ABSTRACT

America, like all other nations, has defined itself by telling stories of itself and its ‘others’. Today, in the aftermath of World Wars and Cold Wars, America has begun to rediscover hidden divisions within the national body politic and is responding by inventing new narratives of the alien ‘other’. The more extra-terrestrial the better. The postmodern paranoia concerning aliens, running from Hollywood blockbusters, web-site obsessions and cybergames to Reaganite Star War fantasies, is not adventitious. It is, I believe, a telling symptom of mounting millennial hysteria: a symptom informing the current wave of identity-questions – who are we? What is our nation?