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| 1 |
ID:
155291
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| Summary/Abstract |
Building upon current interest in studies of how popular culture relates to global politics, this article examines one hitherto overlooked aspect of popular culture: computer games. Although not prominent in the field of International Relations (IR), historical strategy computer games should be of particular interest to the discipline since they are explicitly designed to allow players to simulate global politics. This article highlights five major IR-related assumptions built into most single-player historical strategy games (the assumption of perfect information, the assumption of perfect control, the assumption of radical otherness, the assumption of perpetual conflict, and the assumption of environmental stasis) and contrasts them with IR scholarship about how these assumptions manifest themselves in the “real world.” This article concludes by making two arguments: first, we can use computer games as a mirror to critically reflect on the nature of contemporary global politics, and second, these games have important constitutive effects on understandings of global politics, effects that deserve to be examined empirically in a deeper manner.
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| 2 |
ID:
188593
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| Publication |
New Delhi, Manohar Publishers and Distributors, 2010.
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| Description |
viii, 395p.hbk
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| Standard Number |
9788173048449
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Copies: C:1/I:0,R:0,Q:0
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| Accession# | Call# | Current Location | Status | Policy | Location |
| 060274 | 306.4/VAS 060274 | Main | On Shelf | General | |
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| 3 |
ID:
193223
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| Summary/Abstract |
The question of how wars end is of continued importance, especially in the context of the ongoing War on Terror. This question has traditionally been approached within International Relations through rational choice theories, logical modelling and game theory. Such approaches have become increasingly ill-suited to capturing the complexity and ambiguity of contemporary warfare and the War on Terror in particular. These battlefield ambiguities are often at odds with political and public desires to see decisive victory in wars. This article builds on recent critical work within War Termination Studies in order to re-conceptualise the end of war as assemblages. By paying greater attention to the affects inculcated by political rhetoric surrounding war and utilising the concepts of affect and emergence, this article presents a novel approach to the study of contemporary war termination. Utilising popular culture, increasingly seen as a crucial site of global politics, the case study analysed here advances the argument that sacrifice emerges from cinema and presidential rhetoric as a trope that allows leaders to claim victory in war despite indecisive conditions of the ground. Through affective cinematic encounters, conceptualised here through the end of wars assemblages, audiences can become more accepting of such political claims.
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| 4 |
ID:
144064
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article attempts to further develop the IR research agenda on video games. The argument starts with a critique of the narrow focus on war-themed blockbuster games of current IR work on video games. I argue that this narrow view of IR and of video games is unsustainable and counterproductive, and has led to the positioning of IR as a regime of value with an unwarranted focus on the ideological effects of video games, and also to a paradoxical closing off of its research agenda. In the second half of the article I attempt to sketch two directions of research that could help overcome these initial limitations. The first outlines the potential for the IR study of the global aesthetic economy of video games, and the differentiated distribution of its regimes of value. The second encourages the study of game-worlds as practical-theoretical spaces where a particular relationship between academic subjectivity and its objects is constituted. The significance of this argument transcends IR video games research: it has relevance for cross-disciplinary issues regarding the status of academic moral-aesthetic judgements about cultural artfacts and practices; the relationship between academic and ‘popular’ knowledge; and the potential for political mobilisation at the interface of entertainment and social critique.
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| 5 |
ID:
164496
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| Summary/Abstract |
Over the last 30 years, post-structuralist, feminist and other IR theorists have asked questions of the ways in which discourses on sovereignty seek to foreclose political possibility. To do so, they have advanced a decentralised, contested, incomplete and relational understanding of politics that presupposes some sort of intersubjective agency, however fragmented. There is one site, however, that appears to confound this line of argument insofar as it is commonly understood to exemplify an entirely non-relational, anti-political ‘desolation’: the concentration camp. Drawing on feminist theory to establish the terms of an aesthetic mode of ‘interruption’, this article will identify a compelling challenge to this position in a comic book drawn by Horst Rosenthal, a German–Jewish detainee at Gurs in Vichy, France, who was later killed at Auschwitz–Birkenau. Rosenthal’s piece will be read as an ‘aesthetic interruption’ that mounts a powerful critique of the logic underpinning his concentrationary experience, and in so doing demonstrates one way in which (to however painfully limited a degree) the political might be ‘brought back in’ to discussions about sovereign power.
