources: 

1. Ching, Leo T. S. Anti-Japan : The Politics of Sentiment in Postcolonial East Asia. Duke University Press, 2019.
2. Kap, Ryanne. “Lessons from the Southern Air Temple: How Avatar: The Last Airbender Negotiates the Trauma of Imperialism.” The Avatar Television Franchise: Storytelling, Identity, Trauma, and Fandom, 2022, pp. 135–54.
3. Horowitz, Caleb. “Far from the Last Airbender: Cultural Trauma Construction and Diasporic Reimaginings in Avatar and Korra.” The Avatar Television Franchise: Storytelling, Identity, Trauma, and Fandom, 2022, pp. 171–86.
4. Yao, Xine. “Arctic and Asian Indigeneities, Asian/North American Settler/Colonialism: Animating Intimacies and Counter-Intimacies in Avatar: The Last Airbender.” Journal of Asian American Studies., vol. 24, no. 3, 2021, pp. 471–504.
5. Young, Robert C. J. Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2020.

Academic Journal:

Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry. Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Keywords:

I. othering

II. diasporic identities

III. cultural hybridity

In crafting my thesis topic, I focused on two criteria. The first was that my primary text had to be something I loved enough that I would never get tired of writing about it. Second, I had to choose a text that I felt there was enough to analyze—there had to be substance beyond the fact that the text in question brought me joy. I thought about multiple different books, authors, and films, but what I kept coming back to was the 2005 animated show Avatar: The Last Airbender. I grew up watching it and rediscovered how much I loved it during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when it was put on Netflix. It’s a series that I have never run out of things to analyze and question, and when it came to framing a thesis around it, I knew that postcolonialism was the perfect lens to use. 

A postcolonial analysis of Avatar: The Last Airbender may seem like the obvious theoretical lens for anyone familiar with the show, but in my research so far I have found few articles discussing both the show and its postcolonial implications. Modeled after Japanese colonization throughout East Asia in the first half of the 20th century, Avatar is a surprisingly complex narrative for a children’s program, dealing with themes of genocide, gender and ethnic discriminantion, hierarchical status systems, colonization, decolonization, cultural preservation, and numerous other related topics. In effect, it is ripe with plot lines, character arcs, settings, and themes to analyze against a postcolonial lens. 

In crafting my reading list, I spoke with classmates, friends, Professor Kersh, and Professor Seiler. They all encouraged me to go for it based on my passion for the idea. As I go forward and refine my reading list, I will meet with Professor Young in the History department, who specializes in East Asian history. When looking for secondary sources, I looked for existing articles discussing Avatar in terms of imperialism, colonialism, etc., and managed to find a few that look promising. I’m also planning on doing a lot of supplementary reading on the fundamentals of postcolonial theory, starting with Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction, which I got the idea to use from our class’ use of Culler’s Literary Theory from the same collection by Oxford. The last source, Leo Ching’s monograph Anti-Japan, will give me insight into colonial and postcolonial East Asia, which is the model for the Four Nations in Avatar. I landed on an academic journal and keywords through research on secondary sources and the frequently used terms and databases. 

There’s a lot to explore with this topic, but some of my leading questions as of now are: how are diasporic communities portrayed in children’s media? What does Avatar teach about the nature of hybridity, especially following decolonization? What does the show suggest about the roles of violence and nonviolence in decolonization processes? How do the roles of colonizer/colonized affect relationships between characters? 

Updates:

I decided that there was worth in looking at the Avatar comics, despite my qualms with them. I think the first installment has a really interesting, nuanced depiction of the process of decolonization which is something I know I want to explore in my thesis. While doing other blog posts, I also found that I’m really interested in the role that Aang’s pacifism plays in the show. He is the sole survivor of a genocide and is tasked with ensuring that fate doesn’t befall any other nation, but he refuses to use the same violence enacted on his people to bring an end to a brutal war. It’s a really interesting meditation on resistance and the roles of violence and nonviolence in a revolutionary context…other characters don’t hesitate to use violence when they use to, but for Aang the act of taking a life is something he wants to avoid at all costs. I didn’t realize how much this aspect of Aang’s character and the plot (which is a big deal towards the end of season 3 as Sozin’s comet approaches) interested me, but I’m excited to do more reading and figure out how it fits into my thesis.