Cultural Resistance, 9/11, and the War on Terror
Cultural Resistance, 9/11, and the War on Terror

Author: Jenifer Chao

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-01

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1351779435

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Cultural Resistance, 9/11, and the War on Terror: Sensible Interventions offers a fresh account of the enduring cultural legacies of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks and the global war on terror through the critical lens of cultural resistance. It assesses the intersecting ways that popular culture has been deployed as oppositional practice in the post-9/11 context by documenting a collection of media texts, including a political hip hop album, a TV sitcom, a best-selling novel and studio photographs. Deviating from the conventional discursive and representative axis of mourning, nationalism and commemoration, this multimedia assemblage contests and rearticulates the political meanings, affects and visualizations of the war on terror and its global consequences. Drawing on the theoretical work of Jacques Rancière, the book also argues that these cultural artefacts are extending cultural resistance by shifting the scenes and methods of opposition to the realm of the sensible, or sensorial experiences. Never celebratory, the book encapsulates the potential of cultural practices against restricted post-9/11 regimes of visibility and audibility in the public sphere, but it also remains attentive to their blind spots, contradictions and constraints. This book offers a new angle to consider the events of 9/11, the war on terror and their continual effects, one that blurs established visions of patriotism and grief.

Cultural Resistance, 9/11, and the War on Terror
Cultural Resistance, 9/11, and the War on Terror

Author: Jenifer Chao

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-12-12

Total Pages: 150

ISBN-13: 9780367887193

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Cultural Resistance, 9/11, and the War on Terror: Sensible Interventions offers a fresh account of the enduring cultural legacies of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks and the global war on terror through the critical lens of cultural resistance. It assesses the intersecting ways that popular culture has been deployed as oppositional practice in the post-9/11 context by documenting a collection of media texts, including a political hip hop album, a TV sitcom, a best-selling novel and studio photographs. Deviating from the conventional discursive and representative axis of mourning, nationalism and commemoration, this multimedia assemblage contests and rearticulates the political meanings, affects and visualizations of the war on terror and its global consequences. Drawing on the theoretical work of Jacques Rancière, the book also argues that these cultural artefacts are extending cultural resistance by shifting the scenes and methods of opposition to the realm of the sensible, or sensorial experiences. Never celebratory, the book encapsulates the potential of cultural practices against restricted post-9/11 regimes of visibility and audibility in the public sphere, but it also remains attentive to their blind spots, contradictions and constraints. This book offers a new angle to consider the events of 9/11, the war on terror and their continual effects, one that blurs established visions of patriotism and grief.

Cultures of War
Cultures of War

Author: John W. Dower

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 645

ISBN-13: 0393340686

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WORLD HISTORY: SECOND WORLD WAR. Over recent decades, John W. Dower, one of America's preeminent historians, has addressed the roots and consequences of war from multiple perspectives. In War Without Mercy (1986), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, he described and analyzed the brutality that attended World War II in the Pacific, as seen from both the Japanese and the American sides. Embracing Defeat (1999), winner of numerous honors including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, dealt with Japan's struggle to start over in a shattered land in the immediate aftermath of the Pacific War, when the defeated country was occupied by the U.S.-led Allied powers. Turning to an even larger canvas, Dower now examines the cultures of war revealed by four powerful events--Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, and the invasion of Iraq in the name of a war on terror.

Literature, Migration and the 'War on Terror'
Literature, Migration and the 'War on Terror'

Author: Fiona Tolan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-09-13

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 1317985028

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This is a major new collection of essays on literary and cultural representations of migration and terrorism, the cultural impact of 9/11, and the subsequent ‘war on terror’. The collection commences with analyses of the relationship between migration and terrorism, which has been the focus of much mainstream political and media debate since the attacks on America in 2001 and the London bombings in 2005, not least because liberal democratic governments in Europe and North America have invoked such attacks to justify the regulation of migration and the criminalisation of ‘minority’ groups. Responding to the consequent erosion of the liberal democratic rights of the individual, leading scholars assess the various ways in which literary texts support and/or interrogate the conflation of narratives of transnational migration and perceived terrorist threats to national security. This crucial debate is furthered by contrasting analyses of the manner in which novelists from the UK, North Africa, the US and Palestine have represented 9/11, exploring the event’s contexts and ramifications. This path-breaking study complicates the simplistic narratives of revenge and wronged innocence commonly used to make sense of the attacks and to justify the US response. Each novel discussed seeks to interrogate and analyse a discourse typically dominated by consent, belligerence and paranoia. Together, the collected essays suggest the value of literature as an effective critical intervention in the very fraught political aftermath of the ‘war on terror’. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

Culture, Crisis and America's War on Terror
Culture, Crisis and America's War on Terror

Author: Stuart Croft

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2006-09-14

Total Pages: 9

ISBN-13: 113945918X

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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.

Subtle Tools
Subtle Tools

Author: Karen J. Greenberg

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2023-02-21

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0691216576

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How policies forged after September 11 were weaponized under Trump and turned on American democracy itself In the wake of the September 11 terror attacks, the American government implemented a wave of overt policies to fight the nation’s enemies. Unseen and undetected by the public, however, another set of tools was brought to bear on the domestic front. In this riveting book, one of today’s leading experts on the US security state shows how these “subtle tools” imperiled the very foundations of democracy, from the separation of powers and transparency in government to adherence to the Constitution. Taking readers from Ground Zero to the Capitol insurrection, Karen Greenberg describes the subtle tools that were forged under George W. Bush in the name of security: imprecise language, bureaucratic confusion, secrecy, and the bypassing of procedural and legal norms. While the power and legacy of these tools lasted into the Obama years, reliance on them increased exponentially in the Trump era, both in the fight against terrorism abroad and in battles closer to home. Greenberg discusses how the Trump administration weaponized these tools to separate families at the border, suppress Black Lives Matter protests, and attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Revealing the deeper consequences of the war on terror, Subtle Tools paints a troubling portrait of an increasingly undemocratic America where disinformation, xenophobia, and disdain for the law became the new norm, and where the subtle tools of national security threatened democracy itself.

