« Indigenous borderlands against settler borderlands (introducing a special issue): Amrah Salomón J., Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, Susy J. Zepeda, ‘Indigenous Borderlands: Indian Again, the Return of Land and People’, American Quarterly, 78, 3, 2026, pp. 467-491
Deportation is a form of incarceration: Monisha Das Gupta, ‘Carcerality and Abolition: Settler Politics and Migrant Organizing’, American Quarterly, 78, 3, 2026, pp. 801-825 »

Alien frontiers: Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, Neda Atanasoski, ‘Unsettling Alien Land’, American Quarterly, 78, 3, 2026, pp. 677-703

15Sep26

Excerpt: On February 18, 2021, NASA released the first high-resolution color images of the Martian surface captured by the Perseverance rover—rust-red plains, wind-carved rock, and a landscape long imagined as holding clues about whether life ever existed on an otherwise lifeless planet.1 That same week, on February 23, 2021, US Customs and Border Protection circulated infrared surveillance footage looking down the Sonoran Desert, depicting migrants’ heat signatures as glowing figures moving across a terrain likewise described as barren, empty, and hostile to life.2 In both cases, distant cameras pictured desert landscapes as frontiers without life. On this alien world of Mars, and “alien land” in the US Southwest, the only visible signs of life were cast as anomalies, disruptions, or threats requiring containment. These parallel images illuminate how an optics of alienness underpins both outer-space exploration and border enforcement. They reveal a shared territorial imaginary in which seemingly uninhabitable arid deserts and jagged mountaintops, whether celestial or terrestrial, are rendered available for scientific infrastructural occupation and US imperial sovereignty precisely because they are imagined as devoid of life, except for the forms of life marked as alien. The relationship between the category of the alien and frameworks for apprehending the boundary between life and no-life (or what elsewhere we term vita nullius) has long undergirded US claims to territorial control, shaping both the legal category of the migrant “alien” and the production of Indigenous homelands as alien land.


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