But even the Westerns of 2015 can’t sidestep race or racist history–of America and of the genre itself. Latter days critical Westerns more readily acknowledge the complicated and interconnected relationships of oppression that built The West, and more naturally bring women and people of colour to the fore. So-called dirty Westerns often pit misfits, cowboys, and criminals against placid colonizers, and often feature people of colour as sidekicks, co-travellers, or even heroes. Conservative Westerns pit underdog colonizers against the expansion of industrial civilization and against the native peoples they must wipe out. The genre is diverse but these themes are common to most forms. Westerns are primarily concerned with a tight cluster of themes: the frontier, the march of civilization, whiteness and otherness, manliness, self-reliance, and survival.
The evidence of Firefly’s origin - as post-racial Western fantasy about race - lingers and its attempts at distance only emphasize the political: what does it mean to take race out of racist history and offer it up as neutral entertainment built around timeless values of freedom and exploration?
And although there are two black people in the core cast - second in command Zoe and mysterious Preacher Book - black people too are seldom seen in the backgrounds of daily life in the Core and Rebel worlds. The Chinese ancestry of this empire is used only for colour: there are no Asian characters in the core cast and non-black people of colour appear only sparingly as supporting characters. The meta story of Firefly, both its core cast and the universe as a whole, is based on American Reconstruction literature and Westerns the story of Alliance rebels is the story of Southern “rebels,” and the show’s creators have gone on record saying that the goal of Firefly was to write a Reconstruction Western absent the racism. They face ne’er do wells, Core military and police forces, vexatious local authorities, constantly failing equipment, and Reavers, the wild frontier cannibals who roam deep space and less-monitored shipping lanes in search of victims.
This is the recent past of Firefly: the show focuses on former Alliance rebels, now turned grifters, and their attempts to carve out a life in a period of post-war reconstruction. Taxation without representation, economic domination by distant powers, and finally, rebellion by new non-Core powers, including a new merchant class and farmers alike. But naturally, as they proved their settlements, representatives of the Core followed, chasing tax revenue, valuable exports, and the expansion of their influence. The powerful Core worlds thrive on surveillance and control and settlers hoped to escape this. As the empire stretched across solar systems, pioneers set out into the stars, ahead of the empire’s armed forces and commercial powers, to settle in new systems and go their own way. But buried history doesn’t stay buried, and Firefly’s attempt to neutralize American history and reuse it as space history only makes its problematic racial politics the more obvious.įirefly is set in a future star empire whose ruling class is culturally descended from white America and a still Han-dominated China. Instead, Firefly wants to be a grand, apolitical adventure centering on the eternal struggle between authority and rebellion, with the political used for colour a true throwback. Although set in the distant future, with no mention of Earth, the show is an almost wholesale transplant of post Civil War American politics, and post WW2, Cold War fantasies about the “Cowboy Era.” The show debuted between waves of renewed enthusiasm for Westerns and doesn’t quite belong to either one: it displays neither Dances With Wolves or Unforgiven’s interest in the politics of justice, nor No Country for Old Men’s interest in the continued relevance of Western themes, tropes, and the genre’s long influence. The 2002 space Western Firefly is part of a long and grand tradition of Hollywood whitewashing.
The index to the entire Joss Whedon roundtable is here.
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