The US-Mexico Border in American Cold War Film

Through an analysis of Cold War Era films including Border Incident , Where Danger Lives , and Touch of Evil , Stephanie Fuller illustrates how cinema across genres developed an understanding of what the U.S.-Mexico border meant within the American cultural imaginary and the ways in which it worked to produce the border.

"We have before us a book of sustained promise. In looking south instead of east (and north rather than west) Fuller studies a variety of situations and stereotypes whose force of expression is found not in genre or storyline but in spatial displacement and movement, interconnection, interrelation, intercession, and the like. She takes up films that perhaps only human and historical geographies would consider in the same breath: Border Incident, Borderline, Where Danger Lives, Border River, Wetbacks, The Tijuana Story, and, last but never least, Touch of Evil." - Tom Conley, Departments of Visual Studies and Romance Languages, Harvard University, USA

Auteur
Stephanie Fuller received her PhD in film studies at the University of East Anglia, UK and her MA film studies with distinction from University College London, UK. Her work has been published in the Journal of Popular Film and Television, and the Journal of American Studies. Her research interests include Hollywood cinema, transnational media, cultural geography, urban studies, and Mexican cinema.

Contenu

Introduction: Screening the Spaces of the US-Mexico Border
PART I: ROMANCE

1. The Romance of Mexico: Tourists, Fugitives and Escaping the US
2. Mapping Borders and Identity: Representation, Transformation and Ethnicity
3. Danger, Disappearance and the Exotic: American Travelers and Mexican Migrants
   PART II: REVOLUTION
4. The Revolutionary Politics of Mexico: Individualism, Communitarianism and Landscape
5. Territory, Colonialism and Gender at the American Frontier
   PART III: REGULATION
6. Ethnicity, Imperialism and the Law: Policing Identities at the Border
7. Border Cities as Contested Space: Postcolonial Resistance in Tijuana
8. Imperial Journeys and Travelling Shots: Regulation, Power and Mobility
   Conclusion: Border Films and Border Studies