Read more
List of contents
Introduction: Bodies on the Line: Border Noir 1. The Bridge Phenomenon 2. Una Herida Abierta: "True Crime Fiction" and the Juárez Murders 3. Haunted Borders and Ghost Estates: Troubling Boundaries in Irish Crime Fiction 4. Northern Exposures and Southern Views: Policing the Nation’s Edge on the Canada-US Border Conclusion
About the author
Manina Jones is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Western Ontario, Canada.
Summary
Exploring the reciprocal relevance of critical border studies and popular detective fiction, this book asks how and why representations of cross-border crime have taken such a central place in the North American and Western European popular imagination. A recent proliferation of crime novels, television series, and films – instances of "border noir" -- attests to exigent anxieties, conflicts, and desires around the permeability and security of bodies and borders. This book offers case studies of police procedurals and private eye fiction set in North American and European borderlands, and produced from the 1980’s to today. In a time of globalization, when borders are presumed to be eroding due to worldwide flows of information, trade, and migrant peoples, border noir registers complex responses to the issue of boundary crossing. How does the border function as a site of fear and attraction, regulation and freedom in the age of the European Union, NAFTA, and post-9/11? To understand the ways in which borders are culturally navigated, Jones turns to the detective story, whose plots by definition conceptualize issues of morality, justice, and legality, performing a discursive "policing" of territories and bordered identities (especially nation, class, and gender). In the dark aesthetics of border noir, the boundary is a site of risk, the scene of the crime, a signifier of the potential or expressed violence of (trans)national governance. This study works the disciplinary boundaries between literary analysis, popular culture studies in the humanities, and burgeoning scholarly interest in border studies across the social sciences to investigate how fiction shapes our understanding of, and ability to live with and to challenge, borders. It thus reveals the complexities of the vital and expanding fields of border theory, genre studies, and transnational cultural analysis.
