Assembling a rich archive of images and texts from the eighteenth century to the present, Rachel Hall offers a history of the "wanted" poster, examining its uses, patterns of circulation, and formal development as an iconic print genre. Her narrative covers a wide range of images: execution broadsides, runaway slave notices, private detective posters, FBI posters, artists' approximations, and the depiction of key figures in the "war on terror." Hall's cultural analysis has profound implications for our understanding of contemporary American fantasies of vulnerability, projection of enemies around the world, and adoption of security measures in domestic and foreign policy.
Wanted will appeal not only to students and scholars in literary studies, cultural studies, and art history but also to readers more generally interested in society's outlaws and in the test of wills between law enforcement and criminal evasion.
Performing Transparency in the Age of Insecurity analyzes the turn to transparency as a means of showing security. The deterrent gaze practiced by the Department of Homeland Security wants to turn the material world (the body) inside out such that there would no longer be any secrets or interiors, human or geographical, in which enemies (or the enemy within) might find refuge. Those who live under the deterrent gaze are repeatedly called upon to demonstrate the absence of threat via state-directed performances of transparency—or acts of seeing and showing through.
Hall traces the state aesthetics of transparency through a variety of sites: the choreography and technology of airport security, efficiency training in the new airport security procedures, programs in behavioral profiling, and the TSA’s anti-joke initiative. Within the context of related style trends in American popular culture, a national security strategy that aims to rid the world of opacity risks becoming a neocolonialist project in compulsory assimilation to American consumer aesthetics.
