Cautionary Stones: Cinema, Infrastructure, and the Necropolitics of Waste is a look into the dark prism of contemporary U.S. cinema for lessons on living and dying in the Anthropocene. Cautionary Stones examines five visual texts produced between 2007 and 2017 to index the transformations of imperial logics and fascistic politics that appear in the decade before the Trump era, juxtaposing colonial and environmental crises against cinematic representations of waste, literally and figuratively, across a variety of genres from children’s animated film to deep-space horror.

Cautionary Stones argues that these films are urgent warnings. In militarized cinema as much as at physical borders, detention centers, and secured outposts, the imperial logic of counterinsurgent vigilance reproduces itself through the visual simulation of terror and reprisal, of maiming and drone surveillance, so that imperial erasure continues with the complicity of a willing viewer. Theoretically, the book elaborates Achille Mbembe’s necropolitical frame as it has been refracted in the past two decades through contemporary theorists from postcolonial, queer, and disability perspectives (e.g., Jasbir Puar) as well as Black critiques of the biopolitical (e.g., Alexander Weheliye, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson) and borderland/settler studies (e.g., Cristina Rivera Garza, Andrés Fabián Henao Castro).