Zombies, Migrants, and Queers

Zombies, Migrants, and Queers
Author: Camilla Fojas
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2017-02-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0252099443

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.

Writing Migration through the Body

Writing Migration through the Body
Author: Emma Bond
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2018-09-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319976958

Writing Migration through the Body builds a study of the body as a mutable site for negotiating and articulating the transnational experience of mobility. At its core stands a selection of recent migration stories in Italian, which are brought into dialogue with related material from cultural studies and the visual arts. Occupying no single disciplinary space, and drawing upon an elaborate theoretical framework ranging from phenomenology to anthropology, human geography and memory studies, this volume explores the ways in which the skin itself operates as a border, and brings to the surface the processes by which a sense of place and self are described and communicated through the migrant body. Through investigating key concepts and practices of transnational embodied experience, the book develops the interpretative principle that the individual bodies which move in contemporary migration flows are the primary agents through which the transcultural passages of images, emotions, ideas, memories – and also histories and possible futures – are enacted.

Pop Culture and the Dark Side of the American Dream

Pop Culture and the Dark Side of the American Dream
Author: Paul A. Cantor
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2019-05-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0813177332

The many con men, gangsters, and drug lords portrayed in popular culture are examples of the dark side of the American dream. Viewers are fascinated by these twisted versions of heroic American archetypes, like the self-made man and the entrepreneur. Applying the critical skills he developed as a Shakespeare scholar, Paul A. Cantor finds new depth in familiar landmarks of popular culture. He invokes Shakespearean models to show that the concept of the tragic hero can help us understand why we are both repelled by and drawn to figures such as Vito and Michael Corleone or Walter White. Beginning with Huckleberry Finn and ending with The Walking Dead, Cantor also uncovers the link between the American dream and frontier life. In imaginative variants of a Wild West setting, popular culture has served up disturbing—and yet strangely compelling—images of what happens when people move beyond the borders of law and order. Cantor demonstrates that, at its best, popular culture raises thoughtful questions about the validity and viability of the American dream, thus deepening our understanding of America itself.

Queering the Migrant in Contemporary European Cinema

Queering the Migrant in Contemporary European Cinema
Author: James S. Williams
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2020-08-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0429559275

This exciting and original volume offers the first comprehensive critical study of the recent profusion of European films and television addressing sexual migration and seeking to capture the lives and experiences of LGBTIQ+ migrants and refugees. Queering the Migrant in Contemporary European Cinema argues that embodied cinematic representations of the queer migrant, even if at times highly ambivalent and contentious, constitute an urgent new repertoire of queer subjectivities and socialities that serve to undermine the patrolled borders of gender and sexuality, nationhood and citizenship, and refigure or queer fixed notions and universals of identity like ‘Europe’ and national belonging based on the model of the family. At stake ethically and politically is the elaboration of a ‘transborder’ consciousness and aesthetics that counters the homonationalist, xenophobic and homo/trans-phobic representation of the ‘migrant to Europe’ figure rooted in the toxic binaries of othering (the good vs bad migrant, host vs guest, indigenous vs foreigner). Bringing together 16 contributors working in different national film traditions and embracing multiple theoretical perspectives, this powerful and timely collection will be of major interest to both specialists and students in Film and Media Studies, Gender and Queer Studies, Migration/Mobility Studies, Cultural Studies, and Aesthetics.

Mixed Race Hollywood

Mixed Race Hollywood
Author: Mary Beltrán
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2008-08
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0814799892

Addresses early mixed-race film characters, Blaxploitation, mixed race in television for children, and the outing of mixed-race stars on the Internet, among other issues and contemporary trends in mixed-race representation. From publisher description.

Imagining the Mulatta

Imagining the Mulatta
Author: Jasmine Mitchell
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2020-05-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0252052161

Brazil markets itself as a racially mixed utopia. The United States prefers the term melting pot. Both nations have long used the image of the mulatta to push skewed cultural narratives. Highlighting the prevalence of mixed race women of African and European descent, the two countries claim to have perfected racial representation—all the while ignoring the racialization, hypersexualization, and white supremacy that the mulatta narrative creates. Jasmine Mitchell investigates the development and exploitation of the mulatta figure in Brazilian and U.S. popular culture. Drawing on a wide range of case studies, she analyzes policy debates and reveals the use of mixed-Black female celebrities as subjects of racial and gendered discussions. Mitchell also unveils the ways the media moralizes about the mulatta figure and uses her as an example of an ”acceptable” version of blackness that at once dreams of erasing undesirable blackness while maintaining the qualities that serve as outlets for interracial desire.

Migrant Labor and Border Securities in Pop Culture

Migrant Labor and Border Securities in Pop Culture
Author: Camilla Fojas
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 89
Release: 2017-06-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351607685

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.

Zombie Cinema

Zombie Cinema
Author: Ian Olney
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 179
Release: 2017-03-17
Genre: Art
ISBN: 081357949X

It’s official: the zombie apocalypse is here. The living dead have been lurking in popular culture since the 1930s, but they have never been as ubiquitous or as widely-embraced as they are today. Zombie Cinema is a lively and accessible introduction to this massively popular genre. Presenting a historical overview of zombie appearances in cinema and on television, Ian Olney also considers why, more than any other horror movie monster, zombies have captured the imagination of twenty-first-century audiences. Surveying the landmarks of zombie film and TV, from White Zombie to The Walking Dead, the book also offers unique insight into why zombies have gone global, spreading well beyond the borders of American and European cinema to turn up in films from countries as far-flung as Cuba, India, Japan, New Zealand, and Nigeria. Both fun and thought-provoking, Zombie Cinema will give readers a new perspective on our ravenous hunger for the living dead.

Theorising the Contemporary Zombie

Theorising the Contemporary Zombie
Author: Scott Hamilton
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2022-05-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1786838591

Zombies have become an increasingly popular object of research in academic studies and, of course, in popular media. Over the past decade, they have been employed to explain mathematical equations, vortex phenomena in astrophysics, the need for improved laws, issues within higher education, and even the structure of human societies. Despite the surge of interest in the zombie as a critical metaphor, no coherent theoretical framework for studying the zombie actually exists. Addressing this current gap in the literature, Theorising the Contemporary Zombie defines zombiism as a means of theorising and examining various issues of society in any given era by immersing those social issues within the destabilising context of apocalyptic crisis; and applying this definition, the volume considers issues including gender, sexuality, family, literature, health, popular culture and extinction.

Books of the Dead

Books of the Dead
Author: Tim Lanzendörfer
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2018-08-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1496819098

The zombie has cropped up in many forms—in film, in television, and as a cultural phenomenon in zombie walks and zombie awareness months—but few books have looked at what the zombie means in fiction. Tim Lanzendörfer fills this gap by looking at a number of zombie novels, short stories, and comics, and probing what the zombie represents in contemporary literature. Lanzendörfer brings together the most recent critical discussion of zombies and applies it to a selection of key texts including Max Brooks’s World War Z, Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, Junot Díaz’s short story “Monstro,” Robert Kirkman’s comic series The Walking Dead, and Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Within the context of broader literary culture, Lanzendörfer makes the case for reading these texts with care and openness in their own right. Lanzendörfer contends that what zombies do is less important than what becomes possible when they are around. Indeed, they seem less interesting as metaphors for the various ways the world could end than they do as vehicles for how the world might exist in a different and often better form.