Alien Imaginations: Science Fiction and Tales of Transnationalism

About the Book

As both an extra-terrestrial and a terrestrial migrant, the alien provides a critical framework to help us understand the interactions between cultures and to explore the transgressive force of travel over geographical, cultural or linguistic borders. Offering a perspective on the alien that connects to scholarship on immigration and globalization, Alien Imaginations brings together canonical and contemporary works in the literature and cinema of science fiction and transnationalism. By examining the role of the alien through the themes of language, anxiety and identity, the essays in this collection engage with authors such as H.G. Wells, Eleanor Arnason, Philip K. Dick and Yoko Tawada as well as directors such as Neill Blomkamp, James Cameron and Michael Winterbottom. Focusing on works that are European and North American in origin, the readings in this volume explore their critical intent and their potential to undermine many of the central notions of Western hegemonic discourses. Alien Imaginations reflects upon contemporary cultural imaginaries as well as the realities of migration, labor and life, suggesting models of resistance, if not utopian horizons.

Table of Contents:

1. Preface
Dame Gillian Beer, University of Cambridge (UK)

2. Introduction
Ulrike Küchler, Freie Universität Berlin (Germany), Silja Maehl, Brown University (US) and Graeme Stout, University of Minnesota (US)

3. Alien Art: Encounters with Otherworldly Places and Inter-medial Spaces
Ulrike Küchler, Freie Universität Berlin (Germany)

4. Space: The Final (Queer) Frontier. The Sexual Other in Eleanor Arnason’s Ring of Swords Emilie McCabe, University of Toronto (Canada)

5. Alienated Labor: William Gibson’s Girls
Jen Caruso, Minneapolis College of Art and Design (US)

6. Assimilating Aliens: Imagining National Identity in Oskar Panizza’s Operated Jew and Salomo Friedländer’s Operated Goy
Joela Jacobs, University of Chicago (US)

7. Canned Foreign. Transnational Estrangement in Yoko Tawada
Silja Maehl, Brown University (US)

8. Migrants and the Dystopian State
Matthew Goodwin, University of Massachusetts Amherst (US)

9. Alienation, Hybridity, and Liminality in Ray Bradbury and Archie Weller
Célia Guimarães Helene, Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie (Brazil)

10. The Interplanetary Logic of Late Capitalism: Global Warming, Forced Migration and Cyborg Futures in Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Andrew Opitz, Hawaii Pacific University (US)

11. Control and Flow: Winterbottom’s Migratory Cinema
Graeme Stout, University of Minnesota (US)

12. Human Subjects / Alien Objects? Abjection and the Constructions of Race and Racism in District 9
Andrew Butler, Canterbury Christ Church University (UK)

13. Was of the Worlds
John Mowitt, Leeds University (UK)

14. Meeting the Other: Cyborgs, Aliens & Beyond
Bianca Westermann, Ruhr Universität Bochum (Germany)

15. “This is I, Hamlet the Dane!” Hamlet’s Migration and Integration in the Dramatic Theater as Cyberspace
Gerrit Roessler, University of Virginia (US)

Index

About the Author :

Ulrike Küchler is Ulrike Küchler is an independent scholar and has taught at Freie Universität Berlin, Eberhard Karls Universität, Germany, and Brown University, USA. Her creative practice and research focus on art and artificial life in science fiction and on the evolving relationship between traditional aesthetic categories and new media.

Silja Maehl received her PhD from the Department of German Studies at Brown University, USA.. Her research engages with bilingual writing practices, transnationalism, and translation in contemporary literature.

Graeme Stout is Senior Lecturer and Film Studies Coordinator at the University of Minnesota. His teaching and research focus on the nature, deployment and transformation of power in the modern age and the relationship of aesthetic form to social consciousness.

Review :
When we imagine the alien, the alien imagines us. With theoretical astuteness and admirable lucidity, Alien Imaginations brings together science fiction and narratives of transnational identity, recontextualising each in terms of the other. In a globalised, biopolitical era, such encounters and transformations make for essential reading. Placing science fiction in the context of transnational studies, Alien Imaginations offers a compelling vision of how the genre narrates and interrogates the world of global technoculture. Reflecting on the dialectical interaction between the imaginations and material realities of capitalist flows of migrants and money, the essays gathered here demonstrate that the question ‘who is the foreigner?’ is complex and consequential. This book is an impressive example of the critical power of understanding science fiction as a mode for perceiving the contemporary. This volume's thirteen variations of the figure of the alien demonstrate the remarkable resonance and fecundity both of speculative fiction from the 1890s to the present and of the richly varied critical discourses currently being brought to bear upon it.