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"The figure of the alien is at the heart of science fiction and has helped us to understand and explore interactions with other cultures and the possibilities of life beyond both the modern configuration of the nation-state and the natural order of life on earth. Alien Imaginations brings together canonical and contemporary works in the cinema and literature of science fiction, transnationalism, and globalization in order to examine the role of the alien as well as the realities of migration, labor, and life in the twenty-first century. The essays in this collection discuss films such as District 9, Avatar, and Code 46, as well as novels by H.G. Wells, Philip K. Dick, or Ray Bradbury. As we continue down the road to a global economy and culture, Alien Imaginations offers a critical reflection upon our 'imagined realities' while also turning to speculative fiction and cinema to provide us with examples of resistance, if not a utopian horizon."-- Preface / Dame Gillian Beer, University of Cambridge (UK) -- Introduction / Ulrike Küchler, Freie Universitat Berlin (Germany), Silja Maehl, Brown University (US) and Graeme Stout, University of Minnesota (US) -- Alien Art: Encounters with Otherworldly Places and Inter-medial Spaces / Ulrike Küchler -- Space: The Final (Queer) Frontier. The Sexual Other in Eleanor Arnason's Ring of Swords / Emilie McCabe, University of Toronto (Canada) -- Alienated Labor: William Gibson's Girls / Jen Caruso, Minneapolis College of Art and Design (US) -- Assimilating Aliens: Imagining National Identity in Oskar Panizza's Operated Jew and Salomo Friedlander's Operated Goy / Joela Jacobs, University of Chicago (US) -- Canned Foreign. Transnational Estrangement in Yoko Tawada / Silja Maehl -- Migrants and the Dystopian State / Matthew Goodwin, University of Massachusetts Amherst (US) -- Alienation, Hybridity, and Liminality in Ray Bradbury and Archie Weller / Celia Guimares Helene, Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie (Brazil) -- 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) -- Control and Flow: Winterbottom's Migratory Cinema / Graeme Stout -- Human Subjects/Alien Objects: Abjection and the Constructions of Race and Racism in District 9 / Andrew Butler, Canterbury Christ Church University (UK) -- Was of the Worlds / John Mowitt, Leeds University (UK) -- Meeting the Other: Cyborgs, Aliens & Beyond / Bianca Westermann, Ruhr Universitat, Bochum (Germany) -- "This is I, Hamlet the Dane!" Hamlet's Migration and Integration in the Dramatic Theater as Cyberspace / Gerrit Roessler, University of Virginia (US).
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