Results by title

Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men thrusts readers into a gripping near-future world where environmental collapse and global infertility have fortified borders and torn apart the fabric of society. Its stark depictions of mass deportation, lawless border zones, and the desperate fight for survival echo powerfully through Octavia Butler’s prophetic novels Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, where environmental breakdown, migration, childbirth, and the resilience of women’s bodies form the core of her visionary storytelling. Remarkably, the futures imagined in these works are no longer distant—Butler’s 2024 has arrived, and Cuarón’s 2027 is nearly here. Children of Cuarón: Speculative Futures Through Cinematic Fiction ignites bold, necessary conversations about borders, immigration, and the urgent political, environmental, and social challenges facing our world today. By examining how speculative fiction dares to imagine what comes next, this book invites readers to confront the realities of our present—and the possibilities of our future—with fresh eyes and uncompromising clarity.

A recurrent and popular setting in American cinema, the dressing room has captured the imaginations of filmmakers and audiences for over a century. In The Dressing Room: Backstage Lives and American Film, the only book-length study of the space, author Desirée J. Garcia explores how dressing rooms are dynamic realms in which a diverse cast of performers are made and exposed. Garcia analyzes the backstage film, which spans film history, modes, and genre, to show how dressing rooms have been a useful space for filmmakers to examine the performativity of American life. From the Black maid to the wife and mother to the leading man, dressing rooms navigate, shape, and challenge society’s norms. The stakes are high in dressing rooms, Garcia argues, because they rehearse larger questions about identity and its performance, negotiating who can succeed and who cannot and on what terms.