Transnational Crime Fiction

Mobility, Borders and Detection

Maarit Piipponen, Helen Mäntymäki, Marinella Rodi-Risberg, Maarit Piipponen, Helen Mäntymäki, Marinella Rodi-Risberg

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030534127
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030534134
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Letteratura generale

Focusing on contemporary crime narratives from different parts of the world, this collection of essays explores the mobility of crimes, criminals and investigators across social, cultural and national borders. The essays argue that such border crossings reflect on recent sociocultural transformations and geopolitical anxieties to create an image of networked and interconnected societies where crime is not easily contained. The book further analyses crime texts' wider sociocultural and affective significance by examining the global mobility of the genre itself across cultures, languages and media. Underlining the global reach and mobility of the crime genre, the collection analyses types and representations of mobility in literary and visual crime narratives, inviting comparisons between texts, crimes and mobilities in a geographically diverse context. The collection ultimately understands mobility as an object of study and a critical lens through which transformations in our globalised world can be examined.

© The Author(s) 2020

M. Piipponen et al. (eds.)Transnational Crime FictionCrime Fileshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53413-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. From Mobile Crimes to Crimes of Mobility

Maarit Piipponen¹ , Helen Mäntymäki² and Marinella Rodi-Risberg²

(1)

Tampere University, Tampere, Finland

(2)

Department of Language and Communication Studies, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland

Keywords

MobilityTransnationalismGlobalisationMobilities researchGenre hybridisationCrime fiction scholarship

End Abstract

During its two-hundred-year-long history, the crime genre has proved not only persistent, but also flexible and mobile in many ways, and its contemporary global popularity can be partly attributed to its adaptability to different times, cultures and purposes. While the genre was earlier often dismissed as “a trashy, minor genre” (Rodriguez 3), crime fiction scholarship has during the past few decades increasingly drawn attention to the genre’s sociocritical potential.¹ In Transnational Crime Fiction: Mobility, Borders, and Detection, the popular crime story that incorporates entertainment into critical analyses of societies is approached from the perspective of mobility. We suggest that many contemporary crime narratives across the globe host a heightened interest in diverse and ambiguous mobilities, border crossings and borderlands. As the chapters in this volume show, often the representations of such mobilities and crossings reflect on sociocultural developments on local and global levels and communicate specific geopolitical anxieties. The contributors offer analyses of mobilities present in today’s crime texts that range from trans-border crimes such as human trafficking to postmodern urban mobility, travels of television crime dramas across national borders and the mobilisation of affect through genre hybridisation and blending. The focus on mobility places the volume within the framework of mobilities research, which has gained significant critical momentum during the past couple of decades. In this volume, mobility is not only an “object of study” but also “an analytical lens” (Salazar, “Theorizing Mobility” 155) through which contemporary crime fiction can be examined.

This book thus first understands mobilities research to explore specific types, practices and representations of mobility, and second, to offer a perspective from which to study local, global and geopolitical transformations. As a term, mobility is not identical with movement, as Tim Cresswell’s seminal mobilities research book On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World makes clear: while movement can be defined as “mobility abstracted from contexts of power,” mobility refers to motion that is socially produced (2; 3). The social and cultural constructedness of mobility also means that it is characterised by its historicity. As a theoretical concept, mobility can be applied to a wide range of phenomena. Current mobilities research understands it in both concrete and abstract senses: mobility can refer to the traffic and flow of people, goods, capital and information; to embodied experiences of mobility; or to the mobility of ideas, texts, images, affects and ideologies. Accordingly, research on mobilities is highly flexible when it comes to its objects of study: it not only studies global flows and mobilities, but also more local, everyday practices and lived experiences, aiming to identify and explain connections between them.

