BiblioVault - Books about Arrival

Arrival

David Roche

University of Texas Press, 2024

A study of Denis Villeneuve’s genre-transcendent film.

In Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016), scientists must decipher the language of and peacefully communicate with aliens who have landed on Earth before the world’s military attacks. In this first book-length study of the film, scholar David Roche argues that it is one of the most important films of this century, and the most brilliant science fiction film since Blade Runner. Roche posits Arrival as a blockbuster with artistic ambitions—an argument supported by the film’s several Academy Award nominations—and looks closely at how the film engages with theoretical questions posed by contemporary film studies and philosophy alike. Each section explores a central aspect of the film: its status as an auteur adaptation; its relation to the science fiction genre; its themes of communication on narrative and meta-narrative levels; its aesthetics of time and space; and the political and ethical questions it raises. Ultimately, Roche declares Arrival a unique, multifaceted experience in the world of hard science fiction films, placing it in context with works like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Contact while also examining how it bridges the gap between genre and art house cinema.

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The Arrival

Daniel Simko

Four Way Books, 2009

Poet and translator Daniel Simko emigrated with his parents to the U.S.A. and lived here until his death, aged 45, in 2004. Steeped in the traditions of European art, Simko remained reticent about publishing. Thanks to his literary executor, Carolyn Forché, this first collection, in the language Simko grew up into, showcases his gift for the unexpected, exact phrase. The Arrival maps a haunting choreography of travel, memory, and the body so gently you will feel you have been carrying this book around with you all along.

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The Arrival of the Fittest

Biology's Imaginary Futures, 1900–1935

Jim Endersby

University of Chicago Press, 2025

In the early twentieth century, varied audiences took biology out of the hands of specialists and transformed it into mass culture, transforming our understanding of heredity in the process.

In the early twentieth century communities made creative use of the new theories of heredity in circulation at the time, including the now largely forgotten mutation theory of Hugo de Vries. Science fiction writers, socialists, feminists, and utopians are among those who seized on the amazing possibilities of rapid and potentially controllable evolution. De Vries’s highly respected scientific theory only briefly captured the attention of the scientific community, but its many fans appropriated it for their own wildly imaginative ends. Writers from H.G. Wells and Edith Wharton to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, J.B.S. Haldane, and Aldous Huxley created a new kind of imaginary future, which Jim Endersby calls the biotopia. It took the ambiguous possibilities of biology—utopian and dystopian—and reimagined them in ways that still influence the public’s understanding of the life sciences. The Arrival of the Fittest recovers the fascinating, long-forgotten origins of ideas that have informed works of fiction from Brave New World to the X-Men movies, all while reflecting on the lessons—positive and negative—that this period might offer us.

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Ball Hawks

The Arrival and Departure of the NBA in Iowa

Tim Harwood

University of Iowa Press, 2018

Believe it or not, Waterloo, Iowa, had an NBA team during the league’s first season, 1949 to 1950. Broadcaster and independent sports historian Tim Harwood uncovers the fascinating story of the Waterloo Hawks and the Midwest’s influence on professional basketball. Beginning with the professional leagues that led up to the creation of the National Basketball Association, Harwood recounts big games and dramatic buzzer-beaters, and the players who made them.

The first season of the NBA was far from a success. Teams had a hard time attracting fans, with games often played in half-empty arenas. When Waterloo residents learned that the team was struggling financially, they rallied behind the Hawks and purchased shares of the team in a bid to keep it afloat. Unfortunately, that community-based effort was not enough; owners of teams in larger markets pressured the league to push Waterloo—and other smaller towns like Anderson, Indiana, and Sheboygan, Wisconsin—out of the league.

Though the Hawks disappeared after their lone NBA campaign, Waterloo and other midwestern teams were nonetheless integral to getting the NBA off the ground, and their legacy continues today through some of the current franchises that relocated to larger markets. Combining newspaper accounts and personal interviews with surviving players, Harwood weaves a fascinating story of the underdog team, in the unlikeliest of places, that helped make professional basketball the worldwide success it is today.

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Pregnant on Arrival

Making the Illegal Immigrant

Eithne Luibhéid

University of Minnesota Press, 2013

“State alert as pregnant asylum seekers aim for Ireland.” “Country Being Held Hostage by Con Men, Spongers, and Those Taking Advantage of the Maternity Residency Policy.” From 1997 to 2004, headlines such as these dominated Ireland’s mainstream media as pregnant immigrants were recast as “illegals” entering the country to gain legal residency through childbirth. As immigration soared, Irish media and politicians began to equate this phenomenon with illegal immigration that threatened to destroy the country’s social, cultural, and economic fabric.

Pregnant on Arrival explores how pregnant immigrants were made into paradigmatic figures of illegal immigration, as well as the measures this characterization set into motion and the consequences for immigrants and citizens. While focusing on Ireland, Eithne Luibhéid’s analysis illuminates global struggles over the citizenship status of children born to immigrant parents in countries as diverse as the United States, Hong Kong, and elsewhere. Scholarship on the social construction of the illegal immigrant calls on histories of colonialism, global capitalism, racism, and exclusionary nation building but has been largely silent on the role of nationalist sexual regimes in determining legal status. Eithne Luibhéid turns to queer theory to understand how pregnancy, sexuality, and immigrants’ relationships to prevailing sexual norms affect their chances of being designated as legal or illegal.

Pregnant on Arrival offers unvarnished insight into how categories of immigrant legal status emerge and change, how sexual regimes figure prominently in these processes, and how efforts to prevent illegal immigration ultimately redefine nationalist sexual norms and associated racial, gender, economic, and geopolitical hierarchies.

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A Sense of Arrival

Kevin Adonis Browne

Duke University Press, 2024

In A Sense of Arrival, Kevin Adonis Browne blends literary, visual, and material forms to present a narrative of Caribbean blackness. Arguing that the story of Caribbeanness cannot be told through words alone, Browne interweaves essays, memoir, autotheory, and narrative verse with documentary photography, portraiture, Rorschach blots, and images of his own sculptures and art installations. Browne labels this multimodal approach and rhetorical form “Caribbean nonfiction,” and he uses it to conceptualize arrival as a theory of being. Arrival is practiced through forms of status, return, belonging, nomadism, self-exile, love, loss, presence, and haunting, each of which expresses the vast complexity and urgency of Caribbeanness. At the same time, arrival emphasizes and extends Caribbean ways of being, knowing, and doing. Throughout, Browne challenges readers to follow the archipelagic sensibilities of the Caribbean to look beyond black death and apprehend the inherent optimism and beauty of arrival. A singular meditation on the art and process of Caribbeanness, A Sense of Arrival is a statement on how the black Caribbean self comes to be.

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Tanegashima

The Arrival of Europe in Japan

Olof Lidin

National University of Singapore Press, 2002

The year 1543 marked the beginning of a new global consciousness in Japan with the arrival of storm-blown Portuguese merchants in Tanegashima Island in southern Japan. Other Portuguese rapidly followed and Japan became aware of a world beyond India. The Portuguese brought with them the musket, which was quickly copied and began to change Japanese warfare. Francis Xavier arrived in 1549 and other Christian missionaries soon after. This is not a new story but it is the first time that Japanese, Portuguese and other European accounts have been brought together and presented in English.

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