Alien Imaginations Science Fiction and Tales of Transnationalism

by Küchler, Ulrike; Maehl, Silja; Stout, Graeme A.

• ISBN13: 9781501319976
• ISBN10: 1501319973
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2016-07-28
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Ulrike Küchler is a Doctoral Candidate at the Freie Universität in Berlin. 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 is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of German Studies at Brown University. 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.

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