Author: thedeadpoets

While the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender itself is fictional, its influences are very much rooted in real cultures and global histories. Though no nation in Avatar is purely based on one culture, from a plot-based function, the Fire Nation with its violent colonialism and warmongering parallels the Japanese Empire (1868-1945), particularly at its height during WWII and the preceding decade.

Like Imperial Japan, the Fire Nation sits on a volcanic archipelago and commands the most impressive navy in the world of Avatar. It is a nation with a strong, centralized government that is extremely militant and expansionist. But the similarities are most evident when looking at the actual movements of the Fire Nation and its military. With the Air Nomads wiped out and the Water Tribes isolated from both one another and the rest of the world, the Earth Kingdom is the largest obstacle in the Fire Nation’s path to total hegemony. Large, geographically diverse, and multi-ethnic (drawing primarily off of China), the Earth Kingdom is hard to conquer in its entirety. At no point in the show does the Fire Nation manage to control the entire country, but they do occupy smaller islands, regions, and individual kingdoms. Instead, they colonize and occupy border territories in the west and south, with one of the most notable conquests being Omashu city. They have “colonies” with other minorities (usually Earth Kingdom), the existence of which allows Aang and his friends to hide in the Fire Nation as immigrants from the colonies. 

Japan’s own occupation of Manchuria, in northeastern China, bears similarity to the operations of the Fire Nation, down to the infiltration of the occupying citizenry into the occupied lands. After the 1931 invasion of Manchuria, Japanese citizens flocked to the region in large numbers—similar things happened with the siege and occupation of Omashu in season 2 of Avatar. The new proxy government was set up and Fire Nation citizens displaced Omashu residents in their own home. This pattern of similarity includes more large-scale violence. The genocidal massacre of Aang’s people, the Air Nomads, evokes similar levels of incomprehensible destruction and life lost to China during WWII. In the Nanjing Massacre alone, the Japanese military murdered up to 300,000 people. Low estimates for the amount of Chinese people killed during WWII (both civilian and military) stand at around 15-20 million. Since rewatching Avatar: The Last Airbender in 2020, I have always seen the real-life comparisons to Japan’s empirical age and the devastation they enacted throughout Asia but especially in China. But until I took a closer look and thought about the specific intricacies of that colonization, I didn’t realize just how similar certain plot points were to actual historical moments. 

Works Cited

Young, Louise. “Manchukuo and Japan.” Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism, 1st ed., University of California Press, 1998, pp. 3–20.

World War II Casualties by Country 2024. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/world-war-two-casualties-by-country. 

Pinning down the exact year and context in which I first watched Avatar: The Last Airbender is near impossible. Given that I was two years old when it first began airing, I don’t think my first experience with it was watching it as it aired. I likely caught the last season, which finished in 2008, but it’s more likely that I came across it as Nickelodeon continued reruns for years after the show finished. I remember watching it with my brother, and I know that at some point, I had more or less seen every episode because when I rewatched it in 2020, everything felt familiar. 

In May of 2020, Avatar was put on Netflix. I watched it as I got ready for work at a new job, and when the open-air restaurant closed the following day due to bad weather, I spent the day in bed rewatching what I now remembered loving as a child. I didn’t have many memories of Avatar beyond the characters and basic plot, but when I began watching it all came back to me. The only major difference was that this time around, I was 17, and better understood a lot of the themes and lessons at play that went over my head when I was in elementary school.

Avatar: The Last Airbender is often praised by fans and critics for its deft handling of extremely difficult, more “adult” topics like genocide, colonialism, war, etc. and explaining those concepts in a way that could be understood by all ages. A seven year old might not know what the word genocide means, but they can understand the weight of Aang’s entire people being wiped out and know at the very least that it is a bad thing. But I had learned so much in the decade since I had last watched Avatar, and I could read into the nuances of the show. That, in part, is what has kept Avatar interesting to me over the years. I have fond memories of watching it, and it generally brings me joy, but it also sparks a lot of questions and analysis for me. In more recent years, when I began reading the comics that follow the series, I began to realize how the franchise was elucidating the complexities of decolonization. 

