Concurrent Whiteness: Science Fiction Film’s Close Encounters in Apartheid South Africa

This chapter brings the theoretical term “concurrences” to bear on a reading of how US popular filmic depictions of whiteness flowed seamlessly into white South African life during the time of apartheid. I wager that we might productively use the term to consider the ways in which dominant signs and identities, in this case whiteness, might be sustained across different political and ideological terrains through the media of popular culture. Focusing on Steven Spielberg’s 1977 film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which premiered in South Africa in 1979, I investigate how science fiction film of this era became a site of white disassociation from apartheid’s realities and association with the global North. The chapter thereby raises a series of questions that challenge received understandings of South Africa’s cultural isolation during apartheid and prompt us to understand apartheid’s global dimensions and contexts.