Founding Violence in the Future: A Mnemonic Reading of Ridley Scott's Alien

Abstract

In this article, I offer a settler colonial reading of Sir Ridley Scott’s Alien films: Alien (1979), Prometheus (2012), and Alien: Covenant (2017). My purpose is to underscore the historical dimensions within Alien’s depiction of the future and to demonstrate that the film series is far more exercised with historicity than with futurity. Specifically, I argue that Scott’s metaphors, themes, and plots were intentionally evocative of the horrors of British imperial expansion within North America and function as a kind of mnemonic device that remember the violence of the settler colonial past. More broadly, I offer this analysis because, like many other scholars, I view the science fiction and horror genres, between which we can locate Alien, as remarkably provocative and productive. Such non-realist depictions of monsters, zombies, ghosts, alien invasions, or the human colonization of outer space contain archives of historical feeling that can be accessed through what Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd called a “mnemonic reading” praxis.