Borderlands Media

David E. Toohey’s Borderlands Media: Cinema and Literature as Opposition to the Oppression of Immigrants is an in-depth analysis which explores the immigrant experience using a mixture of cinema, literary, and other artistic media spanning from 1958 onward. Toohey begins with Orson Welles’s 1958 Touch of Evil, which triggered a wave of protest resulting in Chicana/o filmmakers acting out against the racism against immigrant and diaspora communities. The study then adds policy documents and social science scholarship to the mix, both to clarify and oppose undesirable elements in these forms of thought. Through extensive analysis and explication, Toohey uncovers a history of power ranging from lingual and visual to more widely recognized class and racial divisions. These divisions are analyzed both with an emphasis on how they oppress, but also how cinematic political thought can challenge them, with special attention to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. David E. Toohey’s Borderlands Media is an essential text for scholars and students engaged in questions regarding the effect of media on the oppression of immigrants and diaspora communities.

Conceptually innovative, historically sensitive, and politically acute, David Toohey's Borderlands Media is an important contribution to scholarship. Its relevance will doubtless endure., Toohey has done a masterful job of showing how immigrants in the United States are constrained to violent spaces and saddled with tortured identities. By using the media as a social laboratory, Toohey navigates a critical analysis of media sub-texts to illustrate the operation of fascist practices that wound the spirit and lives of immigrants. Toohey’s book is a must-read for anyone studying the borderlands.

David E. Toohey is visiting assistant professor at Aichi University in Nagoya, Japan.