Cultural Resistance, 9/11, and the War on Terror
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 television situation comedy, a bestselling novel, and studio photographs. Deviating from the conventional discursive and representative axis of mourning, nationalism, and commemoration, this multi-media 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 Rancire, the book also argues that these cultural artifacts 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.
Jenifer Chao is a Lecturer in the Leicester Media School at De Montfort University. Her research is situated at the confluence of cultural analysis, in particular visual culture, and International Relations. It focuses on the diverse ways that politics and aesthetics converge most often with oppositional intentions to address issues such as identity, globalization, and terrorism.
Popular Culture and World Politics
Edited by Matt Davies, Newcastle University,
Kyle Grayson, Newcastle University,
Simon Philpott, Newcastle University,
Christina Rowley, University of Bristol, and
Jutta Weldes, University of Bristol
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com
The Popular Culture World Politics (PCWP) book series is the forum for leading interdisciplinary research that explores the profound and diverse interconnections between popular culture and world politics. It aims to bring further innovation, rigor, and recognition to this emerging sub-field of international relations.
To these ends, the PCWP series is interested in various themes, from the juxtaposition of cultural artifacts that are increasingly global in scope and regional, local, and domestic forms of production, distribution, and consumption; to the confrontations between cultural life and global political, social, and economic forces; to the new or emergent forms of politics that result from the rescaling or internationalization of popular culture.
Similarly, the series provides a venue for work that explores the effects of new technologies and new media on established practices of representation and the making of political meaning. It encourages engagement with popular culture as a means for contesting powerful narratives of particular events and political settlements as well as explorations of the ways that popular culture informs mainstream political discourse. The series promotes investigation into how popular culture contributes to changing perceptions of time, space, scale, identity, and participation while establishing the outer limits of what is popularly understood as political or cultural.
In addition to film, television, literature, and art, the series actively encourages research into diverse artifacts including sound, music, food cultures, gaming, design, architecture, programming, leisure, sport, fandom, and celebrity. The series is fiercely pluralist in its approaches to the study of popular culture and world politics and is interested in the past, present, and future cultural dimensions of hegemony, resistance, and power.
The International Politics of Fashion
Being Fab in a Dangerous World
Edited by Andreas Behnke
Cultural Resistance, 9/11, and the War on Terror
Sensible Interventions
Jenifer Chao