Sie befinden Sich nicht im Netzwerk der Universität Paderborn. Der Zugriff auf elektronische Ressourcen ist gegebenenfalls nur via VPN oder Shibboleth (DFN-AAI) möglich. mehr Informationen...
Tarzan's White Flights: Terrorism and Fantasy before and after the Airplane
Ist Teil von
American literature, 2011-06, Vol.83 (2), p.305-329
Ort / Verlag
Durham: Duke University Press
Erscheinungsjahr
2011
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Duke University Press
Beschreibungen/Notizen
By placing the Tarzan novels and films in the historical context of the development of aviation and aerial bombardment, Bady traces how changing fantasies of flight mediate the Tarzan franchise's changing relationship to white supremacist violence. Edgar Rice Burroughs's original novels were published contemporaneously with the popular "airmindedness" that accompanied the invention of the airplane, and Tarzan's ability to "fly" expresses the types of fantasy by which this advance was popularly understood. For Burroughs, Tarzan's flight signified the white race's "natural" superiority over nature. By the time the novels were adapted into films, however, aerial bombardment had come to seem monstrously unnatural, a technology serving racialized colonial governance. The Tarzan films made in the 1930s, this essay argues, use flight to describe a very different fantasy, the desire to forget and transcend the very histories of racial violence that the Tarzan character was once unthinkable without.