Description
Book SynopsisCovering 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
Trade ReviewKil (San Jose State Univ.) provides a rigorous analysis of news discourse focusing on how the nation and aspiring immigrants are depicted based on articles published in the Los Angeles Times, Arizona Republic, Albuquerque Journal, and Houston Chronicle from 1993 to 2006. The analysis demonstrates how immigrants have been "racially imagined" as thieves and rapists who drain social services resources and create injury to the suffering (and white) taxpayer. Theoretically rich and methodologically rigorous, this seven-chapter book examines the most recent "nativist wave," which has focused attention on immigrants and the US/Mexico border region. . . Brutalization theory helps Kil explain, throughout, why both the news-reading public and US policy makers might seek to further militarize the border despite the deadly costs of doing so. A comprehensive bibliography completes this engaging and accessible text. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students, faculty, and professionals.
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In Covering the Border War: How the News Media Creates Crime, Race, Nation, and the USA-Mexico Divide, Sang Hea Kil examines how the media repeats images of pollution, floods, invasions, and border walls that support white notions of being under attack by brown bodies. Recommended reading for those interested in how whiteness still matters and how the brown threat is used to justify draconian immigration policies.
-- Leo Chavez, University of California, Irvine
Table of ContentsChapter 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
