REBECCA SCHREIBER
Assistant Professor of American Studies.
My book Cold War Exiles in Mexico: U.S. Dissidents and the Culture of Critical Resistance (University of Minnesota Press, October 2008), studies the Cold War as a political and cultural project that marginalized and forced into exile left-wing artists, writers and filmmakers from the United States. I argue that for these exiles, collaborations with artists and filmmakers in Mexico, as well as their financial isolation from the culture industries contributed to the formation of a culture of critical resistance. My central argument is that this culture of resistance articulated an expressly "critical transnationalist" perspective in both its form and content. The work of the U.S. exiles challenged U.S. Cold War nationalism, as well as the presumptions and consequences of American exceptionalist ideology by focusing on forms of political exclusion and racialization advanced by U.S. policies and everyday cultural politics. In this book I examine the ways in which the work of the U.S. exiles in Mexico critically engaged both the global reach of the United States and the domestic consequences of the Cold War. I contend that the form and content of their work was dramatically transformed by their circumstances in Mexico and their conditions of exile. Working collaboratively with Mexican nationals, European exiles or independently, the U.S. exiles also explicitly addressed the political-economic context of Mexico, Mexican nationalism, and Mexican cultural production. Their work provided not only a vital counterpoint to the cultural and political norms of early Cold War America, but also demonstrated the resilience of oppositional cultural production in response to protracted state repression.
My second book project, Migration, Immigration, Representation: Documentary Film and Photography between the U.S. and Mexico , currently in development, also focuses on issues of migration between the U.S. and Mexico, and considers relations to place, identity and dislocation through forms of visual culture. My interest in this project grew out of the courses I have taught in U.S. labor history and visual culture, as well as my research interests in documentary film and photography and U.S.-Mexico relations since World War II. In this book I will explore how contemporary U.S. documentary photographers and filmmakers have represented undocumented Mexican and Latin American migrants, as well as how these groups have depicted themselves in photography, film and video since 9/11.
My most recent publications include: "Dislocations of Cold War Cultures: Exile, Transnationalism, and the Politics of Form," in Sandhya Shukla and Heidi Tinsman, eds., Imagining Our Americas: Toward a Transnational Frame (Duke University Press, 2007); "Resort to Exile: Willard Motley's Writings on Postwar U.S. Tourism in Mexico," in Nicholas Bloom, ed., Adventures into Mexico: American Tourism Beyond the Border (Rowman and Littlefield Press, Scholarly Resources Books Division, Jaguar Series on Latin America, 2006); and "The Labors of Looking: Unseenamerica and the Visual Economy of Work," American Quarterly Volume 56, Number 4 (December 2004).
Courses
Undergraduate courses:
American Studies 285: American Life and Thought: Work in America
American Studies 310: The Making of American Culture
American Studies 342: Television and American Culture
American Studies 385: Theory and Methods of American Studies
American Studies 485: Senior Seminar in U.S. Culture
Graduate courses:
American Studies 500: American Culture Studies
American Studies 510: Race, Class, and Gender in the Culture Industry
American Studies 517: Visual Culture
American Studies 519: Transnational American Studies
American Studies 545: Popular Culture Theory and Methods
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