Examines how the US-Mexico border is seen through visual codes of surveillanceWhen 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 bord...

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. Thr...

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--t...

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 hemisphe...

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 networ...

Written by scholars of various disciplines, the essays in this volume dig beneath the veneer of Hawai‘i’s myth as a melting pot paradise to uncover historical and complicated cross-racial dynamics. Race is not the primary paradigm through which Hawai‘i is understood. Instead, ethnic difference is celebrated as a sign of multicultural globalism that designates Hawai‘i as the crossroads of the Pacific. Racial inequality is disruptive to the tourist image of the islands. It ruptures the image...