Horror and Death: Rethinking Coco's Border Politics

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 41-49
Author(s):  
Orquidea Morales
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Walt Disney Company ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Walt Disney ◽  
Day Of The Dead ◽  
Animated Film ◽  
Border Politics ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The U.S

In 2013, the Walt Disney Company submitted an application to trademark “Día de los muertos” (Day of the Dead) as they prepared to launch a holiday themed movie. Almost immediately after this became public Disney faced such strong criticism and backlash they withdrew their petition. By October of 2017 Disney/Pixar released the animated film Coco. Audiences in Mexico and the U.S. praised it's accurate and authentic representation of the celebration of Day of the Dead. In this essay, I argue that despite its generic framing, Coco mobilizes many elements of horror in its account of Miguel's trespassing into the forbidden space of the dead and his transformation into a liminal figure, both dead and alive. Specifically, with its horror so deftly deployed through tropes and images of borders, whether between life and death or the United States and Mexico, Coco falls within a new genre, the border horror film.

Coda

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Harford Vargas
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Central America ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Mission District ◽  
Day Of The Dead ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Music Film

The coda examines how cultural producers contribute to the Latina/o counter-dictatorial imaginary using non-print-based artistic forms. It focuses in depth on the murals in Balmy Alley in San Francisco’s Mission District, examining how their depiction of authoritarian repression in Central America coexists alongside representations of other forms of oppression in the United States. The murals generate linked histories of violence and are material testaments to interracial solidarity and a collective struggle for social justice. The coda’s analysis of the palimpsests of paint and the visual polyphony across the walls of Balmy Alley adds another texture and layer to the counter-dictatorial imaginary traced in the preceding chapters. It ends by suggesting that other forms of Latina/o cultural production such as music, film, and Day of the Dead altars work together with the murals and the novel to capture the afterlives of the dictatorial past and current dictatorial forms of oppression.

scholarly journals An autopsy of the coloniality of suicide: Modernity’s completed genocide

2021 ◽  
pp. 136345932110385
Author(s):  
Tisha X ◽  
marcela polanco
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
World System ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Politics ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
The U.S

From the Latin American modernity/coloniality project, we address the inhospitality of the modern/colonial and globally designed world-system in relation to suicidality. In our vernacular Spanglish, guided by epistemological disobedience, and responding to epistemicide, we interpellate ourselves to unmask the hidden colonial structures of power of modernity’s global design on suicide knowledge. Our intent is to argue, specifically from the perspective of coloniality and our racialized, gendered, and monetized bodies, that suicide is rather an extension of modernity’s colonial genocide. From the decolonial geo and body-politics of knowledge, our discussion on modernity’s Eurocentric rhetoric on suicide departs from the materialization of suicidality in our flesh. We story experiences of our bodies with life and pleas of death, within the context of our immigrant backgrounds, and as family therapists in the United States (U.S.). We adopt autopsy as an analogy from where to advance such analysis to contest Eurocentric configurations of suicide from within, but against modernity. We emphasize the hidden racism and capitalism of suicide embedded within the persuasive Eurocentric promises of the Anglo scientific method and the U.S. American Dream. We address the concepts of epistemicide, coloniality of knowledge and of being. It is our hope to contribute to further advance decolonizing possibilities to reinscribe options that would border with the current Western knowledge on suicide. This may require other configurations of the body, knowledge, hence ways of being, doing, thinking, sensing, feeling, imagining, and dreaming to coexist among pluriversal hospitable worlds of life and death.

scholarly journals Immersion Through Culture: Representations of the “Day of the Dead” in Film

2020 ◽  
pp. 61-78
Author(s):  
Giorgos Dimitriadis ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Visual Metaphor ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
Day Of The Dead ◽  
Sam Mendes ◽  
Cultural Element ◽  
Dia De Los Muertos ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Way

The Mexican celebration of the “Day of the Dead” (Día de Muertos or Día de los Muertos) has been recurrently used in film, with three of the most notable examples ranging from the recent Coco (Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina, 2017) and Spectre (Sam Mendes, 2015), all the way back to the surviving footage of ¡Que Viva Mexico! (Sergei Eisenstein, 1931, unfinished). Though vastly different from one another in almost every respect, all three cases explore the topic of “in-between” both thematically and technically: the celebration that merges life and death becomes a visual metaphor and a tool for filmmakers to explore the ways in which film technique creates overlapping areas between cinema and reality. In each film, a visually powerful cultural asset such as the “Day of the Dead,” is combined with different aspects of film technique, explicitly, but differently, appealing to a kind of sensory immersion in order to attract viewers inside its world. By doing so, the “Day of the Dead” exemplifies the ways in which a common cultural element can help translate the personal visions of different filmmakers into distinct filmic events.

