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Spectral Aesthetics
Visualizing the Crisis of Migrant Disappearance
China Medel (Author)
9781477333839, University of Texas Press
Hardback, published 7 May 2026
262 pages, 20 b&w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.454 kg
"Spectral Aesthetics is a fascinating work on the role of visual cultures in the production of life-making work for migrants crossing the US-Mexico border. China Medel provides a new way of imagining border aesthetics that counters the dominant narrative about migrants in mainstream media while drawing on critical theory from a range of disciplines and areas of study." - Camilla Fojas, Arizona State University, author of Border Optics: Surveillance Cultures on the US-Mexico Frontier
"At a moment when the precarity of immigrant lives is foregrounded in US political discourse, Spectral Aesthetics provides a timely, multidisciplinary assessment of the question of visibility. China Medel gives us a way out of the visibility/invisibility binary by offering up the "alternative optics" of the spectral. This book is a must-read for those studying visual culture and the US-Mexico borderlands. " - Ila Nicole Sheren, Washington University in St. Louis, author of Border Ecology: Art and Environmental Crisis at the Margins
Analyzing how artists reimagine migrant disappearance and visibility at the US–Mexico border. In the mid-1990s, the US government implemented Prevention through Deterrence, a major buildup of troops, walls, and surveillance around El Paso and San Diego. Cut off from these crucial urban crossings, migrants flowed into the dangerous surrounding deserts, where some ten thousand have since died. This is all according to plan: Pentagon documents describe the strategy of funneling migrants toward “mortal danger.” In this bracing critique, China Medel explores the aesthetics enabling and resisting the crisis of migrant death. The nation-state’s performance of sovereignty along the border, predicated on mass casualties, is tolerated and even celebrated, thanks to the images in our heads of racialized and therefore criminal bodies, made invisible as they disintegrate in the baking sand. Spectral Aesthetics shows how state officials and mainstream media, relying on postracial ideologies and white-supremacist agendas, collectively foster this picture of a brown body so abject that it is disposable. In close readings of artworks contesting this murderous visual regime, Medel discovers an alternative kind of sight, one emphasizing the ghostly traces of the dead. These are images not of the individual “alien” but of life itself, indisposable.
s The Undocumented
s Fugitive Poetics of Freedom in Children of Men