A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

oth in their rich and bizarre detail and the shifts they exhibit over time. Their reverberations
along multiple lines of association make them even more arresting. By way of introduction to
the extended discussion of these tales that comprises the heart of this dissertation, I will discuss a
series of interrelated matters: the nature of genealogy as historical enterprise; the driving
dialectic of the peculiar history traced by this dissertation; and the links between the figure of the
extraterrestrial and utopian thought.
As to the historical enterprise—I look to Foucault, and particularly to his essay
“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” as a cautionary influence. 3
My understanding of genealogy
dictates that one write a history of the present rather than a history of the past. This operative
distinction captures something essential of the approach. A history of the past imagines the
present as somehow predestined. It is “a history whose perspective on all that precedes it implies
the end of time, a completed development.” 4
One recent and much ballyhooed example of such
a history is Frances Fukuyama’s 1992 The End of History and the Last Man. In his book,
Fukuyama argues that liberal democracy is the end of the line—the end result toward which all
“history,” “understood as a single, coherent, evolutionary process” has led. 5
It is this sense, of
history as singular, coherent and evolutionary, that genealogy as a practice seeks to challenge.
Genealogy opposes this tidy vision by viewing the passage of events as characterized by
multiplicity, division and uneven change. The first of these terms, multiplicity, opposes the
sense of singularity espoused by traditional historiography, and addresses, among other historical
matters, the question of origin. While Foucault does deploy the term “singularity” in the
aforementioned essay, he does so not to describe the overall process of history, but rather the
3 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York:
Pantheon, 1984) 76-100.
4 Foucault, 86-87.
5 Frances Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).
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