Visions of Invasion: Alien Affects, Cinema, and Citizenship in Settler Colonies explores how the US government mobilizes media and surveillance technologies to operate a highly networked, multidimensional system for controlling migrants. Author Michael Lechuga focuses on three arenas where a citizenship control assemblage manufactures alienhood: Hollywood extraterrestrial invasion film, federal antimigration and border security legislation, and various immigration enforcement protocols implemented along the Mexico–United States border.

Building on rhetorical studies, settler colonial studies, and media studies, Visions of Invasion offers a glimpse at how the processes of alien-making contribute to an ongoing settler colonial project in the US. Lechuga demonstrates that popular films—The War of the Worlds, Predator, Men in Black, and more—participate in the production of migrants as subjective terrorists, felons, and other noncitizen personae vilified in public discourse.

Beyond just tracing how alien invasion narratives circulate in popular media, Lechuga describes how the logics motivating early US colonists materialize in both the US’s citizenship control policy and in some of the country’s most popular texts. Beneath each of the film franchises and antimigrant political expressions described in Visions of Invasion lies an anxious colonial logic in which the settler way of life is seemingly threated by false narratives of imminent invasion from abroad. The volume offers a deep dive into how the rhetorical figure of the alien has been manufactured as a political subjectivity, one that plays out the anxieties, guilts, and fears of colonialism in today’s science fiction landscape.

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The Rhetoric of American Exceptionalism: Critical Essays (co-edited by Jason A. Edwards and David Weiss)

The American experience has been defined, in part, by the rhetoric of exceptionalism. This book of 11 critical essays explores the notion as it is manifested across a range of contexts, including the presidency, foreign policy, religion, economics, American history, television news and sports. The idea of exceptionalism is explored through the words of its champions and its challengers, past and present. By studying how the principles of American exceptionalism have been used, adapted, challenged, and even rejected, this volume demonstrates the continued importance of exceptionalism to the mythology, sense of place, direction and identity of the United States, within and outside of the realm of politics.

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What Democrats Talk About When They Talk About God: Religious Communication in Democratic Party Politics

What Democrats Talk about When They Talk about God is a collection of essays on the religious communication of past and present leaders of the Democratic Party, while in office, on the campaign trail, and in their public and private writing. While many books address issues at the intersection of church and state, this is the only volume that focuses exclusively on Democrats as important contributors to the dialogue about religion and politics in the United States.

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