[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.The argument would go something like this: because race has been so important to postwar America, the myths and discourses of America tend to embody a consciousness of race.What, for instance, primarily distinguishes ‘the space alien’ from the human being? We might say any number of things (tentacles, bug-eyes, many arms, slime and so on), but the chances are we would agree on one thing: skin colour.Aliens, as popular consciousness knows, are differently coloured: green-skinned, blue-skinned or (more latterly) grey-skinned.Skin colour, in other words, is reflected by SF as the key vector of difference.TV shows such as Alien Nation (which was a spin-off from a popular film) posit the arrival of aliens from another world who settle amongst humanity to live and work like any other immigrants as the underclass of affluent America.Apart from a number of bizarre differences (the ability to get drunk on sour milk, being burnt by seawater as if by acid, and so on) the predominant difference between humans and these humanoid aliens is their skin colour; the aliens are patterned exotically, we might almost say in jungle colours.As SF writer Greg Tate points out, in Alien Nation the aliens ‘were former slaves who were brought to earth on a ship and just dumped on these shores’ (Tate in Dery 1993: 764).It seems almost too straightforward an SF allegory.A show such as The X-Files, on the other hand, has little explicitly to say about race.But its dominant narrative fascination, that of alien abduction, is a revealing contemporary American myth.Studies put the number of Americans who literally believe in alien abduction in the millions, and a variety of critics have attempted to come to terms with why this story is so extraordinarily popular (see, for instance, Luckhurst 1998).One thing the alien abduction narrative does, as several criticssf and race106have noted, is to retell the story of the African slave trade by relocating it to a contemporary SF context.The typical abductee is a white, moder-ately affluent thirty-something American.Abductees are taken suddenly from their homes by aliens, restrained (perhaps shackled) and transported to the alien spaceship.Once there they are subjected to physically degrading and sometimes painful treatment by aliens who seem cal-lously indifferent to their suffering.Some of these treatments seem to involve some sort of ‘tagging’ (the insertion, for instance, of devices into nose or ear); some of them constitute sexual assault, such as the insertion of probes into genital or rectal areas, the stimulation of the penis and the removal of sperm, or the investigation of the womb.At the end of this process, the aliens compel the abductees to forget, or at least to suppress, memories of the experience, usually with some quasi-telepathic invasion of the mind.What happens with alien abduction, in other words, is what Freudians call ‘the return of the repressed’, although on a societal level.The brutal realities of the trade in slaves, which involved precisely the abduction of people from their homes, physical humilia-tion, violence and sexual assault, are intimately complicit with the history and indeed the success of America.Such narratives sit uncomfortably with the discourse of ‘the land of the free’ and have been largely and, until recently, successfully suppressed, to be replaced with stories of Pilgrim Fathers and intrepid wagon trains going west.But things do not disappear by being pushed down into the political unconscious, and the return of this violent, cruel and fundamentally American narrative manifests itself in a variety of new ways.In the case of alien abduction, mainstream America is fantasising a science-fictionalised version of eighteenth and nineteenth-century slaving and interpolating itself into the victim role.It is very much to do with race.CASE STUDY: BUTLER’S XENOGENESISOne of today’s most highly regarded SF novelists, Octavia Butler, takes the alien abduction narrative as the starting point for her masterpiece, the Xenogenesis trilogy.In the first novel of this trilogy, Dawn (1987), Lilith Iyapo, a well-to-do African-American woman, wakes to find herself in a grey, enclosed room aboard a spaceship.She has no memory of how she came to be there and cannot explain the scar across her belly,sf and race107something which seems to suggest invasive alien procedures.Interrogation by her alien captors is, in the first instance, an intimidat-ing and sinister business: ‘Her captors spoke when they were ready and not before.They did not show themselves at all.She remained sealed in her cubicle and their voices came to her from above like the light’(Butler, Dawn (1997): 5).Lilith remembers the nuclear war that had destroyed her world and remembers the death of her family
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]