An American Language

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosina Lozano
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
National Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spanish Language ◽  
Spanish Speakers ◽  
Language Recognition ◽  
Political Language ◽  
Political Issue ◽  
History Of ◽  
The U.S

An American Language is a political history of the Spanish language in the United States. The nation has always been multilingual and the Spanish language in particular has remained as an important political issue into the present. After the U.S.-Mexican War, the Spanish language became a language of politics as Spanish speakers in the U.S. Southwest used it to build territorial and state governments. In the twentieth century, Spanish became a political language where speakers and those opposed to its use clashed over what Spanish's presence in the United States meant. This book recovers this story by using evidence that includes Spanish language newspapers, letters, state and territorial session laws, and federal archives to profile the struggle and resilience of Spanish speakers who advocated for their language rights as U.S. citizens. Comparing Spanish as a language of politics and as a political language across the Southwest and noncontiguous territories provides an opportunity to measure shifts in allegiance to the nation and exposes differing forms of nationalism. Language concessions and continued use of Spanish is a measure of power. Official language recognition by federal or state officials validates Spanish speakers' claims to US citizenship. The long history of policies relating to language in the United States provides a way to measure how U.S. visions of itself have shifted due to continuous migration from Latin America. Spanish-speaking U.S. citizens are crucial arbiters of Spanish language politics and their successes have broader implications on national policy and our understanding of Americans.

Palestine Unbound

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 130-134
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Task Force ◽  
The United States ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Tel Aviv ◽  
The Us ◽  
Intention To Move ◽  
Arab Israeli Conflict ◽  
The U.S

This section, updated regularly on the blog Palestine Square, covers popular conversations related to the Palestinians and the Arab-Israeli conflict during the quarter 16 November 2017 to 15 February 2018: #JerusalemIstheCapitalofPalestine went viral after U.S. president Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and announced his intention to move the U.S. embassy there from Tel Aviv. The arrest of Palestinian teenager Ahed Tamimi for slapping an Israeli soldier also prompted a viral campaign under the hashtag #FreeAhed. A smaller campaign protested the exclusion of Palestinian human rights from the agenda of the annual Creating Change conference organized by the US-based National LGBTQ Task Force in Washington. And, UNRWA publicized its emergency funding appeal, following the decision of the United States to slash funding to the organization, with the hashtag #DignityIsPriceless.

The French Way

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard F. Kuisel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
French Language ◽  
French Cinema ◽  
Free Markets ◽  
Technology Sector ◽  
Aids Epidemic ◽  
Political Reality ◽  
Politics And Culture ◽  
The U.S

There are over 1,000 McDonald's on French soil. Two Disney theme parks have opened near Paris in the last two decades. And American-inspired vocabulary such as “le weekend” has been absorbed into the French language. But as former French president Jacques Chirac put it: “The U.S. finds France unbearably pretentious. And we find the U.S. unbearably hegemonic.” Are the French fascinated or threatened by America? They Americanize yet are notorious for expressions of anti-Americanism. From McDonald's and Coca-Cola to free markets and foreign policy, this book looks closely at the conflicts and contradictions of France's relationship to American politics and culture. The book shows how the French have used America as both yardstick and foil to measure their own distinct national identity. France has charted its own path: it has welcomed America's products but rejected American policies; assailed Americ's “jungle capitalism” while liberalizing its own economy; attacked “Reaganomics” while defending French social security; and protected French cinema, television, food, and language even while ingesting American pop culture. The book examines France's role as an independent ally of the United States, but he also considers the country's failures in influencing the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations. Whether investigating France's successful information technology sector or its spurning of American expertise during the AIDS epidemic, the book asks if this insistence on a French way represents a growing distance between Europe and the United States or a reaction to American globalization. Exploring cultural trends, values, public opinion, and political reality, this book delves into the complex relationship between two modern nations.

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