In the first installment, called The Promise, there’s a former Fire Nation colony whose governance is being returned to the Earth Kingdom now that the war is over and Zuko, an ally and friend to Aang, is the new and much more level-headed Fire Lord. I won’t lie—the writing and characterization in the comics is subpar, but what’s most interesting is the conflict that arises from trying to right the wrongs of colonial violence and occupation. Aang, Zuko, and the others soon realize that it’s not so simple as sending Fire Nation citizens away and handing the colony back over to the Earth Kingdom—the two communities have been intertwined for a century, with intermarriage and fully blended communities. It’s a very realistic reminder that there is often no such thing as a “return to normal” when such a long and violent occupation comes to an end. Every time I rewatch Avatar or read a new installment of the comics, I find new instances like this one to zero in on and analyze.

Given that my primary text for my thesis is an entire TV series, I had trouble figuring out which prompt to select and what to write about. Ultimately, I decided that prompt #2 would make the most sense for me and set out to find primary sources contemporaneous to the run  of Avatar: The Last Airbender on Nickelodeon from 2005 to 2008. The most obvious place to start was to look for reviews, and while results on Jumpstart and in film databases were not bountiful, I was able to find two of interest. 

The first was a short review from Video Librarian, a resource that essentially contains reviews of tens of thousands of films and TV shows. It caught my eye because it reads like those succinct, to the point book reviews of academic monographs that sum up the work and then give a judgment on whether it’s worth the reader’s time. This review by T. Keogh was in the same fashion, giving a rating of 3.5 stars out of 4 (in between “good” and “excellent”), and ending with the glowing endorsement: “Highly recommended.” The review only covers the first DVD set of season 1, which is just a few episodes, but I found it interesting how Keogh chose to summarize the series. They focused on the fact that Aang, the protagonist, had been in an iceberg for 100 years and was tasked with restoring balance to humanity. 

There is no mention of the fact that Aang is, as the title of the show suggests, the last Airbender—the last of his people after a brutal genocide that Aang escaped by pure chance. The premise of Aang being the last of his kind is central to the show’s theme and plot—he’s not only the last airbender alive, but as the series takes place 100 years after the genocide of his people, the Air Nomads, he’s the only person alive with knowledge of their culture and customs. Since the Video Librarian is used as an academic resource as well and is not necessarily geared towards children, I found it a bit surprising that this element of the show was ignored entirely. The violence underscoring Avatar feels obvious to me, but this review makes me question how much attention people paid to the colonialist violence and genocide rather than focusing on the beautiful animation, the character arcs, or the concept of elemental bending.

The second review, from the New York Times, appeared ahead of the release of the series finale. It seems to get closer to the heart of Avatar, focusing specifically on Aang’s struggle as a pacifist who has to stop the genocidal Fire Lord. Everyone expects him to kill the Fire Lord and sees it as the only possible end to the Fire Nation’s colonial rule, but Aang was raised to be a non-violent pacifist and only uses violence in self-defense. It’s a tenet he adheres to throughout the series, but the reason why it’s so salient is that it is in direct relation with his Air Nomad culture. As the last Air Nomad and Airbender, he feels a responsibility to preserve the culture as best as possible. He refuses to let go of the teachings of the monks who raised him, a lingering connection to the life he was robbed of. 

This review, by Susan Stewart, touches on that to some degree, recognizing the complexity of balancing Aang’s religious and cultural practices with his duty and the expectation of violence. But, Stewart says, it’s a hard topic to broach that is “beautifully rendered” in the series finale. I’m inclined to agree. But more importantly, it seems that by the end of Avatar’s run, viewers and reviewers seemed to form a better sense of the heart of the show and the difficult, often tangentially violent topics it deals with. For me, this exercise proved to be a fascinating way of seeing not only what people thought of Avatar on a base level, but how they thought about it. Everyone consumes and analyzes media differently, so to see which themes reviewers wrote about, some of their takeaways, and interpretations of the story was helpful for me. It’s a reminder that not everyone is going to be consuming media through the same lens.

