Preface : down these mean streets, again -- Film noir and the culture of internationalism. Dislocating James M. Cain's The postman always rings twice -- Pulp modernism in the 1930s: between the new and the real -- Noir's displaced persons -- Poetry and politics in interwar France : the case of Jean Renoir -- The fatal engines of La Bête humaine -- French film noir and the decay of the nation -- Cain in Italy : the decade of translations -- Luchino Visconti's Ossessione and noir cosmopolitanism -- Hollywood noir and the postwar culture of occupation. Postwar France and the "invention" of American film noir -- The Maltese falcon as existential passionplay -- Hollywood, Americanization, and market empire -- Germany : occupation noir and the shadow of Weimar -- Occupied Japan and Kasutori noir -- From cesspools and slums to far-fetched amusements : Akira Kurosawa, Sam Fuller and Carol Reed -- The times of film noir. Out of Mexico's past -- From neorealism-nero to Antonioni's noir modernism -- Untimely death and Spanish noir under Franco -- Post-colonial noir : the dark streets of Bombay -- Perilous developments? : Iranian noir and the Islamic state -- California dreaming : Chungking express and Wong's dark optimism -- Critical debates. Noir's ontologies, origins, and critical futures -- Genre or discourse? -- How global culture remakes noir -- Post-post modernism : or, the future is history -- The future of noir nostalgia : the American friend -- Noir's others. Noir sexuality and the politics of desire -- Noir as the refuge of whiteness? -- The lady from Shanghai, Touch of evil, and noir's exaggerated types -- Film noir style and the arts of dying. Technologies of noir style -- Noir style as history -- Lost voices and other ghosts of noir media -- Styles of noir cinephilia. Gestures, hats, and contract killers : noir fashion in France -- Making Asian gangsters modern -- Ghost dog : love, theft, and the afterlife of cinephilia -- Fragments of one international noir history.