Alien Invasion! National Culture in Peril! Fifth Column Plot Uncovered!

These are dark days for cosmopolitanism. On both sides of the Atlantic, in the US and Europe, xenophobia, nativism, and aggressive jingoism are in the ascendency. In the US, the President Elect built his platform on a promise to build a wall along the US/Mexico border. In the UK, the nation votes to sever its ties with the European Union following a campaign based on anti-immigration rhetoric. Throughout continental Europe, right wing, populist political parties are increasing their share of the vote. The spectre of “criminal aliens,” as Trump’s running mate has recently called undocumented migrants, is projected everywhere as the gravest threat to national security, culture, and identity.

In searching a critical grasp of these times, we might look to the writings and experiences of a previous generation of cosmopolitans, who responded to their own era of right-wing authoritarianism, xenophobia, and barbarism. In mid-century America, intellectuals such as Theodor Adorno, C. L. R. James and Simone de Beauvoir left a Europe in crisis for the United States, and spent time in America observing, commenting on and criticizing the cultural landscape. They were all aliens in their own right, and were treated with varying degrees of hostility. Adorno, as a German, was designated an “enemy alien” during World War Two and placed under curfew in Los Angeles, unable to travel more than five miles from his home. C. L. R. James was detained as a suspected Communist during the Red Scare in 1953 (he wasn’t one) and deported to the UK. In Beauvoir’s case, the alien status was metaphorical. After she wrote a critical account of the United States in her travelogue America Day by Day in 1947, the US intellectual establishment painted her as a sci-fi space-traveller unable to come to terms with a newly discovered planet, descending from her plane “as from a spaceship, wearing metaphorical goggles.” This was the golden era of science fiction in the United States, after all, when popular culture repeatedly rehearsed the trope of alien invasion in novels and films such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Invasion U.S.A., and Red Planet Mars. Waves of grotesque and hostile outsiders were always ready to pour into the country, or else insidiously creep under the radar in order to infiltrate and destroy the integrity of American culture. This is one of the United States’ most potent myths, and it is one that has lost none of its seduction today, on either side of the Atlantic.

In my book Transatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile and Culture in Midcentury, I explore how figures like Adorno, James and Beauvoir experienced alienation in the United States and transformed that experience into a positive tool for understanding the emergence of the modern world. The book tells a critical story about how seeing the world through alien goggles carries simultaneously both a positive and a negative charge, offering a double perspective that never sees things in isolation. It examines the process of adaptation to US culture, and the consequences of refusing to do so, alongside the need to cope and survive in an estranged cultural environment. We have much to learn from these figures about our current predicaments, and especially about the dangers of populist rhetoric about malevolent outsiders. With their help, we can combat fears of alien invasion, and reconceptualise alienation as a potentially benevolent experience.

 

Will Norman is a senior lecturer in American literature at the University of Kent. He is the author of Transatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile, and Culture in Midcentury America.