Dark Borders: Film Noir and American Citizenship

Illustrations; Acknowledgments Introduction: The Un-Americanness of Film Noir; 1. Gestapo in America (Confessions of a Nazi Spy and Stranger on the Third Floor); 2. White-Collar Murder (Double Indemnity); 3. Cuba, Gangsters, Vets, and Other Outcasts of the Islands (The Chase and Key Largo); 4. North from Mexico (Border Incident, Hold Back the Dawn, Secret Beyond the Door, and Out of the Past); 5. Bad Boy Patriots (This Gun for Hire, Ride the Pink Horse, Pickup on South Street) Postscript: Darkness Visible; Notes; Bibliography; Index

Jonathan Auerbach is Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of "Body Shots: Early Cinema's Incarnations"; "Male Call: Becoming Jack London," also published by Duke University Press; and "The Romance of Failure: First-Person Fictions of Poe, Hawthorne, and James."

"While scholars have long attended to film noir as one of the preeminent genres of U.S. cinema, they ironically have rarely studied it in terms of its specific engagements with national self-identity and self-definition. Deftly employing his strong and reputed background in American Studies to far-reaching ends, Jonathan Auerbach shows precisely how film noir was central to the country's self-questioning in the fraught times of the Cold War. This is a groundbreaking study that comes up with trenchant insights about a genre that one might have thought had nothing new to yield to critical inquiry." Dana Polan, New York University "This terrific book offers fresh insight into both the genre of film noir and the cultural production of the postwar and early Cold War period. Through rich, historically contextualized readings of a range of noir films, Jonathan Auerbach shows how the genre captured the uncanniness of a time of suspicion and paranoia. By illuminating the uncanny figures (the immigrants, the aliens, the strangers) and spaces (national borders and urban zones) that characterize the noir affect, he shows how these films dramatized the national response to the changing terms of citizenship and subjectivity as the anxious fear of the stranger within."oPriscilla Wald, author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative