Thursday, January 7, 2027: 7:00 PM-8:15 PM
501B (LACC)
The figure of the extraterrestrial alien is often epitomized as a dangerous Other, antagonistic to and at fundamentals odds with the human. Alien encounters are routinely configured as a coercive experiences that imperil the human body and human social orders alike; frequently framed as “abductions,” descriptions of these encounters are designed to draw attention to ontological distinctions between the alien and human, thereby establishing the alien as an aggressively antihuman force in the universe. There is a substantial body of multiethnic literature, however, that imagines extraterrestrial alien encounters and spaceflight as emancipatory orientations that imagine worlds and entanglements that do not yet or cannot exist on our planet. This panel, entitled “Xenoemancipation: Aliens, Humans, Freedom, Narrative” confronts literary and cultural representations of alienness by Black, Indigenous, and Latine arists and creators that imagine alien encounters and the logics of extraplanetary escape as potentially freeing. The panelists consider how and why peoples of color have turned to extraterrestrial aliens, UFO phenomena, and spaceflight as progressive and liberational narratives, and therefore as important for imagining otherwise and embracing alternative futures.
Recent scholarship, including Matthew David Goodwin’s 2021 Latinx Files: Race, Migration, and Space Aliens (Rutgers UP), Stephen C. Finley’s In and Out of This World: Material and Extraterrestrial Bodies in the Nation of Islam (Duke UP), and Joanna Davis-McElligatt’s 2026 Black Aliens: Kinship in the Cosmic Diaspora (OSUP), among others, have argued for the necessity of rethinking and repurposing traditional constructions of extraterrestriality, work that has implications for how we make sense of our terrestriality and live together now and in the future. This panel expands existing scholarship by staging a comparative and multiethnic exploration of extraterrestrial and spaceflight as potentially emancipatory between Indigenous, Latine, and Black fiction and poetics. This panel includes Black, Indigenous, and African scholars working on literatures and cultures written in French, English, and Spanish.
"Xenoemancipation" has four participants, each of whom will speak for 10-12 minutes, leaving ample time for discussion after. Joanna Davis-McElligatt’s paper, “Living with Octavia E. Butler’s Aliens, or Making Construct Kin in the Chthulucene,” reads Octavia E. Butler’s trilogy Xenogenesis as a complex emancipatory fantasy of alien-human reproductive and ecological kin-making in the cosmic diaspora. Following Donna Haraway, this paper describe Butler’s new world as a radical “holobiont,” comprised of symbiotic assemblages formed by alien life-forms, human beings, nonhuman animals, and the living land itself, that intentionally blurs boundaries of speciality, dissolving differences between plants and animals, animals and humans, humans and aliens, aliens and the world.
Edmund Ankomah’s paper, “I am everything and nothing”: Xenocorporeal Subjectivity and the Utopian Impulse in Sun Ra,” explores Sun Ra’s aesthetics as a worldmaking mirror, critique, and transformation of lived Black experience by offering concrete liberatory potentialities and choices for Black folk eager to escape the confines of an antiblack world. This paper argues that Ra’s imaginings of an alien space/body reflects what R. Scott Heath terms a “black sometimey,” or a storying of planetary black Southerness that, in experimenting with spacetime, foregrounds utopian potential.
Jordan J. Tudisco’s paper, entitled, “'Your Circle Is Not Round': Xenoemancipation, Extraplanetary Escape, and Staying with the Trouble in Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction,” examines Cree and Métis Indigiqueer writer Adam Garnet Jones’s “History of the New World,” which, they argue, puts pressure on our conceptions of emancipation and escape. If leaving one’s planet is motivated by a desire to save one’s normative structuring of life and ultimately results in the reproduction of current colonial systems elsewhere, is extraplanetary escape truly an emancipatory move? Can one find emancipation and liberation through solidarity and alien relationality by “staying with the trouble,” as Donna Haraway puts it?
