The War On Terror And American Popular Culture

The War on Terror and American Popular Culture is a collection of original essays by academics and researchers from around the world that examines the complex interrelation between the Bush administration's "War on Terror" and American popular culture. Written by experts in the fields of literature, film, and cultural studies, this book examines in detail how popular culture reflects concerns and anxieties about the September 11 attacks and the war those attacks generated, how it interrogates the individual and collective impacts that war has wrought, how it might challenge or critique current policy, and how it might reinforce or endorse the war and its sociopolitical paradigms.

Pop Culture Goes to War, by Geoff Martin and Erin Steuter, explores the persistence of and opposition to militarism in American life. It provides a comprehensive overview of the role of toys, video games, music, television and movies in supporting contemporary militarism. Resistance to militarism is highlighted through the traditional mediums of music and movies, and increasingly through the arts, 'culture jamming,' and the satire of The Daily Show, The Onion, The Simpsons, The Colbert Report, and South Park.

A collection of analyses focusing on popular culture as a profound discursive site of anxiety and discussion about 9/11 and demystifies the day's events.

Since the infamous events of 9/11, the fear of terrorism and the determination to strike back against it has become a topic of enormous public debate. The 'war on terror' discourse has developed not only through American politics but via other channels including the media, the church, music, novels, films and television, and therefore permeates many aspects of American life. Stuart Croft suggests that the process of this production of knowledge has created a very particular form of common sense which shapes relationships, jokes and even forms of tattoos. Understanding how a social process of crisis can be mapped out and how that process creates assumptions allows policy-making in America's war on terror to be examined from new perspectives. Using IR approaches together with insights from cultural studies, this book develops a dynamic model of crisis which seeks to understand the war on terror as a cultural phenomenon.

This book is about war and popular culture, and war in popular culture. Tara Brabazon summons, probes, questions and reclaims popular culture, challenging the assumptions of war, whiteness, Christianity, modernity and progress that have dominated our lives since September 11. Addressing modes of thinking, design, music and visual media, Thinking Popular Culture offers a journey through courageous, interventionist and thoughtful ideas, performers and cultures. It welcomes those who ask difficult questions of those in power. Addressing the lack of imagination and dissent that characterizes this new century, it is essential reading for any scholar of cultural studies and popular culture, media and journalism, creative writing and terrorism studies.

In Rethinking Global Security, Andrew Martin and Patrice Petro bring together ten path-breaking essays that explore the ways that our notions of fear, insecurity, and danger are fostered by intermediary sources such as television, radio, film, satellite imaging, and the Internet. The contributors, who represent a wide variety of disciplines, including communications, art history, media studies, women's studies, and literature, show how both fictional and fact-based threats to global security have helped to create and sustain a culture that is deeply distrustful-of images, stories, reports, and policy decisions. Topics range from the Patriot Act, to the censorship of media personalities such as Howard Stern, to the role that Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other television programming play as an interpretative frame for current events.

The first comprehensive survey and analysis of War on Terror themes in post-9/11 American television. Critiques those shows that--either blindly or intentionally--supported the Bush administration's security policies, showing how popular culture mediated a profound national trauma.