Airport terminals and desert planes: re-visiting the border in the terminal and no country for old men (original) (raw)
Related papers
Beyond Borders Joel and Ethan Coens NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN as a Postmodern Borderline Myth
M. Stiglegger & A. Escher (Hg.), Mediale Topographien. Beiträge zur Medienkulturgeographie , 2019
As a postmodern reinterpretation of Carson McCarthy’s late modern Western No Country for Old Men (2005) the Coen brothers’ same-titled film quickly achieved cult status. The following study presents the film in light of a major change in cultural identity. Through the lens of film psychoanalysis, the following paper investigates No Country for Old Men (USA 2007) as an expression of the epoch signature ‘Borderland’. The impact of the film is established by confronting viewers who are personally faced with a loss of economic, social and cultural borders as well as boundaries within identity. Film psychoanalysis is to be understood as a systematic reconstruction of subjective, unconscious film reception, tracing it back to film aesthetics.
Introduction: Transnational cinema at the borders: borderscapes and the cinematic imaginary
In tandem with a postnational imaginary that is nurtured by the ever-present promise of deterritorialized mobility and burgeoning migratory fluxes, walls and fences separating nation-states multiply. This is a burning issue: Even though nation-states at the centre of the global order increasingly present themselves as postnational, calls for tighter border security undermine utopian notions of both a borderless New Europe and the US as the Promised Land. This collection investigates the urgent issue of borderscapes and the cinematic imaginary by bringing together a range of new approaches in the field of film and media studies, crossing over into sociology, migration studies and artistic research. The contributions focus on the interrelated motifs of borderscapes as they are represented and used in transnational cinematographies, from Palestine to Sweden, Spain, Finland, Italy, Iran, Iraq, France, the UK and the US, and as constituting premises of cinematic production. The chapters in this book were originally published in the Transnational Cinemas journal.
The Anthropology of Airports: Security and the Apparatuses of State Borders
In recent years, scholars across disciplines have increasingly turned their attention toward the study of international airports, especially in the context of “security”. The regulatory forces that exist in airports are meant to protect political livelihood from perceived foreign threats. These forces manipulate mobility, construct identities, and impact economies. For anthropologists, airports are both physical and symbolic sites of complex social, political, and economic activities. These activities have a tremendous impact on people at local, regional, national, and supra-national scales. Using a broad- based literature review and border theory, this thesis examines several functions of airports as contemporary borders, concentrating on the security apparatus. Building from this view, three aspects of security are highlighted: personal security, economic security, and state security. An examination of airports and the related security initiatives demonstrates how important it is for anthropologists and other scholars to build on existing research through ethnography.
Airports, Time, Uncertainty: Reading another Poetics of Migration
Have you been to an airport? Has time passed—have you moved on, waited, been delayed or turned away? In 1995, Marc Augé characterized international airport terminals as super-modernity’s “non-places” or stateless zones of grey affect (Non-Places). Yet these sites are not “non-places”—an illusion of impatient movement—but carefully designed zones of sovereign statelessness that yield theoretical material in their everyday operation. Thus, when 600 Chinese migrants arrived in staggered waves on smuggler boats across the BC Coast in 1999, Canadian Immigration Control officials declared the “long tunnel thesis” to process these migrants without interference from lawyers and without declaring their arrival in Canada. Just as a long tunnel separates a plane from the customs desk, a “long tunnel thesis” separated these migrants from their human rights. Similarly, in an article titled “Trump’s Airport Kingdom,” Sam Kriss (2017) reads the initial American flight ban on Muslim travellers (or, officially, travellers from seven countries, all majority Muslim) as an exercise in permissiveness; it allows border police to go beyond the ban’s regulations, as stated in the executive order, and push forward in the spirit of the ban’s Islamophobia. This too is a tradition of American immigration police who, in ceaselessly and aggressively inventive uses of their fundamental writs of official creation, craft new poetics of behaviour, tools, and legal discourses to justify their behaviour (Kang, INS on the Line 2017). Kriss observes that airports present a “excruciatingly banal and sharply horrifying experience” for any traveller (2017). In the study of migration, this poetics is not singular but startling, an exception in an age of political exceptionalism (Agamben, State of Exception 2005). The metaphors of airport modernity—characterized by an apparently missing state and designated statelessness that calls itself into being in a moment of crisis while holding invisible powers of demarcation—now infiltrate other purportedly timeless places of waiting and formal deportation. This paper follows those metaphors to read the tools that implement migration policies and politics as a form of poetics, a kind of making and unmaking of bodies (to remember a phrase used by Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain 1985). To read these migrational poetics, I examine contemporary spaces of detention and airport border crossing, considering the cases of modern regulations in United States airports and deportation case studies in North America. The future promised by the exceptional space is twofold: to pass through or to be returned. Whose bodies are at risk? What kind of future is promised by the long tunnel and the shadowy world of deportation that creeps closer and closer to hegemonic society? Airports speak to one version of this ever uncertain future through a creative poetics of migration.
