If Peele’s contemporary American horror story peels back the layers of white psychic investment in black flesh, then Ghost in the Shell alerts us to what yellow female bodies promise their master: not the harnessing of durable organic flesh, or even the challenge of a psychic depth to plumb, but instead a pure escape into the dream of artificial ontology. The Major is always already surface, thing, robot, and shell. This is why the black body has to be “cut into” while the yellow body is “uploaded”; why the doll that is the black man requires violent manual manipulation (think, too, of Ralph
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