Since the infamous events of 9/11, the fear of terrorism and the determination to strike back against it has become a topic of enormous public debate. The 'war on terror' discourse has developed not only through American politics but via other channels including the media, the church, music, novels, films and television, and therefore permeates many aspects of American life. Stuart Croft suggests that the process of this production of knowledge has created a very particular form of common sense which shapes relationships, jokes and even forms of tattoos. Understanding how a social process of crisis can be mapped out and how that process creates assumptions allows policy-making in America's war on terror to be examined from new perspectives. Using IR approaches together with insights from cultural studies, this book develops a dynamic model of crisis which seeks to understand the war on terror as a cultural phenomenon.

Holloway discusses representations of 9/11 and the war on terror in Hollywood film, novels, mass media, visual art and photography, political discourse, and revisionist historical accounts of the American empire created between the 11 September attacks and the Congressional midterm elections in 2006. He suggests that the culture of the period not only prompted international crises in security, governance, and law but also points to a crisis unfolding in the institutions and processes of US republican democracy. Cultures of the War on Terror offers a cultural and ideological history of the period, showing how culture was used to debate, legitimize, qualify, contest, or repress discussion about the broader meanings of 9/11 and the war on terror.

An entire generation of young adults has never known an America without the War on Terror. This book contends with the pervasive effects of post-9/11 policy and myth-making in every corner of American life. Never-Ending War on Terror is organized around five keywords that have come to define the cultural and political moment: homeland, security, privacy, torture, and drone. Alex Lubin synthesizes nearly two decades of United States war-making against terrorism by asking how the War on Terror has changed American politics and society, and how the War on Terror draws on historical myths about American national and imperial identity. From the PATRIOT Act to the hit show Homeland, from Edward Snowden to Guantanamo Bay, and from 9/11 memorials to Trumpism, this succinct book connects America's political economy and international relations to our contemporary culture at every turn.

The University of Chicago political philosopher applies "just war theory" to the war on terror and concludes that pacifism is an inappropriate response to the events of September 11, 2001. 35,000 first printing.

This timely collection provides a historical overview of violence in American popular culture from the Puritan era to the present and across a range of media. Few topics are discussed more broadly today than violence in American popular culture. Unfortunately, such discussion is often unsupported by fact and lacking in historical context. This two-volume work aims to remedy that through a series of concise, detailed essays that explore why violence has always been a fundamental part of American popular culture, the ways in which it has appeared, and how the nature and expression of interest in it have changed over time. Each volume of the collection is organized chronologically. The first focuses on violent events and phenomena in American history that have been treated across a range of popular cultural media. Topics include Native American genocide, slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, and gender violence. The second volume explores the treatment of violence in popular culture as it relates to specific genres—for example, Puritan "execution sermons," dime novels, television, film, and video games. An afterword looks at the forces that influence how violence is presented, discusses what violence in pop culture tells us about American culture as a whole, and speculates about the future.

The Pen and the Sword is the only comprehensive examination of how the media have covered the 21st century's #1 news story: terrorism and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is the full story-from 9/11 to the Obama doctrine-including

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 TV sitcom, a best-selling novel and studio photographs. Deviating from the conventional discursive and representative axis of mourning, nationalism and commemoration, this multimedia 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 Rancière, the book also argues that these cultural artefacts 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.