Utopia and Dystopia in the Age of Trump


Book Description

Utopia and Dystopia in the Age of Trump:Images from Literature and Visual Arts treats literature, film, television series, and comic books dealing with utopian and dystopian worlds reflecting on or anticipating our current age. From Henry James’s dreamlike utopia of “The Great Good Place” to the psychotic world of Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, from science fiction and recent horror films, television adaptations of books such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and new series such as Black Mirror to the repressive Hitlerian dystopia of Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night, the contributors examine the development of scenarios that either prefigure the rise of individuals such as Donald J. Trump or suggest alternatives to them. Ultimately, one might say of the worlds presented here, viewed from different social and political perspectives: one person’s utopia is another’s dystopia. This is the fifth in a series of books edited by Barbara Brodman and James E. Doan, and published by Rowman & Littlefield with Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. The Universal Vampire: Origins and Evolution of a Legend and Images of the Modern Vampire: The Hip and the Atavistic (both in 2013) focused on the vampire legend in traditional and modern thought. The Supernatural Revamped: From Timeworn Legends to Twenty-First-Century Chic (2016) examined a range of supernatural beings in literature, film, and other forms of popular culture. Apocalyptic Chic: Visions of the Apocalypse and Post-Apocalypse in Literature and Visual Arts (2017) dealt with legends and images of the apocalypse and post-apocalypse in film and graphic arts, literature and lore from early to modern times, and from peoples and cultures around the world.




American Literature in the Era of Trumpism


Book Description

This edited collection offers an exploration of American literature in the age of Trumpism—understood as an ongoing sociopolitical and affective reality—by bringing together analyses of some of the ways in which American writers have responded to the derealization of political culture in the United States and the experience of a ‘new’ American reality after 2016. The volume’s premise is that the disruptions and dislocations that were so exacerbated by the political ascendancy of Trump and his spectacle-laden presidency have unsettled core assumptions about American reality and the possibilities of representation. The blurring of the relationship between fact and fiction, bolstered by the discourses of ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts,’ has not only drawn attention to the shattering of any notion of ‘shared’ reality, but has also forced a reexamination of the purpose and value of literature, especially when considering its troubled relation to the representation of ‘America.’ The authors in this collection respond to the invitation to reassess the workings of fiction and critique in an age of Trumpism by considering some of the most recent literary responses to the (new) American realit(ies)—including works by Colson Whitehead, Ben Winters, Claudia Rankine, Gary Shteyngart, Jennifer Egan, and Steve Erickson, to name but a few—, some of which were composed in the run-up to the 2016 election but were able to accurately and incisively imagine the world to come.




America 2034


Book Description




Dystopian Emotions


Book Description

As nations reel from the effects of poverty, inequality, climate change and the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, it feels as though the world has entered a period characterized by pessimism, cynicism and anxiety. This edited collection challenges individualized understandings of emotion, revealing how they relate to cultural, economic and political realities in difficult times. Combining numerous empirical studies and theoretical developments from around the world, the diverse contributors explore how dystopian visions of the future influence, and are influenced by, the emotions of an anxious and precarious present. This is an original investigation into the changing landscape of emotion in dark and uncertain times.




Interrogating the Visual Culture of Trumpism


Book Description

Bringing together scholars from art history, visual studies, and related disciplines, this edited volume asks why Trumpism looks the way it does and what that look means for American—and global—society. Grouped into six categories, the essays in this volume tackle some of the most perplexing—and urgent—aspects of the Trumpist visual project. Two of the most striking aspects of that project are its use of novel commodity forms, including the iconic red baseball caps, as well as its embrace of social media. Trump’s outlandish persona and striking physicality have lent themselves to caricature both from his critics and, perhaps more surprisingly, his supporters. That physicality—as well as his movement’s hearkening back to a (mostly imagined) era of mid-twentieth-century prosperity—has also brought gender and the body into sharp focus. Perhaps second only to the aforementioned red hat is Trumpism’s vigorous use of interventions into public space, including traditional campaign signs as well as flags and other ad hoc visual and architectural materials. Finally, there were the events of January 6, 2021, when many of Trumpism’s most outré visual and cultural preoccupations exploded from the shadows onto television screens across the country. Taken as a whole, the essays in this book examine Trumpist visuality from the seemingly trivial to the starkly horrifying, as well as offering a measured sense of the various resistances and responses that have characterized artistic responses to Trump from the beginning of his prominence. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, American studies, and cultural and media studies.




