“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.

readers and beholders, thereby opening up new perspectives on, and readings of, reality. To learn about migration and its e ects, not only through the journalistic lens (in news media or online sources), but also through innovative storytelling or visual material, is a chance to see things di erently, to grasp the complexity of these processes, and, thus, to di erentiate more. Drawing on scholars such as Susan Sontag, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Silvia Schultermandl, Katharina Gerund and Anja Mrak, our project argues art's formal attributes can bring us, as readers and viewers, into powerful, transformative experiences that we do not yet know how to name -although these experiences have been labeled as "empathy" by Martha C. Nussbaum, "a ect" by Fredric Jameson, and "agency" by Alfred Gell, for example. 01 Creating proximity and empathy, artistic and literary expressions allow audiences to identify with other peoples' lives, to relate to political events and locations that otherwise appear distant and abstract. This book is one manifestation of a larger, transnational collective of researchers and artists that begins, in one temporality, in 2019, when Jennifer cohosted an international conference titled Forms of Migration: Literature, Performance, the World with Silvia Schultermandl at the University of Graz in Graz, Austria, funded generously by the Austrian Science Fund's (FWF) Lise Meitner Postdoctoral Fellowship. Here, she met Stefan Maneval, as well as several of the contributors to this book. A collaboration was born.Stefan proposed the idea of an edited volume on the various aesthetic forms used to give expression to experiences of migration to the Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities (AGYA) as part of their Working Group "Common Heritage, Common Challenges" of which he's been a member since 2019. Joining forces with fellow AGYA members Ikram Hili and Matthias Pasdzierny, AGYA kindly supported the publication with a grant. The result is a rich collection of texts and images of various genres and styles, some of which were presented as papers and performances at the 2019 conference in Graz, while others were created for the book by AGYA members, as well as international authors, artists, and researchers.In other temporalities, the story begins elsewhere: in a university in Berlin in the early 1930s…, in Australia's East Hills Migrant Hostel in 1982…, Mosul, Iraq in 1966…, Siena, Italy during the Renais-sance…, in a cookie factory in Bilbao, Spain in 1903…, in a Turkish movie from the 1970s…, in a refugee camp in Lebanon… The story begins before, during, and after colonialism, in California, Poland, Tunisia, Romania, Palestine, Queens… And in one spacetime configuration, the story unfolds on the planet of Memoria.The work collected here showcases the forms of expression that emerge from translocal and transcultural encounters from the perspective of multiple disciplines, including comparative literature, art history, musicology, Middle Eastern and translation studies, as well as artwork, ess...

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