The figure of the mother in literature and the arts has been the subject of much recent critical attention. Whereas many studies have focused on women writers and the maternal, Laura Doyle significantly broadens the field by tracing the racial logic internal to Western representations of maternality at least since Romanticism. She formulates a theory of "racial patriarchy" in which the circumscription of reproduction within racial borders engenders what she calls the "race mother" in literary and cultural narratives. Pairing literary movements not often considered together--Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance--Doyle reveals that this figure haunts the openings of diverse modern novels and initiates their experimental narrative trajectories. Figures such as the slave mother in Invisible Man, Lena Grove in Light in August, Mrs. Dedalus in Ulysses, and Sethe in Beloved, Doyle shows, embody racial, sexual, and metaphysical anxieties which modern authors expose reconfigure, and attempt to surpass. Making use of heterogeneous materials, including kinship studies, phenomenology, and histories of slavery, Bordering on the Body traces the symbolic operations of the "race mother" from Romanticism and nineteenth-century biology to eugenics and twentieth-century fiction. A breakthrough in race and gender theory, a racial reconfiguration of modernism, and a reinterpretation of discourses of nature since Romanticism, the book will engage a wide spectrum of readers in literary and cultural studies.

The Border and Its Bodies examines the impact of migration from Central America and México to the United States on the most basic social unit possible: the human body. It explores the terrible toll migration takes on the bodies of migrants—those who cross the border and those who die along the way—and discusses the treatment of those bodies after their remains are discovered in the desert. The increasingly militarized U.S.-México border is an intensely physical place, affecting the bodies of all who encounter it. The essays in this volume explore how crossing becomes embodied in individuals, how that embodiment transcends the crossing of the line, and how it varies depending on subject positions and identity categories, especially race, class, and citizenship. Timely and wide-ranging, this book brings into focus the traumatic and real impact the border can have on those who attempt to cross it, and it offers new perspectives on the effects for rural communities and ranchers. An intimate and profoundly human look at migration, The Border and Its Bodies reminds us of the elemental fact that the border touches us all.

In this study of sex, gender, sexual violence, and power along the border, Bernadine Marie Hernandez brings to light under-heard stories of women who lived in a critical era of American history. Elaborating on the concept of sexual capital, she uses little-known newspapers and periodicals, letters, testimonios, court cases, short stories, and photographs to reveal how sex, violence, and capital conspired to govern not only women's bodies but their role in the changing American Southwest. Hernandez focuses on a time when the borderlands saw a rapid influx of white settlers who encountered elite landholding Californios, Hispanos, and Tejanos. Sex was inseparable from power in the borderlands, and women were integral to the stabilization of that power. In drawing these stories from the archive, Hernandez illuminates contemporary ideas of sexuality through the lens of the borderland's history of expansionist, violent, and gendered conquest. By extension, Hernandez argues that Mexicana, Nuevomexicana, Californiana, and Tejana women were key actors in the formation of the western United States, even as they are too often erased from the region's story.

With the railroad's arrival in the late nineteenth century, immigrants of all colors rushed to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, transforming the region into a booming international hub of economic and human activity. Following the stream of Mexican, Chinese, and African American migration, Julian Lim presents a fresh study of the multiracial intersections of the borderlands, where diverse peoples crossed multiple boundaries in search of new economic opportunities and social relations. However, as these migrants came together in ways that blurred and confounded elite expectations of racial order, both the United States and Mexico resorted to increasingly exclusionary immigration policies in order to make the multiracial populations of the borderlands less visible within the body politic, and to remove them from the boundaries of national identity altogether. Using a variety of English- and Spanish-language primary sources from both sides of the border, Lim reveals how a borderlands region that has traditionally been defined by Mexican-Anglo relations was in fact shaped by a diverse population that came together dynamically through work and play, in the streets and in homes, through war and marriage, and in the very act of crossing the border.

This book examines hospitality in American immigrant literature and culture, situating it at the crossroads of space and border theory, and exploring themes of migration, citizenship, identity formation, and spatiality. Assessing the conditions, duration, and shifting roles of hosts and guests in the US, it visits recent representations of immigrant spatiality, from the space of the body in film to the ways in which immigrants are incorporated into the US in a range of literary examples. Timely and imperative in light of the legacies of colonialism, and the realities of modern-day globalization, this book will be of value to fields including post-colonialism, American Studies, and others.

Shows how science and public health shaped the meaning of race in the early twentieth century. Examining the experiences of Mexican, Japanese, and Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles, this book illustrates the ways health officials used complexly constructed concerns about public health to demean, diminish, discipline, and define racial groups.

The border between the United States and Mexico, established in 1853, passes through the territory of the Tohono O'odham peoples. This revealing book sheds light on Native American history as well as conceptions of femininity, masculinity, and empire.

A collection of 15 short stories by female, Latin American writers, including Isabel Allende and Luisa Valenzuela. Ranging across boundaries of geography and gender, the work covers such topics as incest, race, politics, sexual needs, love, old age, and child abuse.

In Fevered Measures, John Mckiernan-González examines public health campaigns along the Texas-Mexico border between 1848 and 1942 and reveals the changing medical and political frameworks U.S. health authorities used when facing the threat of epidemic disease. The medical borders created by these officials changed with each contagion and sometimes varied from the existing national borders. Federal officers sought to distinguish Mexican citizens from U.S. citizens, a process troubled by the deeply interconnected nature of border communities. Mckiernan-González uncovers forgotten or ignored cases in which Mexicans, Mexican Americans, African Americans, and other groups were subject to—and sometimes agents of—quarantines, inspections, detentions, and forced-treatment regimens. These cases illustrate the ways that medical encounters shaped border identities before and after the Mexican Revolution. Mckiernan-González also maintains that the threat of disease provided a venue to destabilize identity at the border, enacted processes of racialization, and re-legitimized the power of U.S. policymakers. He demonstrates how this complex history continues to shape and frame contemporary perceptions of the Latino body today.

We build border walls to keep danger out. But do we understand the danger posed by walls themselves? East Germans were the first to give the crisis a name: Mauerkrankheit, or “wall disease.” The afflicted—everyday citizens living on both sides of the Berlin wall—displayed some combination of depression, anxiety, excitability, suicidal ideation, and paranoia. The Berlin Wall is no more, but today there are at least seventy policed borders like it. What are they doing to our minds? Jessica Wapner investigates, following a trail of psychological harm around the world. In Brownsville, Texas, the hotly contested US-Mexico border wall instills more feelings of fear than of safety. And in eastern Europe, a Georgian grandfather pines for his homeland—cut off from his daughters, his baker, and his bank by the arbitrary path of a razor-wire fence built in 2013. Even in borderlands riven by conflict, the same walls that once offered relief become enduring reminders of trauma and helplessness. Our brains, Wapner writes, devote “border cells” to where we can and cannot go safely—so, a wall that goes up in our town also goes up in our minds. Weaving together interviews with those living up against walls and expert testimonies from geographers, scientists, psychologists, and other specialists, she explores the growing epidemic of wall disease—and illuminates how neither those “outside” nor “inside” are immune.