Articulating Aliens: Discursive Crossover and the Figure of the Migrant

Abstract

This dissertation explores representations of the ‘alien migrant’ in popular historical and contemporary discourses and argues that analyzing discourses on different types of ‘alien’ is a productive way to understand and counteract animosity against people constructed as ‘migrant’. Using a method of discourse analysis, I analyze a broad range of cultural artifacts that construct the figurative subject of the migrant. Showing how ideas about ‘race’ and ‘nation’ articulate to produce this problematized subject-figure in the 1790 Naturalization Act, I argue that such problematizations lend support to practices and policies of immigration restriction and exclusion. I then show how the ostensibly unrelated discourses concerning alien species and space aliens modify the discourse on the alien migrant in a process that I term discursive crossover. This is an original theoretical contribution that adds new nuance to Kristeva’s (1986) notion of intertextuality, extends the concept of metaphorical linkage as discussed by Fine and Christoforides (1991), and draws from Deleuze’s idea of the attendant character (1981). I posit that one of the consequences of discursive crossover is to produce the commonsense understanding that migrants are symptomatic of a ‘crisis’. Leaning on Cohen’s (1972) concept of moral panics, I argue that the hegemony of immigration-as-crisis lends legitimacy to calls to ‘build the wall’ on our contemporary southern border. Materials for analysis include popular media such as newspaper articles, books, satirical cartoons, and more contemporary cultural artifacts such as films and tweets. The central period under analysis is from the 1790 Naturalization Act and up to the present day.