Shadows of NAFTA: Persons as Enterprises, Bodies as Spectacle, and the Deterritorialization of Feeling

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2014
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Haverford College. Department of History
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Open Access
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Abstract
This thesis takes as object the history of '90s globalization, in the context of neoliberal reforms by President Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994) of Mexico, and extension of informal U.S. Empire through the free trade reforms of Bill Clinton's presidency, from 1992-2001. A cultural history of the North American Free Trade Agreement, passed in 1993, suggests alternative views of '90s foreign policy from a moment of optimism and "soft power," to see the hauntings of violence and labor exploitation visible across borders to subjects living in an era of unprecedented connectivity. Novels like David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996) and Roberto Bolaño's 2666 (2004) write a critical history of US-Mexico economic relations through landscapes of hyper-consumption and dissociative, televisual politics in U.S. suburban enclaves, and in visions of violence erupting at the sites of maquiladora factories on the U.S.-Mexico border since 1993. While North American novelists reacted to the disjuncture of feeling between first world consumers and spectacles of neoliberal violence, Mexican films like Robert Rodriguez' El Mariachi (1992), Desperado (1995) and Alfonso Cuarón's Y tú mamá también (2001) structured political critiques through the image, to reveal the transformations of Mexican political identity and rural life with the intensification of the illegal drug trade, and tourist economies under neoliberalism.
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