Bong Joon-ho’s Okja: Transatlantic Racism, Transpacific Capitalism, and Intimate Subversion

Abstract

This article explores the ethical and strategic thought of Bong Joon-ho’s Okja, a film about a Korean adolescent and a genetically modified pig who save each other’s lives. In part one, I convene Bong Joon-ho and Frank Wilderson to explore how human supremacy and White supremacy work together. I argue that Okja connects super-pigs’ suffering to Black, Indigenous, Latino/a, and Asian suffering in the Americas, with the implication that non-White and non-human struggles for liberation are inseparable. That said, Bong insists that the Americas are not the entire world, in order to imagine liberatory responses which arise and arrive elsewhere. Hence, in part two, I resituate the transatlantic question of racial/species oppression in Okja within a transpacific analytic of global capitalism and US empire. I investigate how both humans and super-pigs, across both racial and species lines, can forward liberation projects within asymmetrical situations of conflict. My thesis is that Bong Joon-ho proposes that, in such situations, subversions among intimates are more valuable and useful than alliances among strangers.