Exploring Cross-Cultural Psychology


Book Description

Exploring Cross-Cultural Psychology: Exercises for Instructors and Students is an accessible text that provides material for generating interactive discussion of a broad sampling of topics in cross-cultural psychology. This new edition (previously Interactive Exercises for Cross-Cultural Psychology) expands the range of topics of cultural interest to psychology and connects cultural study to health, forensic, organizational, and other applied psychology fields. Each chapter offers suggestions for exposition, simulation, and confrontation of current cultural issues while allowing for creativity in instructional design. Topics covered include regional and Indigenous psychology; expression and play; language; identity; social perception and cognition; interpersonal interaction; emotion, motivation, and health; development and family; government and law; economics and work; environmental psychology; and animals and other species. This revised edition includes new coverage of WEIRD psychology, vaccination, well-being, tight vs. loose cultures, and home and homelessness. Thoroughly and currently referenced, with connections to a wide range of accessible web-based and open-source materials, this user-friendly text is ideal for students and instructors of cross-cultural psychology across the spectrum of classroom and workshop applications.




The American Dream and American Cinema in the Age of Trump


Book Description

The American Dream and American Cinema in the Age of Trump uses both film theory and insights from object relations theory in order to examine how recent films address and reflect the state of the ‘American Dream’. This fascinating book looks at how the American Dream is one of the organising ideas of American cinema, and one of the most influential cultural outputs of the twenty-first century, at a time of internal crisis. In an era characterised by populism, climate change and economic uncertainty, the book considers nine auteur films in how they illustrate the challenges of contemporary America. Graham S. Clarke and Ross Clarke present a bifocal perspective on some of the most well-received American films of recent years and how they relate to the American Dream in the context of the Trump presidency. For each of the nine films discussed, two different accounts are presented side by side so that each film is considered from an object relations psychoanalytic point of view (internal world) as well as a film and cultural theory perspective (external world). This unique approach is complemented by discussion of political and critical theory, providing a thorough and engaging analysis. Challenging and insightful, The American Dream and American Cinema in the Age of Trump will be of great interest to scholars of cinema, popular culture, American studies and psychoanalytic studies.




The Many Lives of The Purge


Book Description

With a worldwide box office of more than a half-billion dollars, The Purge franchise has become one of the top horror franchises in film history, with many reviewers wowed by the concept of the series and differentiating on the execution. With five films and a TV show (and another film possibly in the works), the series seems unstoppable. The franchise's main concept taps into underlying tensions throughout America. The vast differences between the films are largely due to the ever-changing casts, including actors, writers, and directors, so that each film has its own unique commentary, sometimes getting right at the nerve of social issues that seem to be best discussed in fictional worlds' metaphors and parables. Acclaimed film and television critics and horror scholars such as Dale Bailey, Jason V. Brock, Chesya Burke, Lisa Morton, Katherine A. Troyer, and Kevin J. Wetmore give a wide range of analyses of just what The Purge films are saying about modern-day America and the world. Essays in the collection examine politics, violence, Trump, Freud, class issues, feminism, race, and more.




The Postworld In-Between Utopia and Dystopia


Book Description

This collection of essays offers global perspectives on feminist utopia and dystopia in speculative literature, film, and art, working from a range of intersectional approaches to examine key works and genres in both their specific cultural context and a wider, global, epistemological, critical background. The international, diverse contributions, including a Foreword by Gregory Claeys, draw upon posthumanism, speculative realism, speculative feminism, object-oriented ontology, new materialisms, and post-Anthropocene studies to propose alternative perspectives on gender, environment, as well as alternate futures and pasts rendered in fiction. Instead of binary divisions into utopia vs dystopia, the collection explores genres transcending this dichotomy, scrutinising the oeuvre of both established and emerging writers, directors, and critics. This is a rich and unique collection suitable for scholars and students studying feminist literature, media cultural studies, and women’s and gender studies.




William Shakespeare and 21st-Century Culture, Politics, and Leadership


Book Description

William Shakespeare and 21st-Century Culture, Politics, and Leadership examines problems, challenges, and crises in our contemporary world through the lens of William Shakespeare’s plays, one of the best-known, most admired, and often controversial authors of the last half-millennium.