Description
Book Synopsis
Covering the Border War: How the News Media Create Crime, Race, Nation, and the USA-Mexico Divide examines the notion of the body politic in border newspaper coverage of the USA-Mexico divide and how the nation and immigration are racially imagined in crime news discourse, where whiteness is associated with order and brownness is associated with disorder in a variety of imaginative, nativist ways. By applying critical discourse analysis methodology to the Los Angeles Times, Arizona Republic, Albuquerque Journal, and Houston Chronicle during a peak epoch of border militarization policies (19932006), brownness emerges through a news crime frame that reflexively shows the values and meanings of whiteness and the nation. At the body scale, border crossings threaten the whiteness of the national body through suggestions of rape and disfigurement. Border news discourse feminizes the nation with nurturing resources and services under threat of immigrant rape as well as expresses racial anxiet
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Dirt, Scales, and the White Body Politic Chapter 2: “Build that Wall!;” Brutalizing Presidential Border War Policies and the Necropolitical Deathscape Chapter 3: The Scale of the Vulnerable Body Chapter 4: A Ranch in the Wild (House Scale) Chapter 5: A Battlefield and a Cataclysmic Flood (Region Scale) Chapter 6: Border Symptoms and Border Treatments: A Disease Body Politic (Nation Scale) Chapter 7: The Unbearable Whiteness of Seeing: Recommendations for Resisting Everyday New(S) Racism