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| 6 |
ID:
168866
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Several scholars have raised concerns that the institutional mechanisms through which transitional justice is commonly promoted in post-conflict societies can alienate affected populations. Practitioners have looked to bridge this gap by developing ‘outreach’ programmes, in some instances commissioning comic books in order to communicate their findings to the people they seek to serve. In this article, we interrogate the ways in which post-conflict comics produce meaning about truth, reconciliation, and the possibilities of peace, focusing in particular on a comic strip published in 2005 as part of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report into the causes and crimes of the 1991–2002 Civil War. Aimed at Sierra Leonean teenagers, the Report tells the story of ‘Sierrarat’, a peaceful nation of rats whose idyllic lifestyle is disrupted by an invasion of cats. Although the Report displays striking formal similarities with Art Spiegelman's Maus (a text also intimately concerned with reconciliation, in its own way), it does so to very different ends. The article brings these two texts into dialogue in order to explore the aesthetic politics of truth and reconciliation, and to ask what role popular visual media like comics can play in their practice and (re)conceptualisation.
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| 7 |
ID:
029031
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| Publication |
London, Caldar & Boyars, 1970.
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| Description |
189p.
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| Standard Number |
0174508381
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Copies: C:1/I:0,R:0,Q:0
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| Accession# | Call# | Current Location | Status | Policy | Location |
| 010716 | 306/ILL 010716 | Main | On Shelf | General | |
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| 8 |
ID:
165988
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| Summary/Abstract |
In this article, I argue that audiocassette technology decentralized state-controlled Egyptian media long before the advent of al-Jazeera and the Internet. By enabling any citizen to become a cultural producer, as opposed to a mere consumer, the mass medium and its users sparked significant anxiety in the mid-to-late 20th century, when contentious cassette recordings led many local critics to assert that “vulgar” tapes were poisoning public taste, undermining high culture, and endangering Egyptian society. This article breaks down these arguments and shows that audiotapes actually broadcast a vast variety of voices. Thus, underlying many criticisms of cassette content, I contend, was not simply a concern for aesthetic sensibilities but a desire to dictate who created Egyptian culture during a time of tremendous change. By unpacking these discussions, this article harnesses Egypt as a case study to enhance prevailing investigations of sound, popular culture, and mass media in Middle East studies.
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| 9 |
ID:
178543
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article examines Islamist engagement with popular culture in Egypt, focusing on Ikhwān Cinema a cultural intervention launched by a youth group affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, following the election of Mohamed Morsi as president in June 2012. Until now, scholars have tended to ignore Islamist-produced popular culture, reflecting assumptions that Islamists are opposed to popular culture, and even culture more broadly. Yet, as this article explores, the Muslim Brotherhood has historically viewed culture as an important vehicle through which to disseminate their ideas and to attract people to the organization. The first part of the article reviews the historical position of the Muslim Brotherhood towards the arts and cinema in order to put Ikhwān Cinema into context. The second part examines the aesthetic content of Ikhwān Cinema’s video productions, specifically created for social media consumption. The third part analyses how the group continued these aesthetics following the toppling of their political leader in July 2013. Overall, the article argues that we can understand Ikhwān Cinema both as a continuation of the Muslim Brotherhood’s historical engagement with culture as well as a case of a post-Islamist trend that seeks to blend Islam with elements of global youth culture.