Unlike Cresswell, whose book focuses on mobility in the Western world, we employ the concept of mobility in a global context. The narratives examined here feature various (trans)national crime locations and represent different countries of origin, including Argentina, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Morocco, Norway, South Africa, Sweden, the UK and the USA. By underlining the contemporary global mobility of the crime genre, the volume invites comparisons between texts, crimes, settings and mobilities in a geographically and geopolitically diverse context. The volume’s geographical diversity evidences not only the genre’s journeys across the globe and subsequent changes in its generic conventions, but also the dislocation of Anglo-American texts from their central position in the field of crime production. The latter aspect is imbued with geopolitical significance, especially if we consider the spread of non-Anglophone crime texts in the global market. That is, popular narratives are “doubly geographical” (Dittmer xvii), if they are produced in one place and consumed in another, which facilitates the circulation of ideas about and images of places. This is worthy of consideration, because popular texts not only represent and position places, nations and people in specific ways, but also shape our attitudes to them. Jason Dittmer understands the mediation of the world through popular culture as geopolitical, for “it occurs in ways that associate values and behaviors with various parts of the world, which in turn influences the ways in which people interact” (16). In this volume, then, we consider contemporary crime narratives as constructive of what also David Atkinson and Klaus Dodds refer to as “popular” geopolitics (10). Narratives published in the Global South may promote different imaginaries of mobility and geopolitics compared to those published in the Global North, thereby questioning established notions of “us” and “them,” and challenging the association of crime or the “evil” with specific nations, regions or groups of people.²

This volume argues that through engaging with a broad selection of mobilities, contemporary crime narratives comment on sociocultural transformations in a globalised and interconnected world. We propose that globalisation and transnationalism—and the social, economic, political and technological developments linked with them—have had an influence on how and what kind of social criticism crime narratives offer in the contemporary era. These developments include the acceleration of human mobility and travel within and beyond national borders, the impact of global flows of goods, capital and information, cross-cultural exchanges as well as (digital) network systems affecting policing and surveillance across borders. Crime narratives no longer conceive crime as a locally, spatially and temporally limited event that only concerns the victims, the detective agency and the criminal; crime is now increasingly conceptualised as networked and embedded in historical and transcultural contexts.

If the restoration of the established social order was a central goal of the detective in the past,³ now “this goal is elusive in communities whose populations are dispersed or migratory and where there is little consensus about shared beliefs and values” (Adams 269). Discussing resolution in crime texts, Bill Phillips makes a somewhat similar claim when he observes how crime narratives have recently become ethically “much more challenging” to their readers (103). A case in point is Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders (2005), which comments on poverty, femicide, the flow of capital and corrupt government institutions on each side of the geopolitical US-Mexico border. For the author herself, Desert Blood is an “anti-detective novel” ([Un]Framing 182), as the El Paso-born amateur sleuth and Women’s Studies professor, Ivon Villa, never solves the crime of who kills “las hijas de Juárez,” Juárez’s daughters. Not only does this novel contribute to what Theresa Márquez has indicated is the “reshaping [of] the mystery genre for specific cultural, political, and social purposes” by contemporary Chicana/o crime fiction (qtd. in [Un]Framing 183), but it also illustrates that there are often no apparent or simple solutions for today’s problems and no justice for victims of current crimes. Consequently, novels such as Desert Blood that lack a dénouement frequently aim to reveal injustices in an increasingly globalised and mobile world; this is a way of social protestation, an effort to question the established social order that has enabled the crimes to continue in the first place ([Un]framing 182).⁴ Unlike Golden Age detective fiction where violence is typically contained (Horsley 38), contemporary socially conscious crime narratives point to the opposite direction, because crimes and violence are not necessarily committed by single individuals; instead, these fictions propose that violence is endemic in local and global sociopolitical and economic systems that affect people’s lives. Truth may be discovered by the detective, but there might be no justice for the victims or release from abusive systems and institutions. It follows, then, that the lack of a neat resolution in today’s texts also challenges the traditional understanding of crime texts’ cathartic value for readers (see also Platten 15).

In combining crime and mobility—or, rather, mobilities—in this volume, we first aim to redirect crime fiction scholarship focused on globalisation, transnationalism⁵ and social critique, and second, to strengthen the study of popular texts within mobilities research. Mobilities research, which emerged in the 1990s and was later named as a “new mobility paradigm” by Mimi Sheller and John Urry, is an interdisciplinary field of study that has gradually drawn together scholars working in different academic disciplines such as sociology, geography, archaeology, ethnography, transport studies and cultural stu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. From Mobile Crimes to Crimes of Mobility
• Part I. Crime on the Move: Transnational Crime and Global Capitalism
• Part II. Historicising Mobility and Agency
• Part III. Genre Borderlands: Generic Mobility and Hybridisation
• Back Matter