Works Cited:

Keogh, T. “Avatar: The Last Airbender–Book 1: Water, Volume 1.” Video Librarian, vol. 21, no. 3, May 2006, p. 57. EBSCOhost, research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=da6a1d18-cd43-39c4-a4f6-dda3698624f1.

Stewart, Susan. “Though raised by pacifists, destined to battle for peace.” New York Times, 19 July 2008, p. B15(L). Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A181561704/AONE?u=carl22017&sid=bookmark-AONE&xid=4e027d18.

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.

When reading the first 100 pages of Beloved, I was struck by how resentful Denver is to anyone and everyone she perceives to have abandoned her. This sense of abandonment threads throughout this first portion, extending to her brothers, her grandmother, and even her mother when Paul D shows up and they begin to talk about their lives at Sweet Home. It excludes her, something she can’t stand, evidenced by the later quote “This was the party of the story she [Denver] loved. She was coming to it now, and she loved it because it was all about herself…” (91). Denver is not a person who can easily accept the kind of change that people leaving and entering her life creates. At the beginning of the novel, she is described as being “ten and still mad at Baby Suggs for dying” (4). Her anger towards her grandmother is irrational, but it is consistent. She feels that sense of resentment and betrayal towards her brothers, too, for running away, something their own mother seems to understand and accept. When Paul D and then Beloved enter their lives, she’s forced to fight for her mother’s attention in a way she hasn’t had to for years. There are now parts to her mother’s life that she is not an insider to, and it frustrates her and invokes a deep sense of jealousy. Curiously, the only person she doesn’t seem to hold anger towards for abandoning her in some way is Halle, her father, perhaps because no one really knows for sure what happened to him. 

As Beloved’s personality and reason for showing up at 124 become clearer, it is also clear that Beloved and Denver truly are sisters. Only the two of them know what/who Beloved really is. More importantly, they share the same desire for Sethe’s attention. Denver delights in the thought of having a sister, someone her age to talk to and spend time with, but when Beloved makes it clear that she’s only there for their mother, Denver becomes defensive, hurt, and jealous. Beloved’s conviction threatens Denver’s place in her own home, when Denver asks what her plans are and Beloved says she’s staying because she belongs there. “I belong here too,” Denver insists, sensing that her sister’s ghost intends to make room for herself, even if it costs Denver in the process (89). 

Both young women are deeply resentful. Denver’s dominant nature stood out in the first half of this section, but she has met her match in Beloved, the sister she wanted but perhaps shouldn’t. Beloved, evidently, comes to 124 on account of unfinished business and wants to take in all the knowledge she can about her mother, compelling Denver to tell her the story of Denver’s birth. She is greedy in a way that Denver recognizes, because she behaves similarly about her and Sethe’s status quo when Paul D shows up and she has to accept that her mother had a life before her. After all the people who have left her, Sethe is all she has left and so Denver takes her time coming around to Paul D. Beloved is reckoning with the opposite—the life her mother had after her—and so the two sisters stand in a uniquely similar yet disparate position.

For this blog post, I want to focus on a keyword that was central to Laura Mulvey’s essay—scopophilia. Once defined, it is easy to see why the concept comes up in an essay discussing women’s role in film as a passive object to be viewed and the broader theme of voyeurism in Rear Window. Though Jeff’s tendency to be a Peeping Tom doesn’t seem to derive from any sense of sexual pleasure, his voyeurism does open up conversations about the roles that men and women play in film and how they’re tied to sexual and gender-based binaries, even if there’s no sex involved. Mulvey discusses the image of women in cinema as an icon, but a passive one, to be looked at by their male love interest. But, she contends, once the leading lady becomes committed to the leading man, she “becomes his property, losing her outward glamorous characteristics, her generalized sexuality…”

