The Aliens Within: Danger, Disease, and Displacement in Representations of the Racialized Poor

Description

Discrimination, stigmatization, xenophobia, heightened securitization – fear and blaming of "aliens within" – characterize the world infected by COVID-19. Such fears have a long cultural history, however, particularly in connecting pathology with race, poverty, and migration. This volume explores theory and narratives of disease, danger, and displacement through the lenses of cultural, literary, and film studies, historical representation, ethnics studies, sociology and cultural geography, classics, music, and linguistics. Investigations range from, for example, illness discourse in the ancient classics to images of perilous intruders in the Age of Trump, from the Haitian Revolution and subsequent zombie stereotypes to current, problematic refugee resettlement in the US South and Greek islands, from the urban underworld in nineteenth-century sensation novels to ethnic women "on the stroll" in coronavirus times. The collection is organized into three thematically intertwined parts: Stigmatizing the Racialized Underclass; Pathologizing the Other; Constructing and Countering Collapse. It examines changing or recurrent aporias in tropes of belonging and exclusion, as well as the birthing of new forms of identity, agency, and countercultural expression. presentation of interdisciplinary theory and case studies investigation of a wide range of historical and cultural, literary, ethnic, and sociological phenomena consideration of new forms of identity, agency, and countercultural expression Table of Contents The Aliens Within: Danger, Disease, and Displacement in Representations of the Racialized Poor Danger: Stigmatizing the Racialized Underclass Bong Joon Ho Meets Richard Wright: Spatialized Poverty in The Host and Parasite or ‘The Koreans Who Lived Underground’ “Holes Swarming with Human Beings”: Racing the Urban Underclass in the Antebellum City Mystery Novel The Black Body as Embodied Sound: Musicking as Personal and Communal Agency against the Othering of the Lettered Gaze in Puerto Rico in the Early Twentieth Century Representations of the “Aliens Within”: Romanian Jews and Roma in Radu Jude’s Cinema Alien Horrors: Lovecraft and the Racialized Underclass in the Age of Trump Disease: Pathologizing the Other Bounding Boukman: The Diseasing of Haitian Bodies in Representations of Race and Culture, from Zombies to Disaster Capitalism De-Pathologizing Diversity: A Critical Analysis of Racialized Discourses of Difference and Deviance in The Black Border and the Imperative of Reframing Approaches to Linguistic Variation Sowing the Seeds: Illness as Social Imbalance and Instrument of Social Change in Octavia Butler’s Speculative Fiction Aliens Without and Within: Abjection from Tetter to Tumor in Toni Morrison’s Novels African American Women and Stigma: Reactions to Medical Targeting for HIV and COVID-19 Displacement: Constructing and Countering Collapse Spilling Over: Morality and Epidemiology in Ancient and Contemporary Contexts Socrates in the City of Bones: Plato’s Republic and August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean Displacement and Discipline: Refugees and the Unemployed in Living and Public Spaces in Greece Resettled Refugees in the American South: Discourses of Victimization and Transgression in Clarkston, Georgia Making the Beams of Architectural Poetry out of the Rubble of Displacement: Czesław Miłosz, Taha Muhammad Ali, and the Lyric of Constructed World Citizenry Notes on Contributors Index