The American Alien: Immigrants, Expatriates and Extraterrestrials in Twentieth-Century U.S. Fiction A Dissertation Presented to The Faculty of the Graduate School At the University of Missouri In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree Ph.D. in English By JOSEPH B. SCOTT Andrew Hoberek, Dissertation Supervisor MAY 2012 The undersigned, appointed by the dean of the Graduate School, have examined the dissertation entitled The American Alien: Immigrants, Expatriates and Extraterrestrials in Twentieth-Century U.S. Fiction Presented by Joseph B. Scott a candidate for the degree of doctor of philosophy, and hereby certify that, in their opinion, it is worthy of acceptance. Professor Andrew Hoberek Professor Karen Piper Professor Noah Heringman Professor Kristin Kopp ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to take this opportunity to thank Andrew Hoberek, Karen Piper, Noah Heringman and Kristin Kopp for their careful responses to the current work, their insightful suggestions, and their generosity with their time. This dissertation has been shaped, extended, trimmed, and otherwise improved by their suggestions. In particular, Dr. Hoberek has been a part of the project from its inception, and his erudition, as well as his skill at identifying the best way to expand upon and make explicit the implicit connections between this work’s far-flung texts, has been invaluable. Karen Piper read an early version of this project as a seminar paper for her seminar in postcolonial theory, so it benefitted from her comments even in its first stage. Noah Heringman’s expertise in conceptions of the environment, as well as Kristin Kopp’s in the history of colonialism, have also been extremely helpful. A previous version of this work was presented at the University of Missouri’s Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference, then known as the Body Project. I would like to thank the attendees of my presentation for their thoughtful comments. In addition, many of the central arguments of this dissertation were first fleshed out in a course I taught at the University of Missouri on The American Alien. The students in this course contributed greatly to the conception of aliens discussed here, and I discovered many of ii Scott iii the ideas in this work together with them. I am grateful for their interest and responsiveness to the topic. Finally, I would like to offer Kibby Smith my thanks for her encouragement and proofreading skills. Needless to say, the contributions of all these readers have only served to improve the present work, while any errors remaining in it are solely mine. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................. ii Abstract ............................................................................................................................... v Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1 ........................................................................................................................... 29 Chapter 2 ........................................................................................................................... 56 Chapter 3 ........................................................................................................................... 85 Chapter 4 ......................................................................................................................... 112 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 138 Notes .............................................................................................................................. 141 Bibliography .................................................................................................................. 159 Vita .................................................................................................................................. 168 ABSTRACT This project argues that such widely differing figures in twentieth-century American literature as the immigrant and the expatriate, the colonizer and the colonized, whether human or extraterrestrial, can all be described under the same rubric: that of the alien. Aliens in science fiction often serve as stand-ins for aliens in terms of nationality, allowing SF authors to discuss immigration issues more freely than would otherwise be possible. At the same time, the description of extraterrestrial aliens in SF also exerts an influence on the treatment of immigrants in “realistic” fiction, and even in legislation related to immigration. Consequently, this project applies postcolonial theory, diasporic and globalization studies to analyze colonial discourse in representations of aliens in science fiction and immigrant fiction, while also seeking a less theoretical, more practical way to open up the subversive potential of SF. Seeing the cultural encounter in terms of a meeting between differently- acculturated aliens, who are mutually strange to one another, presents a way to reimagine the troubled, alternately constructive and destructive, multiplicity of voices which is an unavoidable result of the meeting of different cultures. To that end, this project employs both SF and “realistic” novels about immigrants with attention to the insights gained from multiculturalism and postcolonial theory, tracing the historical development of conceptions of immigrant labor, reproduction, and trauma and including well-known novels by pre-WW II novelists such as Upton Sinclair, Willa Cather and Ernest v Scott vi Hemingway, as well as more recent “realistic” fiction by Arthur Phillips and Jessica Hagedorn. Introduction The Fascination of the Unfamiliar: The Alien in Twentieth-Century American Literature In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz describes the Dominican Republic’s long history of racism and political and domestic violence, from the time of “the Admiral” (a euphemism used by the novel’s Dominican characters in order to avoid saying the name of Christopher Columbus), through the turbulent years of the Trujillo dictatorship to the 1990s, focusing on three generations of the de León family. The overweight and socially awkward protagonist, Oscar, is fascinated by fantasy and science fiction novels, as well as SF films and role-playing games. Oscar’s love for fantasy and SF supplies the novel with its idiosyncratic use of fantasy and SF characters and narratives as a source of metaphors for this destructive history. When Oscar finally falls in love, it is with Ybón Pimentel, a former prostitute who is currently involved with a dangerously violent police captain. Ybón appears distant and affectless due to trauma experienced as a prostitute and a victim of domestic violence in her relationship with the captain. Characteristically, Oscar explains Ybón’s emotional distance in a vocabulary he understands: “there was something slightly detached about her . as though . she 1 Scott 2 were some marooned alien princess who existed partially in another dimension.”1 Similarly, Yunior, Díaz’s narrator, speculates that Oscar’s grandfather may have been writing a book about Trujillo’s magical powers, describing the murderous leader as “a supernatural, or perhaps alien, dictator.”2 Yunior expresses the loss of culture and the liminal status of diasporic Dominicans when Oscar returns to his mother’s homeland, which he barely knows: “he refused to succumb to that whisper that all long-term immigrants carry inside themselves, the whisper that says You do not belong.”3 The novel uses SF-inspired metaphors to describe a wide range of psychological states, but the common thread among these differing situations is that the characters all experience some degree of emotional dislocation as a result of their culture’s painful history. The whisper that Oscar resists is his sense that he is as much an alien in the Dominican Republic as he is in the U.S. In some sense, his choice to leave his home in the latter and return to the former to face death at the hands of the violently jealous police captain is his admission of that whisper’s truth. Much as Oscar, the SF fan, comes to realize that he belongs in neither of his homelands, Ybón experiences dissociative fugue as a result of her relationship with the captain, who serves as a representative both of the Dominican Republic’s culture of macho masculinity and of a repressive police state. Similarly, Trujillo’s subjects are astonished at his cruelty and the impunity with which he exercises it. All these characters are rendered unfamiliar to themselves by the Dominican Republic’s history and its consequences on their individual lives. In this way, the figure of the alien becomes a way to express the unfamiliarity, the alien-ness of Hispaniola’s colonial past, even to those who live there. Scott 3 Postcolonial theory has much to say about the political underpinnings of fiction that describes the encounter between different cultures. All too often, the enduring appeal of representations of contact between cultures owes much to discourses drawn from the era of European colonialism. In such discourse, the narrative tends to adopt the point of view of one of the two cultures, often a white, European or North American culture which is held to be normative, and to place the other culture in a subordinate position. Such narratives serve both to characterize