We have much to learn from these figures about our current predicaments, and especially about the dangers of populist rhetoric about malevolent outsiders. It examines the process of adaptation to US culture, and the consequences of refusing to do so, alongside the need to cope and survive in an estranged cultural environment. The book tells a critical story about how seeing the world through alien goggles carries simultaneously both a positive and a negative charge, offering a double perspective that never sees things in isolation. In my book Transatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile and Culture in Midcentury, I explore how figures like Adorno, James and Beauvoir experienced alienation in the United States and transformed that experience into a positive tool for understanding the emergence of the modern world. This is one of the United States’ most potent myths, and it is one that has lost none of its seduction today, on either side of the Atlantic. Waves of grotesque and hostile outsiders were always ready to pour into the country, or else insidiously creep under the radar in order to infiltrate and destroy the integrity of American culture. After she wrote a critical account of the United States in her travelogue America Day by Day in 1947, the US intellectual establishment painted her as a sci-fi space-traveller unable to come to terms with a newly discovered planet, descending from her plane “as from a spaceship, wearing metaphorical goggles.” This was the golden era of science fiction in the United States, after all, when popular culture repeatedly rehearsed the trope of alien invasion in novels and films such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Invasion U.S.A., and Red Planet Mars. In Beauvoir’s case, the alien status was metaphorical. James was detained as a suspected Communist during the Red Scare in 1953 (he wasn’t one) and deported to the UK. Adorno, as a German, was designated an “enemy alien” during World War Two and placed under curfew in Los Angeles, unable to travel more than five miles from his home. They were all aliens in their own right, and were treated with varying degrees of hostility. James and Simone de Beauvoir left a Europe in crisis for the United States, and spent time in America observing, commenting on and criticizing the cultural landscape. In mid-century America, intellectuals such as Theodor Adorno, C. In searching a critical grasp of these times, we might look to the writings and experiences of a previous generation of cosmopolitans, who responded to their own era of right-wing authoritarianism, xenophobia, and barbarism. The spectre of “criminal aliens,” as Trump’s running mate has recently called undocumented migrants, is projected everywhere as the gravest threat to national security, culture, and identity. Throughout continental Europe, right wing, populist political parties are increasing their share of the vote. In the UK, the nation votes to sever its ties with the European Union following a campaign based on anti-immigration rhetoric. In the US, the President Elect built his platform on a promise to build a wall along the US/Mexico border. On both sides of the Atlantic, in the US and Europe, xenophobia, nativism, and aggressive jingoism are in the ascendency. Many were quick to voice their opinion on the theory, with one user even calling out the TikToker whose account has over 3.9 million likes and 611,000 followers, writing: "First thing I would do as a time traveller: create a TikTok.These are dark days for cosmopolitanism. "One of the meteors will seem different than all the others, that is because it is a ship landing on Earth, starting preparations for the first Nozic War.” In the clip, the time traveller said: "There will be a very large meteor shower that lasts for two weeks, it will be seen in the Northern hemisphere, containing the Nozic Message.
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