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American science fiction stories, such as U.S. historical narratives, often give central place to white, Western male subjects as noble explorers, benevolent colonizers, and border-guarding patriots. This constructed subjectivity renders colonized or cultural others as potentially threatening aliens, and it works alongside the parallel construction of white womanhood as a signifier for the territory to be possessed and protected by American empire—or as a sign of empire itself. Popular cultural narratives, whether in the world of U.S. imperialism or the speculative worlds of science fiction, may serve a religious function by helping to shape world-making: the envisioning and enacting of imagined communities. This paper argues that the world-making of American science fiction can participate in the construction and maintenance of American empire; yet, such speculative world-making may also subvert and critique imperialist ideologies. Analyzing the recent films Arrival (2016) and Annihilation (2018) through the lenses of postcolonial and feminist critique and theories of religion and popular culture, I argue that these films function as parables about human migration, diversity, and hybrid identities with ambiguous implications. Contact with the alien other can be read as bringing threat, loss, and tragedy or promise, birth, and possibility.

This dissertation argues that religious world-making in popular culture can reveal and resist hegemonic times. Taking as my primary case study the United States in the 2010s, particularly the shift from the Obama to the Trump era, I analyze cultural constructions of time—as sacred history, destiny, and “the times”—that reflect and shape national identity and belonging in the American imagined community. In this context, such temporal constructions have privileged whiteness and heteronormative masculinity, positioning those who embody or approximate this norm as “of the times,” while also displacing BIPOC, women, and queer people as “out of time.” I posit time as a material and mediated aspect of culture performed by bodies in normative and non-normative ways. Such temporal performativity, I argue, can reify hegemonic norms, but it can also expose and disrupt the constructed nature of these norms in acts of liberative resistance. My project places theories of religion, media, and culture in critical conversation with an analysis of particular examples of larger trends within the popular culture of and about American times in the 2010s. I examine the performative anachronism of time travel narratives (in Timeless, Outlander, and Doctor Who), the re-presenting of past onscreen or onstage worlds through revivals and reincarnations (in Roseanne/The Conners and Star Wars), and history as improvisational memory performance (in Hamilton: An American Musical). Through textual/visual, contextual, and audience analysis, I consider the temporal performativity of these examples and trends in connection to world-making: a relational activity, both conceptual and performative, that imagines and enacts the narrative, aesthetic, and ethical contours of what is most real, true, and important. Such world-making is religious insofar as it reflects and shapes the contours of the “really real” in the imagined community; and it also relies on teleological notions of time drawn from Protestant Christian theology, which remains culturally dominant in the religiously scrambled context of the twenty-first century United States. I argue that the religious world-making of the popular arts can function to reify cultural hegemonies; but such worlds can also be sites of liberative resistance to hegemonic times.