Aliens and Indians: Science Fiction,Prophetic Photography and Near-Future Visions

Abstract

Building upon the insights of Indian media-makers and critics, this article considers the ways in which science fiction about alien abduction incorporates and transforms histories of Indian slavery. Specifically, it historicizes science fiction in relationship to Indian slavery to explore its implications for contemporary demographic, political and cultural transformations. Narratives of encounter and conquest in Hollywood films such as Contact (1997) and Men in Black (1997) are considered in tandem with Indian media-makers and critics such as Ward Churchill, Jimmie Durham, Jacquelyn Kilpatrick, Victor Masayesva, Leslie Marmon Silko and Beverly Singer, who stress the long-term historical continuities among dominant images of Indians, at different times and places and in diverse forms, more or less from Columbus to the present.