Aliens Who Are of Course Ourselves - Brief Article

No wonder we need aliens.

No wonder we're so good at creating aliens.

No wonder we so often project alienness onto one another.

This last of course has been the worst of our problems--the human alien from another culture, country, gender, race, ethnicity. This is the tangible alien who can be hurt or killed. ... And yet we are unable to get along with those aliens who are closest to us, those aliens who are of course ourselves.

Octavia E. Butler, "The Monophobic Response" [1]

The cultural theorist and novelist Albert Murray once remarked that the mandate of the black intellectual was to provide "technology" to the black community. [2] By technology, Murray didn't mean mechanics, new media, or the Internet. Rather, he defined it as those novel analytic approaches he believed necessary to understanding black life "on a higher level of abstraction." [3] For Murray, this process was one of distillation and complication. He advocated theories of African American existence that, like a blueprint, would be sufficiently robust to reveal the larger patterns of society and do justice to its intricacies and complexities. By Murray's definition, the artist Laylah Ali is a technologist of the highest order. In spite of their striking clarity, her gouache images reflect the contradictions of the human condition.

Ali's work explores the tragic lives of the Greenheads, her hypercephalic, thin-limbed, brown-skinned creations. Using a limited palette, she composes provocative visual fields noticeably lacking in scenery, save the humanoid figures that inhabit them. A master at sleight of hand, she uses bright comic-strip colors in a way that recalls the Sunday funnies; but these images have more in common with sardonic political cartoons, for the figures she depicts inflict all manner of insult and injury on one other. Although Ali provides no script for her images, their despair and anger is unmistakable. But there is no violent haste in her brush stroke; the images are controlled--eerily exact. As befits the work of a technician, these tortured lives are rendered with the sharpest precision.

More troubling still for the viewer is the family likeness of the individual Greenheads to one another. The symbols that distinguish one Greenhead from another are remarkably superficial: one wears a dotted shirt, another a solid-color top; one wears a uniform, another a tunic. Why would these characters, who are so seemingly similar and whose sole medium of differentiation is their attire, be at violent odds with one another?

In Ali's paintings these differences, though only skin-deep, have grave consequences. Encounters in the land of the Greenheads typically end in violence: loss of limb, decapitation, subjugation, and abduction. Moreover, the power trips in this dystopic universe appear to be racialized. In Untitled (2000), a Greenhead pair attired in white hats and robes that resemble white supremacist get-ups meet two similarly dressed figures, one with hair ornamentation that harkens back to ancient Egyptian ceremonial attire. One pair offers a severed head to the other. Violence is pervasive and all encompassing where the Greenheads dwell; all are subject to it. Such exercises of power, however, are also the imposed heritage and present-day reality of people of African decent. The brown-skinned Greenheads do double duty as agents in humanity's universal power struggles and as actors in the performance of racialized violence.

The Greenheads are humanoid--human like--but their countenances and outlines are conspicuously similar to the Grays, the archetypal aliens who appear in abduction stories in popular culture. Elaine Showalter and Jodi Dean argue that aliens are doppelganger of our human fears and desires. [4] Although Showalter and Dean provide different explanations for our strange attachments to aliens, both have argued that U.S. culture is obsessed with them.

In an essay in the anthology Dark Matter, the science-fiction writer Octavia E. Butler provides a related theory of the economy of the imagination that produces aliens. She suggests that we create the ethereal, otherworldly figures of sci-fi and speculative fiction in part as an escape from dealing with local others. Yet, as Butler reminds us, back in the real world we also have homespun "tangible aliens" who are marked as irrevocably different by virtue of their language or culture (rendered as attire in Ali's vocabulary). We fashion aliens, and we "project alienness onto one another." Ali could be said to be sending the same message since she uses alienness to reveal both human connection and detachment. In this sense, we are all aliens, though blacks, are doubly so.

Ali s mises-en-scene are both otherworldly and familiar. This alien-ness is at once personal and collective, local and global, nodal and networked. Laylah All's images are a poignant reminder that the brother from another planet is still kin. The aliens are in fact ourselves.

Alondra Nelson is co-editor of Technicolor: Race, Technology. and Everyday Life (New York University Press, 200 I). She is a doctoral candidate in the American Studies Program at New York University and the Ann Plato Fellow in American Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.