Aliens Within

The COVID-19 pandemic brought a wave of discrimination, stigma, and xenophobia, along with tighter security measures and a habit of casting certain people as threats hidden inside the community. These anxieties are far from new. For generations, illness has been linked to race, poverty, and migration.

This collection brings together scholars from cultural, literary, and film studies, historical representation, ethnic studies, sociology, cultural geography, classics, music, and linguistics to examine how disease, danger, and displacement have been theorized and narrated. Its case studies range from the language of illness in ancient classical texts to portrayals of dangerous intruders in the Age of Trump, from the Haitian Revolution and the zombie stereotypes that followed it to contemporary refugee resettlement in the American South and on the Greek islands, and from the urban underworld of nineteenth-century sensation novels to women of ethnic minorities working the streets during the coronavirus era.

The essays are arranged in three interlinked sections: Stigmatizing the Racialized Underclass, Pathologizing the Other, and Constructing and Countering Collapse. Throughout, the authors trace unresolved tensions in how belonging and exclusion are defined, and they attend to the new identities, forms of agency, and countercultural expression that emerge in response.