A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

figure that serves as a medium between the present and some vision of a world transformed: the
dead, the so-called “ascended master,” and the extraterrestrial. While each of the
aforementioned figures carry with them a more or less religious discourse they are each
understood as occupying a physical plane. Each serves as a secular omen of millennium. The
first moment I examine is American Spiritualism in the mid nineteenth century. The Spiritualist
movement presented a range of “dislocated” actors and narratives, actors and narratives that fell
outside of available taxonomies. The central figure of alterity in Spiritualist discourse exhibits
obvious links to Haraway’s post-human Other. The dead are literally post-human. They are
what we become when we shed our human forms. Their systematic entry into communication
with the living troubles the clear taxonomic distinction between living and dead. Spiritualism
also transgressed established boundaries in the case of gender. While women in the movement
remained inside the domestic sphere in the sense that the séance took place in the parlor,
Spiritualism afforded women positions of power outside the domestic sphere as well. Through
engagement in national and international movements, public performance and lectures, women
were able to take on public roles in a culture that consistently relegated them to the domestic
sphere. Further cleaving to Haraway’s vision of the monstrous, the narrative structures that
emerge from Spiritualism do indeed take us “elsewhere” – the elsewhere in question being the
afterlife. Spiritualism is but the first example of a series of movements to be discussed, all of
which offer a vision of the post-human.
That said this first entry into my genealogy of radical alterity in American culture is
perhaps the least troubling in terms of taxonomy. While communicating directly with the dead
ran against some prevailing notions of the nineteenth century, the dead themselves had been long
known as potential interlocutors. While they were post-human, they still had clear links to the
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