Unhomed : Cycles of Mobility and Placelessness in American Cinema

Wojcik, Pamela Robertson

University of California Press（2024/04発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 296 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9780520390355
• DDC分類 791.43652694

Full Description

In this rich cultural history, Pamela Roberston Wojcik examines America's ambivalent and shifting attitude toward homelessness. She considers film cycles from five distinct historical moments that show characters who are unhomed and placeless, mobile rather than fixed—characters who fail, resist, or opt out of the mandate for a home of one's own. From the tramp films of the silent era to the 2021 Oscar-winning Nomadland, Wojcik reveals a tension in the American imaginary between viewing homelessness as deviant and threatening or emblematic of freedom and independence. Blending social history with insights drawn from a complex array of films, both canonical and fringe, Wojcik effectively "unhomes" dominant narratives that cast aspirations for success and social mobility as the focus of American cinema, reminding us that genres of precarity have been central to American cinema (and the American story) all along.

Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations 
Acknowledgments

Introduction. All Over the Map: Figurations of Mobility and Placelessness 
1 • Ubiquitous: The Tramp's Mobile Masculinity 
2 • Uncivilized: World War II Mobilization and Homecoming as Social Problem 
3 • Adrift: The Ambivalent Freedom of the Female Hitchhiker 
4 • Trash: The Homeless as Urban Waste 
Epilogue. Stuck: Precarity and Perpetual Motion as Slow Death 

Notes 
Works Cited 
Index