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This book presents essays and scientific contributions examining the link between popular media and politics. The essays focus on the question of how political and social change, concepts of power, and utopian elements are reflected in selected films and television series. The book applies a political science perspective, covering theories from political philosophy, political sociology and international relations, and examines a wide range of movies and TV series, such as The Godfather, Fight Club, The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones. It will appeal to anyone interested in studying how political ideas, concepts and messages can be illustrated and visualized using the complex media of movies and TV series.
The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Politics brings together forty essays by leading film scholars and filmmakers in order to discuss the complex relationship between cinema and politics. Organised into eight sections - Approaches to Film and Politics; Film, Activism and Opposition; Film, Propaganda, Ideology and the State; The Politics of Mobility; Political Hollywood; Alternative and Independent Film and Politics; The Politics of Cine-geographies and The Politics of Documentary - this collection covers a broad range of topics, including: third cinema, cinema after 9/11, eco-activism, human rights, independent Chinese documentary, film festivals, manifestoes, film policies, film as a response to the post-2008 financial crisis, Soviet propaganda, the impact of neoliberalism on cinema, and many others. It foregrounds the key debates, concepts, approaches and case studies that critique and explain the complex relationship between politics and cinema, discussing films from around the world and including examples from film history as well as contemporary cinema. It also explores the wider relationship between politics and entertainment, examines cinema’s response to political and social transformations and questions the extent to which filmmaking, itself, is a political act.
Movies and television series are excellent tools for teaching political science and international relations. Understanding how stories in various film and television genres illustrate political ideas can better assist students and fans understand and appreciate the political subtext of these media products. This book examines politics through five film genres and their variants. Gangster movies focus on American and other organized crime. They reached their zenith in the films of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. Political thrillers express paranoia about secrecy and political conspiracies, while action movies channel anger at foreign and domestic threats to order. Superhero films and TV present modern characters who seek to serve society as they face personal struggles about their individual identities. War movies promote positive images of wars when conflicts are perceived as successful, but often include antiwar messages when wars turn out badly. Western movies fell out of favor in the 1970s and 1980s but have undergone a renaissance since the 1990s. Westerns can be taken as either political parables, or as meditations on policing, anarchy, community organization. The author argues that while these genres all offer escape, they also offer important political lessons.
Films examined include: Master and commander - the far side of the world, The Coneheads, X2, The postman, Taxi driver, Working girl, Mr. Smith goes to Washington, Robocop, Showgirls, The passion of the Christ, Last tango in Paris, Pulp fiction, Kill Bill: Vol. 2.
What effect is China's successful autocracy having on global politics? Is it leading to the decline of democracy, and the rise of 'strong man' government worldwide? China's success economically, this collection argues, is undermining the post-war consensus that 'liberal democracy is best'. In a multi-polar, Chinese-dominated world, Trump, Putin, Erdogan, and other global leaders no longer criticize China. In fact, they frequently invoke the usefulness of 'strong' and 'united' leadership. At the same time, China seeks to wear the mantle of a great power, and in doing so talks about human rights, climate change, freedom and economic liberalism. This collection examines how China views itself and where reality meets rhetoric on trade, international relations, diplomacy, economics and social policy. The contributors expertly dissect China's autocracy, and show how a ripple effect is altering the political-model consensus around the world.
The »global« is permanently made and remade by how it is envisioned in political projects, in language, and in literature. Through a range of case studies, this book shows how practices of referring to the world actually constitute the global in its many facets. It aims to provide a sense in readers of how the global is not something »out there«, but that it is embedded in a wide range of the seemingly »everyday«. The contributions appeal to a readership from a background in Sociology, History, Political Science, Literary Studies, and Social Work.
Aesthetic and political representation are often treated separately, but this book argues that film offers a unique perspective through which to understand the dangers to equality and freedom that lurk in representative politics. The potential problems of representative democracy have long been debated: does it cultivate apathy and discourage citizen participation? What does it mean to be faithfully or well represented in a democracy? And how can appropriate, meaningful representation be achieved? Here, these questions are addressed from a new perspective. Representation, Joshua Foa Dienstag argues, can create the illusion of freedom and reciprocity in place of the real thing, and in both cinema and politics, what gives us pleasure is not the same as what secures or supports our existence as free and equal citizens. As this book shows, there are political dangers not visible within the current debates around democratic representation, dangers we can better understand and help to minimize by considering the way that human beings interact, emotionally, with their filmic representations. Dienstag looks at a series of films that directly confront issues of representation (Her, Blade Runner, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Melancholia, and the Up documentary series) to diagnose these hazards and consider how best to respond to them. Each chapter looks at a specific film as emblematic of a different conception or problem of representation often ignored by mainstream political debates (such as reciprocity, happiness, boundaries, evil) to show that the relationship between representation and freedom is fraught with tension. This book continues Dienstag's earlier groundbreaking work on philosophical pessimism, understood not as something despairing, but as a rejection of the idea that these necessary tensions can be cured. Ultimately, Dienstag seeks to defend a kind of pessimistic politics that might produce a better sort of democratic representation than what we have today.
A sociological research on the current “narrations” of the crisis reflected by media and the relation between political discourses and popular myths, consists a revealing study of the dominant social representations worldwide. The real inequalities are counterbalanced by cultural industries’ “fairytales”.
In Representations of Child Soldiers in Contemporary African Narratives, Ademola Adesola examines the dominant factors that writers privilege in their portrayals of child soldiering in sub-Saharan Africa. In his textual-interpretive analyses of selected novels in the African child soldier genre, Adesola contends that critical discussions of African child soldier literature have depended on the interpretive frameworks supplied by Western humanitarian discourses which oversimplify and de-historicize experiences of war in Africa. The author argues that such reductive decontextualization of war realities serve to champion a narrow vision of war in African contexts centered on a moral and humanitarian urge for Western intervention. Regardless of whether the casus belli legitimating those wars are genuine or not, those conflicts (and children’s involvement in them) are understood within the same racist colonial and ethnocentric stereotypes about Africa that have been privileged in Western thought and the Western moral-political imagination for centuries. Thus, in studying African child soldier narratives, this book provides an alternative reading of novels whose settings feature African ethnopolitical conflicts – such as in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Congo-Brazzaville, Nigeria – notable for their exploitation of children for military ends. The author maintains that these works are significant in the varying ways they reify and challenge the Western ideas of “child” and “childhood,” as well as privilege child soldiers as social actors whose intricate makeups disavow being simply understood as innocent victims or irredeemable perpetrators of atrocities.
It is widely acknowledged that the hit franchise Game of Thrones is based on the Wars of the Roses, a bloody fifteenth-century civil war between feuding English families. In this book, Jeffrey R. Wilson shows how that connection was mediated by Shakespeare, and how a knowledge of the Shakespearean context enriches our understanding of the literary elements of Game of Thrones. On the one hand, Shakespeare influenced Game of Thrones indirectly because his history plays significantly shaped the way the Wars of the Roses are now remembered, including the modern histories and historical fictions George R.R. Martin drew upon. On the other, Game of Thrones also responds to Shakespeare’s first tetralogy directly by adapting several of its literary strategies (such as shifting perspectives, mixed genres, and metatheater) and tropes (including the stigmatized protagonist and the prince who was promised). Presenting new interviews with the Game of Thrones cast, and comparing contextual circumstances of composition—such as collaborative authorship and political currents—this book also lodges a series of provocations about writing and acting for the stage in the Elizabethan age and for the screen in the twenty-first century. An essential read for fans of the franchise, as well as students and academics looking at Shakespeare and Renaissance literature in the context of modern media.