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| 10 |
ID:
180537
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| Summary/Abstract |
Arabesk is a trademark of popular culture in Turkey. At its foundation lie injuries of class, emotional wounds that society inflicts on people’s sense of dignity and freedom. Literature on arabesk has long underemphasized this salient fact. A syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis of the narrative structure in thirty melodramas shows that the agony around which arabesk stories unfolds is rooted in class conflict. This study also reveals remarkable parallels between depictions of love in arabesk films from decades ago and the lower classes’ imagination of love today. Thereby, it provides confirmation of the importance of assessing the works of popular culture accurately if we are to better understand the psyche of their target audience in Turkey (and elsewhere in the capitalist world), which is primarily the subaltern segment of society.
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| 11 |
ID:
077352
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| Publication |
2007.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article examines themes of terrorism and counter-terrorism in US popular culture, focusing on eight cinematic or televisual works from the pre- and post-9/11 environment. Each of these works explores the dilemmas posed by terrorism, counter-terrorist mobilization, and occupation and resistance in fictional spaces. Three of the works - 24, The Agency, and The Grid - are narratives that attempt to simulate the activities of counter-terrorist operations in, respectively, a wholly fictional Counter Terrorist Unit; the Central Intelligence Agency; and ad hoc intelligence and tactical groups combing CIA, FBI, NSC, and MI5 agents. The other five works are more removed from an explicit attempt to mimic `reality': The X-Files, The Matrix Trilogy, Alias, The 4400, and Battlestar Galactica. In all of these works, the dangers to human rights posed by both overt and covert security operations lie at the core of their narrative structures.
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| 12 |
ID:
171963
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| Summary/Abstract |
Cybersecurity experts foster a perception of cybersecurity as a gloomy underworld in which the good guys must resort to unconventional tactics to keep at bay a motley group of threats to the digital safety of unsuspecting individuals, businesses, and governments. This article takes this framing seriously, drawing on film studies scholarship that identifies certain aesthetic themes as associated with moral ambiguity in noir films. This article introduces the term “cyber-noir” to describe the incorporation of noir elements in cybersecurity expert discourses. It argues that the concept of cyber-noir helps explain the persistence of practices that blur legal, moral, and professional lines between legitimate and malicious activity in cyberspace. Consequently, changing cybersecurity requires not only institutional and technological measures, but also a re-constitution of cybersecurity identities themselves.
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| 13 |
ID:
156350
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| Summary/Abstract |
Using the case study of the Cold War Soviet Union, this article explores what it terms “domestic cultural diplomacy,” namely government actions within their own borders to positively impact the opinions of foreigners, which it distinguishes from “foreign cultural diplomacy,” referring to state efforts aimed outside of its own territory. The article examines a range of Soviet internal cultural activities that had the goal of convincing foreigners that the USSR possessed an appealing and modern popular culture. The conceptual framework of domestic cultural diplomacy, it suggests, opens new possibilities for scholarly research on diplomatic history and foreign policy.
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| 14 |
ID:
172343
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| Summary/Abstract |
Feminist scholars have provided important analyses of the gendered and racialised discourses used to justify the Global War on Terror. They show how post-9/11 policies were made possible through particular binary constructions of race, gender, and national identity in official discourse. Turning to popular culture, this article uses a Queer feminist poststructuralist approach to look at the ways that Ms. Marvel comics destabilise and contest those racialised and gendered discourses. Specifically, it explores how Ms. Marvel provides a reading of race, gender, and national identity in post-9/11 USA that challenges gendered-racialised stereotypes. Providing a Queer reading of Ms. Marvel that undermines the coherence of Self/Other binaries, the article concludes that to write, draw, and circulate comics and the politics they depict is a way of intervening in international relations that imbues comics with the power to engage in dialogue with and (re)shape systems of racialised-gendered domination and counter discriminatory legislation.
