The alarm and anxiety unleashed by the Great Recession found fascinating expression across popular culture. Harried survivors negotiated societal collapse in The Walking Dead. Middle-class whites crossed the literal and metaphorical Mexican border on Breaking Bad or coped with a lack of freedom among the marginalized on Orange Is the New Black. Camilla Fojas uses representations of people of color, the incarcerated, and trans/queers--vulnerable populations all--to work through the contradictions created by the economic crisis and its freefalling aftermath. Television, film, advertising, and media coverage of the crisis created a distinct kind of story about capitalism and the violence that supports it. Fojas shows how these pop culture moments reshaped social dynamics and people's economic sensibilities and connects the ways pop culture reflected economic devastation. She also examines how these artifacts illuminated parts of society usually kept off-screen or on the margins even as they defaulted to stories of white protagonists.

Zombies, Migrants, and Queers: Race and Crisis Capitalism in Pop Culture

Business & Money

Fojas, Camilla

Economics

University of Illinois Press

The alarm and anxiety unleashed by the Great Recession found fascinating expression across popular culture. Harried survivors negotiated societal collapse in The Walking Dead. Middle-class whites crossed the literal and metaphorical Mexican border on Breaking Bad or coped with a lack of freedom among the marginalized on Orange Is the New Black. Camilla Fojas uses representations of people of color, the incarcerated, and trans/queers--vulnerable populations all--to work through the contradictions created by the economic crisis and its freefalling aftermath. Television, film, advertising, and media coverage of the crisis created a distinct kind of story about capitalism and the violence that supports it. Fojas shows how these pop culture moments reshaped social dynamics and people's economic sensibilities and connects the ways pop culture reflected economic devastation. She also examines how these artifacts illuminated parts of society usually kept off-screen or on the margins even as they defaulted to stories of white protagonists.

The southern frontier is one of the most emotionally charged zones in the United States, second only to its historical predecessor and partner, the western frontier. Though they span many genres, border films share common themes, trace the mood swings of public policy, and shape our cultural agenda. In this examination, Camilla Fojas studies how major Hollywood films exploit the border between Mexico and the United States to tell a story about U.S. dominance in the American hemisphere. She charts the shift from the mythos of the open western frontier to that of the embattled southern frontier by offering in-depth analyses of particular border films, from post-World War II Westerns to drug-trafficking films to contemporary Latino/a cinema, within their historical and political contexts. Fojas argues that Hollywood border films do important social work by offering a cinematic space through which viewers can manage traumatic and undesirable histories and ultimately reaffirm core "American" values. At the same time, these border narratives delineate opposing values and ideas. Latino border films offer a critical vantage onto these topics; they challenge the presumptions of U.S. nationalism and subsequent cultural attitudes about immigrants and immigration, and often critically reconstruct their Hollywood kin. By analyzing films such as Duel in the Sun, The Wild Bunch, El Norte, The Border, Traffic, and Brokeback Mountain, Fojas demands that we reexamine the powerful mythology of the Hollywood borderlands. This detailed scrutiny recognizes that these films are part of a national narrative comprised of many texts and symbols that create the myth of the United States as capital of the Americas.

Border Bandits: Hollywood on the Southern Frontier

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

University of Texas Press

The southern frontier is one of the most emotionally charged zones in the United States, second only to its historical predecessor and partner, the western frontier. Though they span many genres, border films share common themes, trace the mood swings of public policy, and shape our cultural agenda. In this examination, Camilla Fojas studies how major Hollywood films exploit the border between Mexico and the United States to tell a story about U.S. dominance in the American hemisphere. She charts the shift from the mythos of the open western frontier to that of the embattled southern frontier by offering in-depth analyses of particular border films, from post-World War II Westerns to drug-trafficking films to contemporary Latino/a cinema, within their historical and political contexts. Fojas argues that Hollywood border films do important social work by offering a cinematic space through which viewers can manage traumatic and undesirable histories and ultimately reaffirm core "American" values. At the same time, these border narratives delineate opposing values and ideas. Latino border films offer a critical vantage onto these topics; they challenge the presumptions of U.S. nationalism and subsequent cultural attitudes about immigrants and immigration, and often critically reconstruct their Hollywood kin. By analyzing films such as Duel in the Sun, The Wild Bunch, El Norte, The Border, Traffic, and Brokeback Mountain, Fojas demands that we reexamine the powerful mythology of the Hollywood borderlands. This detailed scrutiny recognizes that these films are part of a national narrative comprised of many texts and symbols that create the myth of the United States as capital of the Americas.

Camilla Fojas explores a broad range of popular culture media—film, television, journalism, advertisements, travel writing, and literature—with an eye toward how the United States as an empire imagined its own military and economic projects. Impressive in its scope, Islands of Empire looks to Cuba, Guam, Hawai'i, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, asking how popular narratives about these island outposts expressed the attitudes of the continent throughout the twentieth century. Through deep textual readings of Bataan, Victory at Sea, They Were Expendable, and Back to Bataan (Philippines); No Man Is an Island and Max Havoc: Curse of the Dragon (Guam); Cuba, Havana, and Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights (Cuba); Blue Hawaii, Gidget Goes Hawaiian, and Paradise, Hawaiian Style (Hawai'i); and West Side Story, Fame, and El Cantante (Puerto Rico), Fojas demonstrates how popular texts are inseparable from U.S. imperialist ideology. 
Drawing on an impressive array of archival evidence to provide historical context, Islands of Empire reveals the role of popular culture in creating and maintaining U.S. imperialism. Fojas's textual readings deftly move from location to location, exploring each island's relationship to the United States and its complementary role in popular culture. Tracing each outpost's varied and even contradictory political status, Fojas demonstrates that these works of popular culture mirror each location's shifting alignment to the U.S. empire, from coveted object to possession to enemy state.

Islands of Empire: Pop Culture and U.S. Power

Migrant Labor and Border Securities in Pop Culture (Routledge Focus on Latina/o Popular Culture)

Migrant Labor and Border Securities in Pop Culture explores the conditions for migrant domestic, agricultural, and factory workers as that of continual crisis and examines how the borderlands are a workshop of neoliberalism. These borderland stories present a future of integrated networks in which the border is not just physical but temporal, separating the present time of crisis and migrant phobia, and a future of transborder interaction and settlement based on bridges and networks rather than walls and the proliferation of security technologies. Written in accessible prose for undergraduate and graduate students across American studies, immigration studies, media and cultural studies and more, this book examines the collective action seen in Latina/o cultural productions after the economic crisis and how they reach across racial and geographic lines to imagine new entities.

Reference

Routledge

Migrant Labor and Border Securities in Pop Culture explores the conditions for migrant domestic, agricultural, and factory workers as that of continual crisis and examines how the borderlands are a workshop of neoliberalism. These borderland stories present a future of integrated networks in which the border is not just physical but temporal, separating the present time of crisis and migrant phobia, and a future of transborder interaction and settlement based on bridges and networks rather than walls and the proliferation of security technologies. Written in accessible prose for undergraduate and graduate students across American studies, immigration studies, media and cultural studies and more, this book examines the collective action seen in Latina/o cultural productions after the economic crisis and how they reach across racial and geographic lines to imagine new entities.

