Annotation
The course gives interested students the opportunity to engage with the connections between popular culture and world politics in a critical and engaging way, particularly focusing on the entanglements of popular culture with US Foreign Policy. Students will get acquainted with a rich variety of interdisciplinary theories and insights on how to study politics and the United States through popular culture.
The first section of the course will introduce students to the main literature on popular culture and world politics; this will also touch on issues such as geopolitics, security, aesthetics, and virtuality. This will be the segue into the debate how American national identity is constructed. The second section will engage with the question how the myth of the American nation has been created from the founding of the American nation itself in 1776, the Founding Fathers, Manifest Destiny, the Frontier and the Wild West until World War II as an important juncture of American national mythology. This section will also address the way popular culture informed the East-West confrontation during the Cold War up until the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. The third section will focus on ‘9/11’ and America’s ‘War on Terror’ as key events of US Foreign Policy making in the past 20 years. The focus will lie on how the different presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump and their counterterrorism policies can be read through popular culture. Finally, we will be discussing an outlook to future events and policies under the Biden administration and how they might be (co-)produced through popular culture. This seems especially relevant at a time of politics being negotiated in the virtual and digital real and increasingly blurred lines between reality and fiction.