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| 15 |
ID:
178541
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| Summary/Abstract |
In the early morning of September 6, 2019, two rap videos expressing frustrations with Turkey’s socio-political condition coincidentally dropped together and quickly went viral. Although one was more overtly political, both videos crystalized the rage, grief, and hopelessness many had been feeling under the 17-year rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP). The dual release catalyzed a groundswell of online mobilization at a particularly tumultuous moment – one at which mass protest in the form of organized street demonstrations was effectively off the table. As this article argues, however, pushback against the AKP was alive and well in alternative spaces. From rap collaborations challenging corruption and rising rates of femicide to social media users repurposing familiar memes of TV shows with witty political critique, pop culture-themed acts of resistance signalled to others in Turkey’s fractious opposition that they were not alone. This articles addresses an interdisciplinary body of literature that examines the AKP’s deployment of entertainment media to extend its soft power abroad and cultivate a conservative society at home, but turns it around to explore how various opposition actors strike back by taking pop culture into their own hands as a tool of expression, mobilization, and subversion.
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| 16 |
ID:
118260
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2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The Arab Spring has presented great challenges and opportunities throughout the region. New models of political participation, power-sharing, and evolving forms of social consensus dominate the landscape region-wide. The Arab Spring has also affected popular culture in significant ways which portend even greater social and relational evolution. As noted by a recent World Economic Forum (WEF) report, â??Although not all the regionâ??s countries have experienced political or economic transition, recent events have accelerated changes in public sentiment, raised levels of engagement and heightened expectations region wide.
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| 17 |
ID:
119999
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2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Security studies is again reflecting on its origins and debating how best to study in/security. In this article, we interrogate the contemporary evolutionary narrative about (international) security studies. We unpack the myth's components and argue that it restricts the empirical focus of (international) security studies, limits its analytical insights, and constrains the sorts of interlocutors with whom it engages. We then argue that these limitations can at least partially be remedied by examining the performance of identities and in/securities in everyday life. In order initially to establish the important similarities between (international) security studies and the everyday, we trace elements of the evolutionary myth in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel - which both stand in for, and are, the everyday in our analysis. We then argue that the Buffyverse offers a complex understanding of (identities and) in/security as a terrain of everyday theorizing, negotiation and contestation - what we call the 'entanglement' of in/security discourses - that overcomes the shortcomings of (international) security studies and its myth, providing insights fruitful for the study of in/security. In conclusion, we briefly draw out the implications of our analysis for potential directions in (international) security studies scholarship and pedagogy.
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| 18 |
ID:
083206
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2008.
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This article explores the connections between the field of China studies and the field of gender and sexuality studies. It engages with three questions. First, why is it that theoretical, conceptual and methodological cross-fertilization between China studies and cultural studies remains quite scarce? Second, why are popular culture and art important domains of academic inquiry? Third, why is it crucial to theorize and problematize "Chineseness"? Drawing on the debates surrounding the translation of alleged "Western" theories related to the sex-gender distinction, feminism, and queer studies to a "Chinese" context, it is argued that the call for local knowledges runs the danger of becoming an essentializing, hegemonic discourse on its own. The article concludes with a plea for an interdisciplinary approach that combines theoretical and empirical insights from area studies and cultural studies, and an intersectional take in which gender is analyzed in conjunction with other parameters of difference, such as ethnicity, class or age, and, finally, a multisited, comparative research agenda as to avoid a sino-centric or Han-centric analysis. This may help to identify, understand, and hopefully resist the seduction of both cultural essentialism and cultural relativism
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| 19 |
ID:
189698
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| Summary/Abstract |
Music and politics have always been closely intertwined. Throughout history, political regimes have appropriated musical works for their own purposes, while musicians have expressed their own political views through their work—whether in the lyrics or in the music itself. Some pieces have become closely associated with certain political events, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall. Today, digital streaming services have brought a vast menu of global musical choices to consumers, but algorithmic recommendations could shape playlists in ways that serve political agendas or reinforce Western conventions.
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| 20 |
ID:
073300
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| Publication |
London, Routledge, 2006.
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| Description |
xii, 218p.
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| Standard Number |
041537071X
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Copies: C:1/I:0,R:0,Q:0
Circulation
| Accession# | Call# | Current Location | Status | Policy | Location |
| 051578 | 305.235090511/NIL 051578 | Main | On Shelf | General | |
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