Review\n"As historically enduring and salient as borders and border discourses have been, they remain a crucial topic of study―for their deployment has life and death consequences for millions around the globe. Drawing on a creative combination of Border and Surveillance Studies, Camilla Fojas proposes the concept of ‘borderveillance’ to encourage us to critically assess the imperial significations and material outcomes of the ongoing struggle of human flow at the Mexico-US border. This original approach expands our understanding of the border while creating a visual archive of racial capitalism at work." ― Angharad N. Valdivia, author of Latino/as in the Media\n"An incisive, brilliant, and deep analysis of what Fojas terms the ‘culture, politics and infrastructure of borderveillance.’ With groundbreaking and rigorous research, Fojas demonstrates the ways that the policing of the US-Mexico border is an optical project, one intimately bound up with histories of colonialism, racial capitalism, and genocidal logics. Extending the groundbreaking work of multiple theoretical frameworks from critical race theory to feminist surveillance studies, Border Optics thinks about how dominant modes of seeing produce new technologies aimed at automating and intensifying existing forms of ‘racial surveillance capitalism.’ In this time of intensified white supremacy and policing at the US-Mexico border, Fojas’s work shows the violence produced by borderveillance, and ruminates on alternatives to a dronified future." ― Shoshana Amielle Magnet, author of When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity\nExamines how the US-Mexico border is seen through visual codes of surveillance\nWhen Donald Trump promised to “build a wall” on the U.S.-Mexico border, both supporters and opponents visualized a snaking barrier of concrete cleaving through nearly two thousand miles of arid desert. Though only 4 percent of the US population lives in proximity to the border, imagining what the wall would look like came easily to most Americans, in part because of how images of the border are reproduced and circulated for national audiences.\nBorder Optics considers the US-Mexico border as one of the most visualized and imagined spaces in the US. As a place of continual crisis, permanent visibility, and territorial defense, the border is rendered as a layered visual space of policing―one that is seen from watchtowers, camera-mounted vehicles, helicopters, surveillance balloons, radar systems, unmanned aerial vehicles, and live streaming websites. It is also a space that is visualized across various forms and genres of media, from maps to geographical surveys, military strategic plans, illustrations, photographs, postcards, novels, film, and television, which combine fascination with the region with the visual codes of surveillance and survey.\nBorder Optics elaborates on the expanded vision of the border as a consequence of the interface of militarism, technology, and media. Camilla Fojas describes how the perception of the viewing public is controlled through a booming security-industrial complex made up of entertainment media, local and federal police, prisons and detention centers, the aerospace industry, and all manner of security technology industries. The first study to examine visual codes of surveillance within an analysis of the history and culture of the border region, Border Optics is an innovative and groundbreaking examination of security cultures, race, gender, and colonialism.

Border Optics: Surveillance Cultures on the US-Mexico Frontier (Critical Cultural Communication)

History

Americas

NYU Press

Fojas's book is a study about the aporia between cosmopolitanism as a sign of justice and cosmopolitanism as the consumption and display of international luxury items and cultural production. Turn of the century Pan-American cosmopolitanism described international aesthetic culture and fashion drawn from major world cities, but it was also implicitly political, it held a promise of justice in the acceptance and coexistence of difference. Being cosmopolitan was an orientation towards the cosmopolis in a search for models of tolerance and openness for different lifestyles, ways of being, and gender and sexual identities. Fojas engages the work of Guatemalan Enrique Gomez Carrillo, the travel writings from the Chicago World's Fair of Cuban Aurelia Castillo de Gonzalez, the Venezuelan journal Cosmopoils, and Rodo's infamous Ariel, all of which share a common principle of the practical application of cosmopolitanism. These figures grapple with cosmopolitanism, sometimes conceptualizing new models of hospitality and sometimes failing, nonetheless keeping the broken promise of utopist spaces and their imagined cities.

Cosmopolitanism in the Americas (Comparative Cultural Studies)

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Purdue University Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Fojas, Camilla. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Fojas, Camilla

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Fojas, Camilla. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Zombies, Migrants, and Queers: Race and Crisis Capitalism in Pop Culture

Zombies, Migrants, and Queers: Race and Crisis Capitalism in Pop Culture

Border Bandits: Hollywood on the Southern Frontier

Border Bandits: Hollywood on the Southern Frontier

Islands of Empire: Pop Culture and U.S. Power

Migrant Labor and Border Securities in Pop Culture (Routledge Focus on Latina/o Popular Culture)

Migrant Labor and Border Securities in Pop Culture (Routledge Focus on Latina/o Popular Culture)

Islands of Empire: Pop Culture and U.S. Power

Border Optics: Surveillance Cultures on the US-Mexico Frontier (Critical Cultural Communication)

Cosmopolitanism in the Americas (Comparative Cultural Studies)