Umar Nizar
“It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
-Carl Sagan
The sojourn of US astronaut of Indian origin, Sunita Williams, who has almost been stranded infinitely in space to the point of emaciation, albeit safely, is in many ways a reflection of the immigrant experience. The individual excellence, `talent’ and genius of Williams notwithstanding, the system in the US by default conspires to castigate, imprison and liquidate individuals of non-white ancestry and race. This has been the normative tradition in the `new world’ which despite claims to being a melange of races and nationalities always manages to sideline and marginalize the exceptional individuals of colour who migrate there.
Who are the Aliens?
The instance of the Starliner `failing’ to bring back Sunita Williams due to technical glitches is only a high tech microcosm of what has been writ large across the maps of colonization and conquest. The Sistine Chapel fresco, by Michelangelo Buonarroti, though gigantic by proportions, is said to be a miniature since the original is the universe of which it is a scale-version. In the present instance, the confusion is not just spatial. The cosmic dimensions of the `Williams in space’ interstellar contretemps has been perplexing in a temporal as well as spatial way. Williams of course is living in the future, which entails an extractionist future where mother earth would be legitimately rendered uninhabitable by the likes of Elon Musk and humanity would have to colonize space or other planets in order to survive. This dystopian future is already here in the present, as our living reality in the form of genocide that is being starlinked and telecast live 24X7.
In the future women, subaltern communities, races comprising the global majority, young people will be called on and even compelled to make sacrifices for the emerging space wars and weaponization of outerspace. Outerspace has already been identified as the final frontier of imperialism and capitalism which can be turned into what could be an AI induced Star Wars ecosystem. The data extractionist realm of the digital sphere has already been activated, just like ovulation tracker mobile phone apps during the Covid crisis. These digital applications illegally elicited data from people whom they were supposed to help.
Academics like Lisa Messeri have in the university space, dealt with the theme of `Anthropology of Outer Space’. The multi-species, multi-racial, multi-cultural future that the west had once designed for itself is collapsing under the weight of capitalist greed. Whatever little trickle of equality and justice the capitalist regimes carried in their kitty has evaporated in the desert of ecological disaster and climate change.
Subaltern Aliens VS Elite Cowboys/Bourgeois Vampires VS Proletarian Zombies
The imperialist cowboys and the subaltern aliens are already out and battling it out in a dubious spectacle of electoral democracy. The transcendent operatic dimension of American expansionist ambition means that this necessarily has to be extended to outer space. The romance of outer space has turned it into the new frontier. The edgy sentimentalism of a Trump cannot survive without so much elegiac cooing over space. The lebensraum of National Socialism and the great wall building strategy of the televised MAGA sitcom segue into each other. The USA has turned into a veritable tribute economy where they just print dollars and the rest of the world queues up for it in exchange for precious resources, for such is the extent of US hegemony. But in the ethical vacuum at the heart of the empire, fissures have emerged, which now have spread to outer space. Hacking the outer space is the latest gambit of the techno-capitalist imperium.
Loneliness of the Space Traveller
Spatially what has been unravelling, is a cosmic spectacle that no Indian can contemplate without tragic resonances both colonial and recent. One is reminded of the Slovenian gadfly Zizek’s quip that the past can be changed, but the future is fixed. The apocalyptic future that is being enacted has planetary dimensions and encapsulates the colonial history of the USA into a few months. Such compression schema have been a relaxed feature of the neo-liberal order of things which includes technologies such as the MP3, which is patented by the Fraunhofer University. Compressionist and accelerationist/expansionist schema co-exist side by side. At the heart they embody a vacuum. The inability of the global north to come to terms with the violence of their own history and the re-enactment of that past in the present, constitutes a certain moral vacuum at the heart of the immigrant experience in the present. The existential vacuum that has been created by the loneliness and the individualist ethos of the west find their macroscopic articulation in the Williams episode.
The space exploration programs of the USA and the USSR played crucial roles in the peaceful culmination of the cold war. The Reagan administration and its cynical propaganda surrounding the starwars program apparently impelled the Soviets to boost up their own project, perhaps leading to an overdraft of resources and eventual crumbling of the Soviet experiment itself.
The notional gains from the space programs can be crucial. In the present case, one draws the lessons that a)certain lives matter less than others, b)technology and its inhumanity cannot be questioned, c)the collapse of the west as a civilizational force has already happened. Williams and Butch Willmore and about to vote in the 2024 US elections from outer space, an eventuality that establishes the hegemony of the US in outerspace as well. Trust the Americans to turn racism into a space opera. The tastelessness of US policy which does not stop with Donald Trump, but rather extends to NASA and the US space program, which is the realm of teenage fantasies. The adventures of astronaut Williams in space will certainly make for an inspirational tale for many motivational speakers throughout the `land of the free and the home of the brave’. At the same time it also foreshadows eons of harshness, subjugation, and inhumanity for immigrants from the global South.
The Souls of Colored Space-Folk
The spectacle of the `other in space’ has been rendered normative by Hollywood space operas. The operatic right wing that sings ditties about `many, many billions’ hardly cares for the suffering and angst of the global majority. The dystopian science fiction universe where people are `ashamed to be born of human wombs and not from machines’ could well come to dominate the narrative for the future. Humans already live amongst aliens, and those aliens just happen to be people from Asia, Africa and South America, who happen to belong to non-white races. The disgraceful American fetishism with finance has allowed them to transcend to an outer space realm where a livid Donald Trump talks down to you everyday. The Us of A has literally created its own aliens in the process.
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Umar Nizarudeen is at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has a PhD in Bhakti Studies from the Centre for English Studies in JNU, New Delhi. His poems and articles have been published in Vayavya, Roundtable India, Muse India, Culture Cafe Journal of the British Library, The Hindu, The New Indian Express, The Bombay Review, The Madras Courier, FemAsia, Sabrang India, India Gazette London, Ibex Press Year’s Best Selection etc.
