The Human Alien: The Future of the Environmental Humanities

Focusing on science fiction and film, “Human Aliens” explores two questions: 1) Why are there such baffling and disastrous disconnections between the cognitive awareness of anthropogenic environmental crisis and the generally insignificant alterations in lifestyle that humans seem prepared to make? 2) Can literature and film help move us beyond these disconnections? To answer these questions, this project brings together the insights of literary studies, disability studies, animal studies, and material feminism which, together, are radically challenging the very idea of the “human,” regardless of social contexts, of race, religion or ethnic group by creating a “wilderness zone” inside the tamed area of normality, of “human” as a norm and measure of itself. Placing the question of otherness within the taxonomy of the human subject, these fields are showing that “the other” is not only nature (as the other-than-human), but can be the human itself, or the "human alien." Examining this “alien” presence within the human is a way for the environmental humanities to deconstruct the idea of humanity-qua-normality and to approach a more complex, inclusive and “evolved” type of humanism. By exploring how literary and filmic images associated with “Mother Earth” either distinguish or fail to distinguish between ecocidal anthropomorphism and the legitimate species interests of humanism, the project works to coax the environmental humanities away from its “Mother Earth” origins, engage productively with the sciences of nature, and explore the disconnects between awareness of environmental crisis and inertia in meeting its challenges.