The outbreak tore the U.S. in two. The east remains a safe haven. The west has become a ravaged wilderness. They call it the Evacuated States. It is here that Henry Marco makes his living. Hired by grieving relatives, he tracks down the dead and delivers peace. Now Homeland Security wants Marco for a mission unlike any other. He must return to California, where the apocalypse began. Where a secret is hidden. And where his own tragic past waits to punish him again. But in the wastelands of America, you never know who -- or what -- is watching you.
Is Superman Canadian? Who decides, and what is at stake in such a question? How is the Underground Railroad commemorated differently in Canada and the United States, and can those differences be bridged? How can we acknowledge properly the Canadian labour behind Hollywood filmmaking, and what would that do to our sense of national cinema? Reading between the Borderlines grapples with these questions and others surrounding the production and consumption of literary, cinematic, musical, visual, and print culture across the Canada-US border. Discussing a range of popular as well as highbrow cultural forms, this collection investigates patterns of cross-border cultural exchange that become visible within a variety of genres, regardless of their place in any arbitrarily devised cultural hierarchy. The essays also consider the many interests served, compromised, or negated by the operations of the transnational economy, the movement of culture's "raw material" across nation-state borders in literal and conceptual terms, and the configuration of a material citizenship attributed to or negotiated around border-crossing cultural objects. Challenging the oversimplification of cultural products labelled either "Canadian" or "American," Reading between the Borderlines contends with the particularities and complications of North American cultural exchange, both historically and in the present.
This book represents a contribution to both border studies and short story studies. In today’s world, there is ample evidence of the return of borders worldwide: as material reality, as a concept, and as a way of thinking. This collection of critical essays focuses on the ways in which the contemporary British short story mirrors, questions and engages with border issues in national and individual life. At the same time, the concept of the border, as well as neighbouring notions of liminality and intersectionality, is used to illuminate the short story’s unique aesthetic potential. The first section, “Geopolitics and Grievable Lives”, includes chapters that address the various ways in which contemporary stories engage with our newly bordered world and borders within contemporary Britain. The second section examines how British short stories engage with “Ethnicity and Liminal Identities”, while the third, “Animal Encounters and Metamorphic Bodies”, focuses on stories concerned with epistemological borders and borderlands of existence and identity. Taken together, the chapters in this volume demonstrate the varied and complex ways in which British short stories in the twenty-first century engage with the concept of the border.
This Pivot explores the uses of the Mughal past in the historical fiction of colonial India. Through detailed reconsiderations of canonical works by Rudyard Kipling, Flora Annie Steel and Romesh Chunder Dutt, the author argues for a more complex and integral understanding of the part played by the Mughal imaginary in colonial and early Indian nationalist projections of sovereignty. Evoking the rich historical and transnational contexts of these literary narratives, the study demonstrates the ways in which, at successive moments of crisis and contestation in the later Raj, the British Indian state continued to be troubled by its early and profound investments in models of despotism first located by colonial administrators in the figure of the Mughal emperor. At the heart of these political fictions lay the issue of territoriality and the founding problem of a British claim to sole proprietorship of Indian land – a form of Orientalist exceptionalism that at once underpinned and could never fully be integrated with the colonial rule of law. Alongside its recovery of a wealth of popular and often overlooked colonial historiography, The Return of the Mughal emphasises the relevance of theories of political theology – from Carl Schmitt and Ernst Kantorowicz to Talal Asad and Giorgio Agamben – to our understanding of the fictional and jurisprudential histories of colonialism. This study aims to show just how closely the pageantry and romance of empire in India connects to its early politics of terror and even today continues to inform the figure of the Mughal in the sectarian politics of Hindu Nationalism.
Few places are more revealing than the Alps to grasp the uneven EU core-periphery dynamics intrinsic to the EU border regime. In 2015, the reintroduction of controls at northern Italian borders, as a response to asylum seekers’ mobility, gave rise to a series of conflicts, contradictions and solidarities which this book explores. The ethnographic analysis of the everyday life of the French/Italian and Austrian/Italian borders makes visible the impacts of governance strategies which promote social polarization to contain potentially subversive moments of disruptions and transgressions. By contextualizing the governance of borders and migration in a broader framework, which includes the governance of EU states’ debt, Alpine Border Conflicts focuses on the effects of border regimes not only on migrants but also on EU societies.
This project presents a unique collaboration between photographer Richard Misrach and composer and performer Guillermo Galindo. Misrach has been photographing the 2,000-mile border between the US and Mexico since 2004, with increased focus since 2009--the latest installation in his ongoing series Desert Cantos, a multifaceted approach to the study of place and man's complex relationship to it. Misrach and Galindo have been working together to create pieces that both document and transform the artifacts of migration. Using water bottles, clothing, backpacks, Border Patrol drag tires, spent shotgun shells, ladders and sections of the border wall itself, most of which were collected by Misrach, Galindo fashions instruments to be performed as unique sound-generating devices. He also imagines graphic musical scores, many of which also use Misrach's photographs as points of departure. A unique melding of the artist as documentarian and interpreter, the book includes several suites of photographs drawn from a number of distinct series or Cantos, some made with a large-format camera as well as an iPhone. The book contains a compilation of two dozen sculpture-instruments, graphic scores, instrument designs and links to videos of performances by Galindo.
NAMED A TOP 10 BOOK OF 2018 BY NPR and THE WASHINGTON POST WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE IN CURRENT INTEREST FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE NONFICTION AWARD The instant New York Times bestseller, "A must-read for anyone who thinks 'build a wall' is the answer to anything." --Esquire For Francisco Cantú, the border is in the blood: his mother, a park ranger and daughter of a Mexican immigrant, raised him in the scrublands of the Southwest. Driven to understand the hard realities of the landscape he loves, Cantú joins the Border Patrol. He and his partners learn to track other humans under blistering sun and through frigid nights. They haul in the dead and deliver to detention those they find alive. Plagued by a growing awareness of his complicity in a dehumanizing enterprise, he abandons the Patrol for civilian life. But when an immigrant friend travels to Mexico to visit his dying mother and does not return, Cantú discovers that the border has migrated with him, and now he must know the full extent of the violence it wreaks, on both sides of the line.
Home after Fascism draws on a rich array of memoirs, interviews, correspondence, and archival research to tell the stories of Italian and German Jews who returned to their home countries after the Holocaust. The book reveals Jews' complex and often changing feelings toward their former homes and highlights the ways in which three distinct national contexts--East German, West German, and Italian--shaped their answers to the question, is this home? Returning Italian and German Jews renegotiated their place in national communities that had targeted them for persecution and extermination. While most Italian Jews remained deeply attached to their home country, German Jews struggled to feel at home in the "country of murderers." Yet, some retained a sense of belonging through German culture and language or felt attached to a specific region or city. Still others looked to the future; socialist and communists of Jewish origin hoped to build a better Germany in the Soviet Occupied Zone. In all three postwar states, surviving Jews fought against persistent antisemitism, faced the challenge of recovering lost homes and possessions, struggled to make sense of their persecution, and tried to find ways to reclaim a sense of belonging. Wide ranging and moving, Home after Fascism enriches our understanding of Jews' homecoming experiences after 1945. It reveals the deep affection and persistent love people feel for their homes, the suffering that comes with losing them, and the challenges of a return.
