Description
In the period since the 9/11 wars, popular culture initially (at least) became a form and site which was frequently implicated in mobilising support for war and its violence. This panel explores the ways in which popular culture in its many manifestations has multiplied and intensified war messaging but has also opened up surprising spaces and cracks of resistance. These fascinating papers explore the dominance of war and militarism in toys and the way in which practices of play make militarism banal and part of the everyday; the
messages in films and their failure to amount effective critique of the 9/11 wars; the ways in which popular culture narratives are internalised and reproduced by elite level decision makers, and the ways in which graphic novels offer spaces to explore an ‘imagined’ civil war in the USA so offering a space for critique. Cumulatively in their exploration of the multifaceted ways in which popular culture engages, internalises, and problematises militarism, these papers open up a crucial lens into militarism as global crises in a period of ever intensifying conflict.