When I read this, it was impossible not to immediately think of Lisa and her wardrobe. Throughout the film, Lisa dons a variety of stunning outfits which are both expensive and highly fashionable. It’s a part of who she is and how she presents herself. Jeff may not understand why she pays so much money for her clothes, but he certainly appreciates how beautiful she looks in them. But at the end of the film, we see Lisa in a blouse and jeans, a much more dressed down outfit compared to everything else she’s worn (even her pajamas are glamorous). I initially considered it to be a sign of her showing she was willing to change in order to be with Jeff since he viewed their lifestyles as too different, but Mulvey’s argument made me see differently, even though she wasn’t writing specifically about Rear Window. Of women in film, she says, “her eroticism is subjected to the male star alone.” Lisa’s casual attire can be attributed to her trying to show Jeff she can live in his world, but it can also be part of the larger trend that Mulvey discusses that forces female characters to make themselves smaller and less sexy once they’re in a relationship. In reality, it’s likely both. Part of what convinces Jeff that he cannot marry Lisa is how glamorous and refined she is. He enjoys her beauty and her fine outfits, but he cannot picture a life where she fits into his exactly as she is. Mulvey’s argument would suggest that Jeff cannot handle the thought of other people perceiving Lisa the way he does and getting to see her in those same outfits. His scopophilia makes it so that he needs to know that no one else sees the version of Lisa that he does. She can only be sexy and desirable with him, hence her need to change her way of dressing. Lisa is the subject of Jeff’s scopophilia, which is why she is the only one who makes any concessions in the relationship.

Shared Trauma Overcomes Class Differences

Long before the murder mystery gets under way in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, the audience is faced with Jeff’s personal dilemma, regarding his love life—whether or not to marry Lisa, a woman who he loves and who loves him back, due to her social status. He doesn’t see himself as someone worthy of her and all her elegance, social connections, and expensive clothing. Lisa is a New York socialite, while Jeff is a photographer who travels for work in suboptimal conditions that can be dangerous. He can’t leave his life and job behind for Lisa, and he doesn’t want Lisa to do the same for him. In the first scene of them together, Lisa makes it clear that she wants marriage, but Jeff tells her he cannot see either of them changing for the other, and they come to an impasse.

It isn’t until their investigation into whether Lars Thorwald murdered his wife begins in earnest that their differences start to feel manageable. A large part of this is due to the fact that concerns over their class differences do not matter in the face of danger. While Jeff is still unable to leave his apartment, Lisa takes over the more aggressive aspects of sleuthing and gets caught in Thorwald’s apartment in the process. When Thorwald finds her and starts to assault Lisa, Jeff is paralyzed with fear at the prospect of losing her, as he believes in his heart that Thorwald is a man capable of murder. Subsequently, when Thorwald attacks and nearly kills Jeff in his own apartment, Lisa has a similarly panicked reaction. After he falls from his window, Lisa cradles his head lovingly while Jeff tells her he’s proud of her (1:49:50). In this moment, it is evident that their survival and safety is all that matters, making their earlier relationship troubles seem almost trivial. Having both been assaulted by the same man in an effort to discover the truth, Jeff and Lisa not only become closer but more grateful for their lives together. 

Marriage is not mentioned again, but the final scene of the film makes it clear that Jeff and Lisa will be able to make their relationship work. As Jeff sleeps with two casts, one on each leg, Lisa sits in the apartment in a far more casual outfit than she wore throughout the rest of the film. In a blouse and jeans rather than her $1000+ gowns, her clothing makes it clear that she and Jeff are trying to close the gap between them. Compromises are being made, though neither of them will fully change. As he dozes off, Lisa reads a travel book, clearly for Jeff’s benefit, then picks up something more to her liking once she knows he’s asleep. But the implication is clear—Lisa and Jeff are going to make it work and find a way to exist in the other’s world, even if it’s only halfway.