The Racial Lives of Chilean Aliens: Prospective Genetic Hybridity in Abduction and Contact Narratives

This article is about two interlacing narratives: one is of race, mestizaje and hybridity in historical Chile, and the other is of the underlying assumptions and futurological racial projections in four Chilean abduction and contact ethnographic case studies. The two are at a contrapuntal stance to each other in that the second manifests a sort of forward-thinking “racecraft” (Palmié 2023) where race is not seen as a natural kind but an epistemologically open system with a prospective twist. On the one hand, I highlight the very importance of the question of race itself which is patently manifest in the case studies described. Ouestions of the suspicion of underlying kinship between human and alien races, more than substitution, figure strongly in at least three cases. But, on the other, there is what Hacking (1983) might call an “interventionist” approach to race, whereby race is embedded in a constant process of being prospectively made, or done, by experimentation (alien-human, visits, abductions, processes of knowledge divulgation, affect creation). Through an analysis of the last four case studies, which deals with time-travel, multiple dimensions, and alternate histories in relation to miscegenation, we observe an imminently emotive aspect to this racialization, both of human beings and hybrid-aliens, which can be heuristically juxtaposed to the eugenics doctrine of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Chile. This racial hybridizations is an open-ended, cosmological endeavor, an act of world extension into the spatially, temporally, and racially unknown which I have conceptualized as “extreme” (Valentine et al 2012).