Browsing by Author "Reimer, J. A."

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Open Access
All the pretty Mexican girls: whiteness and racial desire in Cormac McCarthy's all the pretty horses and cities of the plain
(Western Literature Association, 2014) Reimer, J. A.
All the Pretty Mexican Girls: Whiteness and Racial Desire in Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses and Cities of the Plain” uses a critical analysis of race and gender to argue that John Grady Cole’s relationship with Alejandra and Magdalena invokes a larger and longer history of the commodification and sexualization of women’s bodies in the contact zone of the US-Mexico borderlands. The critical concerns this article addresses seek to re-situate McCarthy’s influential borderlands writing within a more nuanced series of border encounters that expose how transactions between regional, national, and international material realities on the US-Mexico border make available certain identities and modes of representation. Exposing the links between McCarthy’s representations and real-world material realities are crucial to this analysis because they reveal how McCarthy both accounts for and disavows the operations of power and history on the US-Mexico border. McCarthy’s border novels represent an in-between space where western history and the Western genre can be self-consciously invoked and revised, but only to a certain extent. John Grady Cole may be a more compassionate and “politically correct” John Wayne, yet the violence, sexual and otherwise, perpetrated on the bodies of brown women in the Border Trilogy reminds us how much McCarthy’s white masculinities rely on such abject bodies in order to fashion their own ambivalent agency in the brutal world of McCarthy’s borderlands.
Open Access
¡Americano! Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers Rock the Borderlands of Transnationall America1
(Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 2014) Reimer, J. A.
Open Access
Disordering the border: Harryette Mullen's transaborder poetics in Muse & Drudge
(The Johns Hopkins University Press and University of Calgary, 2014) Reimer, J. A.
This essay reads Harryette Mullen's epic poem Muse & Drudge as an innovative text of the US-Mexico borderlands by focusing on Mullen's literal and figurative transactions between multiple discourses, including Spanish, and the corresponding sets of material conditions these discourses conjure to understand how Muse & Drudge reveals the ongoing racialization and exploitation of African American women and Latinas. I identify a transaborder politics in Muse & Drudge in which shared colonial histories unite Afro-Caribbean diasporic and borderlands subjects. In Mullen's poetics, themes of separation, definition, and regulation are racial-ized concepts, deeply embedded in the violent histories of racial mixing and mestizaje that are both named outright and alluded to metaphorically by her hybridized language.
Open Access
Double perovskite structure induced by Co addition to PbTiO3: Insights from DFT and experimental solid-state NMR spectroscopy
(American Chemical Society, 2019) Mete, E.; Odabaşı, S.; Mao, H.; Chung, T.; Ellialtıoğlu, Ş.; Reimer, J. A.; Gülseren, Oğuz; Üner, D.
The effects of Co addition on the chemical and electronic structure of PbTiO3 were explored both by theory and through experiment. Cobalt was incorporated into PbTiO3 during the sol–gel process with the X-ray diffraction (XRD) data of the resulting compounds confirming a perovskite structure for the pure samples. The XRD lines broadened and showed emerging cubic structure features as the Co incorporation increased. The changes in the XRD pattern were interpreted as double perovskite structure formation. 207Pb NMR measurements revealed a growing isotropic component in the presence of Co. Consistent with the experiments, density functional theory (DFT)-calculated chemical-shift values corroborate isotropic coordination of Pb, suggesting the formation of cubic Pb2CoTiO6 domains in the prepared samples. Hybrid functional first-principles calculations indicate formation of Pb2CoTiO6 with cubic structure and confirm that Co addition can decrease oxygen binding energy significantly. Experimental UV–vis spectroscopy results indicate that upon addition of Co, the band gap is shifted toward visible wavelengths as confirmed by energy band and absorption spectrum calculations. The oxygen binding energies were determined by temperature-programmed reduction (TPR) measurements. Upon addition of Co, TPR lines shifted to lower temperatures and new features appeared in the TPR patterns. This shift was interpreted as weakening of the oxygen–cobalt bond strength. The change in the electronic structure by the alterations of oxygen vacancy formation energy and bond lengths upon Co insertion is determined by DFT calculations.
Open Access
Latin@ studies abroad: making the transnational international
(Palgrave Macmillan Ltd., 2016) Reimer, J. A.
Open Access
Tijuana Transa: Transa as metaphor and theory on the US – Mexico border
(University of California, 2016) Reimer, J. A.
This essay explores the varied potential of “transa” as a new metaphor to describe the US–Mexico borderlands in the twenty-first century and the formal transactions used in the photo-textual essay Here Is Tijuana! (2006). Reimer identifies certain “transa techniques” in the book that connect reader-viewers to a practice of reading-viewing (both text and city) that contests North American and Mexican stereotypes depicting Tijuana (and the borderlands writ large) as a city of vice, illegality, poverty, or a cultural wasteland. What makes Here Is Tijuana! different from the many other texts produced about Tijuana (a large number of which are cited in the book itself) is the concept of transa. Reimer expands the authors’ usage of the term to offer a theoretical-aesthetic intervention into the existing discourse, not only on Tijuana itself, but also on the US–Mexico border and cultural studies in general. Transa offers an alternative approach to encountering experimental cultural productions. Through transa techniques that include textual-visual collage, pastiche, juxtaposition, and sampling, Here Is Tijuana! documents and visualizes a series of geopolitical and cultural phenomena encountered in Tijuana, such as free trade, uneven urban development, border crossings and migration, labor struggles, and urban and traditional art practices. The book forces readers into its transas to offer new ways of “reading” or “seeing” the US–Mexico border (through Tijuana) that testify to its contradictory power to transgress—and even to render obsolete—national boundaries, while also heightening the perceived power and presence of states and cohesive national identities.