Who lives in a pineapple under the sea? A sponge who is promoting “violent and racist” colonialism, according to this university professor.
A report, published by University of Washington Professor Holly M Barker, accuses TV show SpongeBob Squarepants of normalising the colonisation of indigenous lands.
“SpongeBob Squarepants and his friends play a role in normalising the settler colonial takings of indigenous lands while erasing the ancestral Bikinian people from their nonfictional homeland,” Prof. Barker writes.
In case you didn’t grow up watching the cheeky sea sponge, SpongeBob lives in a pineapple under the sea in a town called ‘Bikini Bottom.’ According to Prof. Barker, Bikini Bottom is a reference to Bikini Atoll, a real-life coral reef in the Marshall Islands.
Native inhabitants of Bikini Atoll were relocated in 1946 when the islands and lagoon became the site of 23 nuclear tests conducted by the United States. According to the Conversation, residents were moved to the islands of Rongerik, where they faced starvation because of inadequate food crop. In 1954, a huge explosion on Atoll caused irreparable damage and radiation contamination.
In the ‘70s, the U.S. government attempted to resettled hundreds of Bikinians to their home islands but just eight years later were forced to remove them once again after residents ingested “more radioactive cesium from the environment than any known human population.”
So, what does SpongeBob Squarepants have to do with these real-life horrors? According to Prof. Barker, SpongeBob is an American character who has inhabited an area once occupied by natives who shows privilege by “not caring about the detonation of nuclear bombs.”
The Independent reports that she also claims that SpongeBob Squarepants appropriates elements of Pacific culture including Hawaiian shirts, pineapple-shaped homes, tikis and Easter Island heads. Prof. Barker concludes her report by writing, “We should be uncomfortable with a hamburger-loving American community’s occupation of Bikini’s lagoon and the ways that it erodes every aspect of sovereignty.”
In a 2015 interview with HuffPost, SpongeBob voice actor Tom Kenny confirmed that Bikini Bottom is “kind of named after Bikini Atoll,” but he denied the character was a result of nuclear testing. “I don’t think SpongeBob and his friends are mutations. I think Bikini Bottom is like its own world…You know, there’s never topical references in the show.”
Is SpongeBob Squarepants intentionally promoting the colonisation of indigenous lands and appropriating the culture? Is Bikini Bottom just an extremely poor choice of reference? Or is it a bit of column A and a bit of column B?