Star Wars In The Public Square

Speculative science fiction, with its underlying socio-political dialogue, represents an important intersection of popular culture and public discourse. As a pop culture text, the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars offers critical commentary on contemporary issues, marking a moment of interplay whereby author and audience come together in what Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin called collaborative meaning making. This book critically examines the series as a voice in the political dialogues concerning human cloning, torture, just war theory, peace and drone warfare.

Speculative science fiction, with its underlying socio-political dialogue, represents an important intersection of popular culture and public discourse. As a pop culture text, the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars offers critical commentary on contemporary issues, marking a moment of interplay whereby author and audience come together in what Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin called collaborative meaning making. This book critically examines the series as a voice in the political dialogues concerning human cloning, torture, just war theory, peace and drone warfare.

This book provides the first detailed and comprehensive examination of all the materials making up the Star Wars franchise relating to the portrayal and representation of real-world history and politics. Drawing on a variety of sources, including films, published interviews with directors and actors, novels, comics, and computer games, this volume explores the ways in which historical and contemporary events have been repurposed within Star Wars. It focuses on key themes such as fascism and the Galactic Empire, the failures of democracy, the portrayal of warfare, the morality of the Jedi, and the representations of sex, gender, and race. Through these themes, this study highlights the impacts of the fall of the Soviet Union, the War on Terror, and the failures of the United Nations upon the ‘galaxy far, far away’. By analysing and understanding these events and their portrayal within Star Wars, it shows how the most popular media franchise in existence aims to speak about wider contemporary events and issues. The History and Politics of Star Wars is useful for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars of a variety of disciplines such as transmedia studies, science fiction, cultural studies, and world history and politics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

While previous work on the Star Wars universe charts the Campbellian mythic arcs, political representations, and fan reactions associated with the films, this volume takes a transmedial approach to the material, recognizing that Star Wars TV projects interact with and relate to other Star Wars texts. The chapters in this volume take as a basic premise that the televisual entrants into the Star Wars transmedia storyworld are both important texts in the history of popular culture and also key to understanding how the Star Wars franchise—and, thus, industry-wide transmedia storytelling strategies—developed. The book expands previous work to consider television studies and sharp cultural criticism together in an effort to bring both long-running popular series, long-ignored texts, and even toy commercials to bear on the franchise’s complex history.

George Lucas’s first Star Wars trilogy shows the influences of its era; Cold War tension is evident in its theme of rebellion against totalitarianism. Recent entries in the Star Wars saga—The Phantom Menace (1999) and Attack of the Clones (2002)—are much more concerned with evil corporations, terrorists, and the corruption of the political process. Each film is influenced by the times in which it was released, but also by cultural subtexts and by other films that had direct and indirect effects on Lucas as writer, producer, and director. This work focuses on all six Star Wars films. The first topic of this multifaceted examination is how the films use the language of colonialism (“The” Rebellion, “The” Empire) to emphasize the idea of imperialism. Next the author looks at how Asian influences—including religious undertones from Taoism and Buddhism and the works of Kurosawa and other Asian filmmakers—provide a subtext for much of the action. Next the discussion turns to the representation of people of color in the Star Wars universe, and how other ethnicities are represented overall, particularly through the literalization of the word “aliens.” These topics of discussion provide for penetrating conclusions about Lucas’s films and how they represent race, religion, and rebellion.

George Lucas spoke about the didactic role of cinema and about his own work being presented through the "moral megaphone" of the film industry. A considerable body of scholarship on the six-part Star Wars series argues (unconvincingly) that the franchise promoted neo-conservatism in American culture from the late 1970s onward. But there is much in Lucas' grand space opera to suggest something more ideologically complex is going on. This book challenges the view of the saga as an unambiguously violent text exemplifying reactionary politics, and discusses the films' identity politics with regard to race and gender.

In this work, J. Budziszewski examines evangelical political thought over the past fifty years through four key figures--Carl F. H. Henry, Abraham Kuyper, Francis Schaeffer, and John Howard Yoder--to argue that, in addition to Scripture, the evangelical political movement should be informed by the tradition of natural law. David L. Weeks (Azusa Pacific University) responds on Henry, William Edgar (Westminster Seminary) responds to the Schaeffer section, John Bolt (Calvin Seminary) comments on Kuyper, and Ashley Woodiwiss (Wheaton College) offers remarks on the Yoder portion. Jean Bethke Elshtain (University of Chicago) provides the afterword, summarizing the dialogue and offering her own observations. In addition, the book includes an introduction by Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

From set designs to character development, the most complete, official tour behind-the-scenes at "Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones."