Alien Agenda Untold Story Extraterrestrials
Alien Chic provides a cultural history of the alien since the 1950s, asking ourselves why our complex mental states to aliens have shifted from fear to affection, and what this may tell us in regards to how we now see ourselves and others. Neil Badmington explores our kinship with aliens, inscribed in films such as The War of the Worlds, Mars Attacks!, Mission to Mars and Independence Day; and how thinkers such as Descartes, Barthes, Freud, Lyotard and Derrida have conceptualised what it means to be humane (and post-human). Alien Chic examines the the conception of posthumanism in an age when the lines among what is humane and what is non-human are growingly blurred by advances in science and technology, for example genetic cloning and engineering, and the development of AI and cyborgs. Questioning whether our current embracing of all things ‘alien’ – in the form of extraterrestrial gimmicks or abduction narratives, for instance – stems from a desire to reaffirm ourselves as ‘human’, this is an primary and thought-provoking contribution to the study of posthumanism.
About the AuthorNeil Badmington is Lecturer in Cultural Criticism and English Literature at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University. He is the editor of Posthumanism (Palgrave, 2000)
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6 of 8 humans found the following review helpful.
 Cultural Crit at it is best
By raincoatmariarilke
Alien Chic, as a title, is rather `chic’ itself, posthumanism and aliens being rather hot topics in the hipster academic (I know, I know, total paradox) circles. In fact, `trashy’ pop-culture topics in general, examined through the lens of an often hyper-academic theory, seem to be more prevalent than more established academic work. It is far too easy to find hundreds of academic papers on Buffy the Vampire Slayer or X-files, and whatsoever those shows’ merits may be, the excess of critical attention surely hearkens an closely morbid interest in pop artifacts by cultural critics who have ultimately been given free sovereignty to write when it comes to whatsoever they want. Anyone who thinks that, to borrow a quintessentially overwrought statement of Terry Eagleton’s, `Jane Austen is better than Jeffery Archer,’ is accused of all sorts of hideous crimes. Good old Marxist that he is, Terry roundly condemns this belief, and, obnoxiously reductive and nostalgic as he may be, Eagleton does have a lot of good points. It does get tiresome reading sundry Lacanian film analyses of beer commercials and sequences of Angel. Even though said essays are not representative of cultural criticism as a discipline, they are hardly in short supply, and sufficient of them and one closely starts wishing for good old Beowulf and numerous high-handed cultural imperialism. Almost. In this reviewer’s modest opinion, the saving grace of cultural theory is books like this one.
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