Finally, Tanner Menard’s paper, “The Poem as UFO: Numalia, Coatlicue, and the Formal Traces of Anomalous Encounter,” proposes that the visionary poem can be seen as a UFO, or an unidentified formal object that arrives through the same ontological register that ufologists Jacques Vallée and Bertrand Méheust have mapped. This paper argues that the formal disruptions of visionary poetry are not failures of expression but traces of contact with what exceeds the bounded self. Through a reading of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Coatlicue State in Borderlands/La Frontera, Menard demonstrates how Anzaldúa’s language enacts the travesía through pronominal collapse, syntactic metamorphosis, and the progressive dissolution of the speaking subject. In doing so, this paper makes the case that reading the poem as UFO is a potentially powerful alternative and tool for imagining our conditions otherwise.
Recent scholarship, including Matthew David Goodwin’s 2021 Latinx Files: Race, Migration, and Space Aliens (Rutgers UP), Stephen C. Finley’s In and Out of This World: Material and Extraterrestrial Bodies in the Nation of Islam (Duke UP), and Joanna Davis-McElligatt’s 2026 Black Aliens: Kinship in the Cosmic Diaspora (OSUP), among others, have argued for the necessity of rethinking and repurposing traditional constructions of extraterrestriality, work that has implications for how we make sense of our terrestriality and live together now and in the future. This panel expands existing scholarship by staging a comparative and multiethnic exploration of extraterrestrial and spaceflight as potentially emancipatory between Indigenous, Latine, and Black fiction and poetics. This panel includes Black, Indigenous, and African scholars working on literatures and cultures written in French, English, and Spanish.
"Xenoemancipation" has four participants, each of whom will speak for 10-12 minutes, leaving ample time for discussion after. Joanna Davis-McElligatt’s paper, “Living with Octavia E. Butler’s Aliens, or Making Construct Kin in the Chthulucene,” reads Octavia E. Butler’s trilogy Xenogenesis as a complex emancipatory fantasy of alien-human reproductive and ecological kin-making in the cosmic diaspora. Following Donna Haraway, this paper describe Butler’s new world as a radical “holobiont,” comprised of symbiotic assemblages formed by alien life-forms, human beings, nonhuman animals, and the living land itself, that intentionally blurs boundaries of speciality, dissolving differences between plants and animals, animals and humans, humans and aliens, aliens and the world.
Edmund Ankomah’s paper, “I am everything and nothing”: Xenocorporeal Subjectivity and the Utopian Impulse in Sun Ra,” explores Sun Ra’s aesthetics as a worldmaking mirror, critique, and transformation of lived Black experience by offering concrete liberatory potentialities and choices for Black folk eager to escape the confines of an antiblack world. This paper argues that Ra’s imaginings of an alien space/body reflects what R. Scott Heath terms a “black sometimey,” or a storying of planetary black Southerness that, in experimenting with spacetime, foregrounds utopian potential.
Jordan J. Tudisco’s paper, entitled, “'Your Circle Is Not Round': Xenoemancipation, Extraplanetary Escape, and Staying with the Trouble in Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction,” examines Cree and Métis Indigiqueer writer Adam Garnet Jones’s “History of the New World,” which, they argue, puts pressure on our conceptions of emancipation and escape. If leaving one’s planet is motivated by a desire to save one’s normative structuring of life and ultimately results in the reproduction of current colonial systems elsewhere, is extraplanetary escape truly an emancipatory move? Can one find emancipation and liberation through solidarity and alien relationality by “staying with the trouble,” as Donna Haraway puts it?
Finally, Tanner Menard’s paper, “The Poem as UFO: Numalia, Coatlicue, and the Formal Traces of Anomalous Encounter,” proposes that the visionary poem can be seen as a UFO, or an unidentified formal object that arrives through the same ontological register that ufologists Jacques Vallée and Bertrand Méheust have mapped. This paper argues that the formal disruptions of visionary poetry are not failures of expression but traces of contact with what exceeds the bounded self. Through a reading of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Coatlicue State in Borderlands/La Frontera, Menard demonstrates how Anzaldúa’s language enacts the travesía through pronominal collapse, syntactic metamorphosis, and the progressive dissolution of the speaking subject. In doing so, this paper makes the case that reading the poem as UFO is a potentially powerful alternative and tool for imagining our conditions otherwise.
Organizer:
Joanna Davis-McElligatt
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