Summer 2020 Remote Research

Alexander G. Weheliye calls racial stories the “hieroglyphics of the flesh” (2014, 43). Human flesh, yes, but not exclusively human -nonhuman animals can and do operate in stories about race as symbols, specters, and avatars. This essay explores the racial hieroglyphics of white dogs in three contemporary films: Steve McQueen’s Widows(2018), Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs(2018), and Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite (2019). Against the backdrop of Samuel Fuller’s White Dog (1982), the essay argues that white dogs communicate specific ideas about race in these films, including the value of proximity to whiteness, the dangers of vulnerability to anti-Black violence, and an embrace of settler colonialism in the white, Western imagination.