Visions of Invasion

Abstract

Visions of Invasion is a study of how the United States (US) government mobilizes media and surveillance technologies to operate a highly networked, multidimensional system for controlling migrants. Building on Rhetorical Studies, Settler Colonial Studies, and Media Studies theories, this book offers a glimpse at how the processes of “alien making” contribute to an ongoing settler colonial project in the U.S. Visions of Invasion illustrates that popular culture texts like alien invasion films manufacture alienhood—a settler colonial political subjectivity embedded in the U.S. colonial consciousness—via emergent visual media technologies. The alien-making process, though, is not limited to Hollywood. It is a nation-wide practice that produces migrants as subjective “terrorists,” felons, and other non-citizen personae that are commonly vilified in public discourse. Thus, this book describes how the settler colonial logics that motivated early US colonizers materialize in both its citizenship control policy and in some of the country’s most popular alien invasion narratives over the last four decades. The case studies in this book uncover an anxious colonial logic that drives settlers’ obsession to manufacture narratives of false invasion from abroad that pose an existential threat to the settler way of life. Visions of Invasion is a deep dive into how the rhetorical figure of the alien has been manufactured through media and surveillance technologies in the U.S. as a political subjectivity, one that plays out the anxieties, guilts, and fears of settler colonialism in today’s science fiction landscape.