Little Green Man’s Burden: Postcolonial satire in H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds and Kurd Lasswitz’s Auf Zwei Planeten

This talk will discuss the extraordinary coincidence that the first two literary narratives of Martian invasion of Earth appeared in the same year (1897) in two different countries and languages and with authors lacking any knowledge of each other’s work.Drawing on a recent trend towards a postcolonial view of the late nineteenth century ‘scientific romance’, in which encounters with extra-terrestrial civilizations are read as allegorical for colonial situations on Earth, it will explain that coincidence by arguing both texts can be read as topically symptomatic of contemporary imperialism on our home planet; that they are both imaginative critiques of this.

Montag, 22.10.2012, 18 – 20 Uhr, Hörsaal 4, Philosophiegebäude, Am Hubland