Synopses & Reviews
This volume explores the science fiction/world politics intertext. Through detailed analyses of such texts as Blade Runner, Stalker, Star Trek, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the chapters in this volume examine the complex and sometimes contradictory relations between world politics, both as discipline and as practice, and discourses of science fiction. Offering a novel combination of popular culture analysis with major theoretical and empirical issues concerning world politics, To Seek Out New Worlds provides insights into the discursive constitution of both science fiction and world politics while highlighting the occasional challenges that the science fiction/world politics intertext launches at our common sense.
Synopsis
This volume explores the science fiction/world politics intertext. Through detailed analyses of such texts as Blade Runner, Stalker, Star Trek, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the chapters in this volume examine the complex and sometimes contradictory relations between world politics, both as discipline and as practice, and discourses of science fiction. Offering a novel combination of popular culture analysis with major theoretical and empirical issues concerning world politics, To Seek Out New Worlds provides insights into the discursive constitution of both science fiction and world politics while highlighting the occasional challenges that the science fiction/world politics intertext launches at our common sense.
Synopsis
Geared toward political scientists interested in links between politics and pop culture, this volume mines science fiction for its ability to explore politics unbounded by reality. Alternative visions of past, present, and future within sci-fi have been used to explore issues of environmental catastrophe, nuclear anxieties, militarism, the growing power of multinational corporations, and the intricacies of cross-cultural encounters. As a result, the book provides a very useful focus for examining, reproducing, and contesting common-sense understandings of world politics. Contributors include Iver Neumann, Naeem Inayatullah, Aida Hozic, Ronnie Lipschutz, and others.
Synopsis
This volume explores the science fiction/world politics intertext. Through detailed analyses of such texts as Blade Runner, Stalker, Star Trek, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the chapters in this volume examine the complex and sometimes contradictory relations between world politics, both as discipline and as practice, and discourses of science fiction. Offering a novel combination of popular culture analysis with major theoretical and empirical issues concerning world politics, To Seek Out New Worlds provides insights into the discursive constitution of both science fiction and world politics while highlighting the occasional challenges that the science fiction/world politics intertext launches at our common sense.
About the Author
Jutta Weldes is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Bristol. She is the author of
Constructing National Interests: The US and the Cuban Missile Crisis (1999).
Table of Contents
Introduction: Popular Culture, Science Fiction, and World Politics--Jutta Weldes *
Part I: World Politics in Outer Space * The Problem of the World and Beyond--Geoffrey Whitehall * 'To know him was to love him. Not to know him was to love him from afar': Diplomacy in Star Trek--Iver B. Neumann * Bumpy Space: Linguistic Imperialism and Resistance in Star Trek: The Next Generation--Naeem Inayatullah *
Part II: Aliens Among Us Aliens, Alien Nations, and Alienation in American Political Economy and Popular Culture-- Ronnie D. Lipschutz * Demon Diasporas: Confronting the Other and the Other Worldly in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel--Patricia Molloy * Forbidden Places, Tempting Spaces and the Politics of Desire: On Stalker and Beyond --Aida A. Hozic *
The US Imaginary and Science Fiction * The Final Frontier: American Anti-Collectivism in the Post-Cold War Era--Patrick Jackson and Daniel Nexon * Fantasies of Future war: Official Military Futurology as Science Fiction--Andrew Latham