Culture and Resistance
Culture and Resistance

Author: Edward W. Said

Publisher: Pluto Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9780745320175

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''... brilliantly original ... brings cultural and post-colonial theory to bear on a wide range of authors with great skill and sensitivity.' Terry Eagleton

Reign of Terror
Reign of Terror

Author: Spencer Ackerman

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2022-08-09

Total Pages: 449

ISBN-13: 1984879790

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A New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2021 "An impressive combination of diligence and verve, deploying Ackerman’s deep stores of knowledge as a national security journalist to full effect. The result is a narrative of the last 20 years that is upsetting, discerning and brilliantly argued." —The New York Times "One of the most illuminating books to come out of the Trump era." —New York Magazine An examination of the profound impact that the War on Terror had in pushing American politics and society in an authoritarian direction For an entire generation, at home and abroad, the United States has waged an endless conflict known as the War on Terror. In addition to multiple ground wars, the era pioneered drone strikes and industrial-scale digital surveillance; weakened the rule of law through indefinite detentions; sanctioned torture; and manipulated the truth about it all. These conflicts have yielded neither peace nor victory, but they have transformed America. What began as the persecution of Muslims and immigrants has become a normalized feature of American politics and national security, expanding the possibilities for applying similar or worse measures against other targets at home, as the summer of 2020 showed. A politically divided and economically destabilized country turned the War on Terror into a cultural—and then a tribal—struggle. It began on the ideological frontiers of the Republican Party before expanding to conquer the GOP, often with the acquiescence of the Democratic Party. Today’s nativist resurgence walked through a door opened by the 9/11 era. And that door remains open. Reign of Terror shows how these developments created an opportunity for American authoritarianism and gave rise to Donald Trump. It shows that Barack Obama squandered an opportunity to dismantle the War on Terror after killing Osama bin Laden. By the end of his tenure, the war had metastasized into a bitter, broader cultural struggle in search of a demagogue like Trump to lead it. Reign of Terror is a pathbreaking and definitive union of journalism and intellectual history with the power to transform how America understands its national security policies and their catastrophic impact on civic life.

The United States of War
The United States of War

Author: David Vine

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2021-09-07

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 0520385683

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2020 L.A. Times Book Prize Finalist, History A provocative examination of how the U.S. military has shaped our entire world, from today’s costly, endless wars to the prominence of violence in everyday American life. The United States has been fighting wars constantly since invading Afghanistan in 2001. This nonstop warfare is far less exceptional than it might seem: the United States has been at war or has invaded other countries almost every year since independence. In The United States of War, David Vine traces this pattern of bloody conflict from Columbus's 1494 arrival in Guantanamo Bay through the 250-year expansion of a global U.S. empire. Drawing on historical and firsthand anthropological research in fourteen countries and territories, The United States of War demonstrates how U.S. leaders across generations have locked the United States in a self-perpetuating system of permanent war by constructing the world’s largest-ever collection of foreign military bases—a global matrix that has made offensive interventionist wars more likely. Beyond exposing the profit-making desires, political interests, racism, and toxic masculinity underlying the country’s relationship to war and empire, The United States of War shows how the long history of U.S. military expansion shapes our daily lives, from today’s multi-trillion–dollar wars to the pervasiveness of violence and militarism in everyday U.S. life. The book concludes by confronting the catastrophic toll of American wars—which have left millions dead, wounded, and displaced—while offering proposals for how we can end the fighting.

Popular Culture, Social Media, and the Politics of Identity
Popular Culture, Social Media, and the Politics of Identity

Author: William Clapton

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-11-08

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 1040223389

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Popular Culture, Social Media, and the Politics of Identity advances a novel methodological approach – pop culture as political object – to capture the centrality of popular culture as an object of a broad range of political contests and debates that constitute pop culture artefacts by generating and informing specific meanings and understandings of them. It is no longer novel to claim that popular culture matters to world politics. The literature on Popular Culture and World Politics (PCWP) has demonstrated the cultural basis of political action and meaning-making. However, this book argues that in doing so, the PCWP literature has focused primarily on the traditionally narrow range of issues, actors, and things that mainstream International Relations regards as part of world politics. While PCWP challenges restrictive disciplinary understandings of the sites of legitimate inquiry where one can purposefully gain knowledge about world politics, comparatively little has been done to challenge constricted understandings of what world politics is, who it involves, and where it takes place. Methodological approaches in the literature largely treat popular culture and politics as separate and therefore focus on understanding how popular culture relates to and intersects with a relatively circumscribed notion of world politics. Focusing on the everyday politics of how audiences perceive and contest popular cultural artefacts, this book demonstrates that pop culture does not merely intersect with or reflect discrete political processes; it is also directly situated as an object of politics. The author analyses current debates over identity politics across a range of contemporary pop cultural artefacts, including films and video games. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of International Relations, Political Science, and Cultural and Media Studies.