I thought you were a Mexican or Something: Re/visioning Borders of the Global South
Comparative American Studies, 2011
Despite histories that share a deep, wounded sensibility about borders, Mexico and India have relatively few overt meditations on potential parallels. This paper proposes to look at a 2010 Indian action film set in Las Vegas and Mexico featuring Bollywood mega-star Hrithik Roshan and the Mexican-Japanese-Uruguyan telenovela actress Bárbara Mori -who play immigrants of Indian and Mexican descent in the United States. In the film, their star-crossed love takes the pair across the US-Mexico border, where at different times in the movie they find themselves negotiating legal systems (getting papers first from the United States, then Mexico), language barriers (the movie is about one-third each Spanish, English, and Hindi), and an evil casino owner's henchmen. We look at the film from a bifocal perspective, across the US-Mexican border, but also across cultural expectations around a series of differently weighted concepts in South Asian and US understandings, including the key title image of the kite, along with other images such as trains, deserts, names, and bodies. Our analysis challenges border studies with its predominant focus on the US-Mexico border and the postcolonial paradigm of encounters between the metropolis and the margin underlying investigations of diaspora, hybridity, and transnationalism.
Walls and fortresses: borderscapes and the cinematic imaginary
In tandem with a postnational imaginary nurtured by an ever-present promise of deterritorialized mobility and burgeoning migratory fluxes, walls and fences separating nation states multiply. This is a burning issue: even though nation states at the centre of the global order increasingly present themselves as postnational, calls for tighter border security (prompted by traumatic events such as the London Underground bombings, the riots in Paris’s banlieues, the September 11 attacks and the massive number of refugees and migrants drowning in the Mediterranean and being hit by trains after stepping over fences to enter in the Eurotunnel area, in Calais) undermine utopian notions of both a borderless New Europe and the USA as the Promised Land. This editorial of Transnational Cinemas introduces the special issue ‘Walls and fortresses: borderscapes and the cinematic imaginary’, which includes essays focusing on the interrelated motifs of borderscapes as they are represented in transnational cinematographies, from Palestine to Sweden, Spain, Finland and France, and as constituting premises of cinematic production. Through this critical movement, this special issue analyses the ways various cinematic practices, technologies and crossmedia developments impact questions of perception, experience and representation of borderscapes.
Crossing Borders and Transgressing Boundaries: Metaphors for Negotiating Multiple Identities
Ethos, 1998
he idea of borders is a popular metaphor for thinking about multiple identities, especially for scholars who see culture as a process involving negotiating differences of all kinds. The salience of the border emerges from a confrontation between anthropology's old idea of bounded cultures with a recent focus on the flow of people, ideas, and goods across national borders. The international political border, on which the border metaphor is founded, is a distinct, physically marked perimeter encircling the nation-state. It defines the national identity of the population living within that perimeter in territorial terms. It also creates the anomaly of ethnic identities that do not correspond to territorially based identities, as well as the political, social, and cultural phenomenon of "border crossing." Borders within this discourse of nationstates thus create a particular identity that is peculiar to our historical period. The specific juxtaposition of the essays in this collection prompts me to reflect on the limits of this metaphor of border crossing for thinking about issues facing Muslims as they negotiate multiple identities. The concept of borderlands as a way of thinking about identity has emerged through the process of metaphorical extension, as in Gloria Anzaldua's work: The actual physical borderland that I'm dealing with ... is the Texas-US. Southwest/Mexican border. The psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands and the spiritual borderlands are not particular to the Southwest. In fact, the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy. [ I987:prefacej
Challenging the border as barrier: Liminality in Terrence Malick's the thin red line
Journal of Borderlands Studies, Vol. 25(1), 2010
This paper is about the cultural production and negotiation of borders and boundaries in and through contemporary Hollywood war and action movies. It works on the assumption that the way borders are represented in artifacts of popular culture has an impact on political discourse and, therefore, on border practices. War and action movies are read through the concept of the border, i.e. the way in which conventions of representing self and other, friend and foe, give rise to epistemological and topographical barriers limiting the subject positions available within a particular movie discourse are sketched out. After having assessed these border effects in Aliens, Black Hawk Down, and 300, the article turns to The Thin Red Line. The concept of liminality is introduced in order to describe the techniques through which Malick's movie challenges and disrupts the notion of borders as barriers interlocking self and other in relations of mutually exclusive hostility. In reconfiguring the border as a zone of contact and negotiation, liminality enables a subversion of the subject positions implied by these barriers and enables a reconstitution of both the divided entities, effectively turning dogs‐of‐war back into human beings.
Journal of Borderlands Studies, 2014
Border scholars have long understood borders as social constructions around territories and identities. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives, my objective is to analyze the cultural production and "othering" processes of the multiple US-Mexico borderlands via good-quality films emanating from both Mexico City and the US, particularly Hollywood, in two periods: historical background on the 1930s-1980s and the contemporary period of the last two decades. I compare differences across multiple border sites along the near 2,000 mile linewest coast Pacific, central El Paso-Ciudad Juárez, and east coast Gulf of Mexico-as well as those sites inbetween. My overarching argument is that the film industry itself brings out the worst of countries in the US-Mexico borderlands. By "worst," I mean lawlessness, sexual violence, deaths, and drugs, with "othering" processes alive and well on both sides of the border. As such, in both historical and contemporary films, everyday lives in the borderlands are not well represented.