The NAFTA Spectacle: Envisioning Borders, Migrants and the U.S.-Mexico Neoliberal Relation in Visual Culture

• Main Author: Wilson, Jamie
• Other Authors: Gutierrez, Laura, Briggs, Laura, Duran, Javier
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: The University of Arizona. 2013
• Subjects: Immigration; Migration; NAFTA; Visual Culture; Spanish; Border Studies; Postville
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10150/299070

This dissertation brings critical visual culture studies to bear on mediatized representations of borders and migration in U.S. and Mexican contexts. In particular, this study examines how the human price of the North American Free Trade Agreement is represented and/or disappeared in popular visual culture. I deploy an eclectic methodological framework whose elements emerge from the confluence of Border Studies, Visual Cultural Studies and theorizations of neoliberalism in order to study how television, print media and narrative and documentary film serve as sites for both the visual constitution and critical contestation of neoliberal agendas. For example, I view objects of visual culture such as the Border Wars television program, Backpacker magazine and films Sin dejar huella and AbUSed: The Postville Raid as powerful and privileged sites for the analysis of political discourses.