REBECCA SCHREIBER
Assistant Professor of American Studies.
Schreiber's research fields include Visual Culture, 20th-Century US-Mexico Cultural and Political Relations, and Transnational American Studies.
In her book Cold War Exiles in Mexico: U.S. Dissidents and the Culture of Critical Resistance (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) Schreiber 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. She argues that for these exiles, collaborations with artists and filmmakers in Mexico contributed to the formation of a culture of critical resistance. This culture of critical resistance articulated an expressly "critical transnationalist" perspective in both its form and content. The cultural 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 she focuses on the ways in which the cultural work of U.S. exiles in Mexico critically engaged both the global reach of the United States and the domestic consequences of the Cold War. She contends that the form and content of their work was dramatically transformed by their circumstances in Mexico and conditions of exile. Their work provided not only a vital counterpoint to the authoritarian cultural and political norms of early Cold War America, but also demonstrated the resilience of oppositional cultural production in response to protracted state repression.
Her current research examines contemporary representations in photography and film/video of the transnational movement of workers from Mexico and Latin America to the United States. This research focuses both on conventional uses of documentary visual media and how migrant groups have sought to intervene in the popular circulation of images and depicted themselves.
Her most recent publications include "Exile, Transnationalism, and the Politics of Form in Cold War Mexico," in Imagining Our Americas: Towards a Transnational Frame, Sandhya Shukla and Heidi Tinsman, eds (Duke University Press, 2007), "Resort to Exile: Willard Motley's Writings on Postwar U.S. Tourism in Mexico," in Adventures into Mexico: American Tourism beyond the Border, Nicholas Bloom, ed., (Rowman and Littlefield Press, 2006) and "The Labors of Looking: Unseenamerica and the Visual Economy of Work," American Quarterly, December 2004.
Courses
AMST 385: American Studies Theory and Method,
AMST 545, Theories and Methods of Popular Culture
AMST 517: Visual Culture
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