Popular Culture,

Geopolitics, and Identity

Second Edition

Jason Dittmer
University College London

Daniel Bos
University of Oxford

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

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Names: Dittmer, Jason, author. | Bos, Daniel, 1988– author.
Title: Popular culture, geopolitics, and identity / Jason Dittmer, University
College London, Daniel Bos, University of Oxford.
Description: Second Edition. | Lanham : ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD, [2019] |
Series: Human geography in the twenty-first century: Issues and applications
| “First edition 2010”—T.p. verso. | Includes bibliographical references and
index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018055318 (print) | LCCN 2018056428 (ebook) | ISBN
9781538116739 (ebook) | ISBN 9781538116715 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN
9781538116722 (paperback : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Geopolitics—Social aspects. | Popular culture—Political
aspects. | Mass media—Political aspects.
Classification: LCC JC319 (ebook) | LCC JC319 .D4995 2019 (print) | DDC
306.2—dc23
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For my grandmother Florence Fitzpatrick,
who always told me to work hard
at something I loved.
Jason

For my parents, Diane and Derek.

Daniel
 Contents

Preface to the First Edition vii

Preface to the Second Edition xiii
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction: Popular Culture—between Propaganda and
Entertainment xvii
1 Geopolitics: Histories, Discourses, and Mediation 1
2 Popular Culture and Popular Geopolitics: Definitions,
Theories, and Convergence 21
3 Methodologies: Researching Popular Geopolitics 45
4 Representation of Place and the British Empire 69
5 Narration of Nation in the Post-WWII United States 95
6 Affect, Embodiment, and Military-Themed Video Games 119
7 Audiences, Assemblages, and the Everyday Geopolitics
of Heritage 141
8 Social Media and the Networked Self 165
9 Conclusion: Identity, Subjectivity, and Going Forward 191
Bibliography 199
Index 209
About the Authors 221
v
 Preface to the First Edition
Jason Dittmer

What is the relationship between popular culture and geopolitics? And

what does that relationship have to do with you and me? These are the
questions that animate this book, and hopefully they will interest you
as much as they interest me. I’ve seemingly always had an interest in
popular culture and geopolitics, although it’s only relatively recently that
I started asking myself these questions. At the risk of self-indulgence, I’d
like to walk you through a retrospective of how these twin interests have
developed in my life—not to talk about myself (although I rarely need an
excuse) but to give an example of how the three main topics of this book,
popular culture, geopolitics, and identity, are enmeshed in often very
personal ways. Hopefully this will inspire some introspection about how
these three things intersect in your own life and will pique your interest
enough to read the rest of the book.
In 1988 I was twelve years old and entering junior high school. It was
a brutal time for me, as early adolescence is for most of us, and it didn’t
help that I was perhaps a bit more bookish than most. My favorite class
that year was World Geography, taught by Mrs. Schoenberger. It was
an excellent class, and as she told us about various parts of the world I
paid close attention; this was the start of a lifelong passion for the variety
and difference found in the world, in terms of both physical and cultural
landscapes (a professional passion most geographers share, I would later
discover). The class was, however, not a politically neutral experience. It
was, after all, the very end of the Cold War, with the Soviet Union still
perceived as a very real threat. Growing up in a city with three naval
bases (Jacksonville, Florida), I had been told from a very young age that

vii
viii Preface to the First Edition

if there was a nuclear war we would likely be a target. Mrs. Schoenberger

taught us about the various parts of the world, who was with us and who
was against us in the global struggle; I distinctly remember hearing about
the economic “backwardness” of Eastern Europe and other areas ruled
by proxy from Moscow, as well as about Soviet aggression in places like
Afghanistan. It was world geography as viewed from a certain place,
with certain geopolitical perspectives. Of course, while I had never had
a geography class before, none of this struck me as exactly new. While I
could not have found Afghanistan on a map prior to that class, I knew
the Soviet Union; at least, I knew the type of people who lived there. They
were the Klingons.
I, from a very young age, had tuned in to watch the original Star Trek
series in reruns every weekday. There I watched the exploits of the USS
Enterprise as it set about exploring the universe. “Its five-year mission: to
explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations;
to boldly go where no man has gone before.” The USS Enterprise was
thus tasked with the advancement of scientific knowledge, and it was
part of Starfleet, itself an extension of the United Federation of Planets,
an interstellar coalition of alien races that nevertheless seemed to be
dominated by humans from Earth. The Federation resembled, in some
ways, the present-day United Nations, from its logo, to its founding in
San Francisco, to its focus on peace, progress, justice, universal rights,
self-determination, and equality among peoples (see figure 0.1). In other
ways, however, it resembled the United States—especially in the appar-
ent existence of American-style civil rights enshrined in law throughout
the Federation and in Starfleet’s ranks and terminology (note the designa-
tion “USS” Enterprise as well as the existence of real-life American aircraft
carriers and space shuttles of the same name). Star Trek seemed to indicate
that in the future, racism, poverty, and the Cold War would all disappear;
liberal American ideals would become universal, expand to incorporate

Figure 0.1. Left: The seal of the United Nations (courtesy of the United Nations). Right:
The seal of the United Federation of Planets from Star Trek. Note the similarities.
 Preface to the First Edition ix

the entire planet, and eventually go even further (a Russian even serves
as navigator of the Enterprise). A more cynical viewer might note that
Starfleet’s explorations seemed primarily to colonize new planets and that
the Enterprise, armed with phasers and photon torpedoes, seemed more
like Spanish conquistador Hernándo Cortés than pacifist Martin Luther
King Jr. Of course, the twelve-year-old me did not think that way (I also
had little idea at the time of the connections between the Federation and
the United Nations).
While there were infinitely many humanoid races in the Star Trek
universe, there was one group that featured more often than others. The
Klingons were introduced in a 1967 episode as the main rivals of the Fed-
eration. In the original series, the Klingons were portrayed as a savage
race of vaguely North Asian appearance. Rather than being a federation
like Star Trek’s protagonists, the Klingons were an empire, and they ruled
by force, with the empire expanding as a result of a seemingly innate need
to dominate. It should come as no surprise that Gene Roddenberry, Star
Trek’s creator, has said that the Klingons were explicitly modeled on the
Soviet Union. Thus, the geopolitical conflict that characterized the Cold
War had been displaced, leaving the Earth united in a seeming postracial
utopia of liberalism but locating the danger of tyranny and aggression
elsewhere in the universe, able to be called upon whenever needed to ad-
vance the plot. While no one ever told me the Klingons were the Soviets
and the Federation was a loosely defined “us,” nobody needed to. They
fit together in my twelve-year-old mind, so when Mrs. Schoenberger told
me about the Cold War, it seemed quite natural to me—after all, the 1988
geopolitical order was largely the same as it had been twenty years earlier
when Star Trek was made.
In 1994 I graduated from high school and went to college, choosing
international studies and political science as my majors. This resulted
from the same interest in difference that I had discovered in Mrs. Schoen-
berger’s class. While my own interests were unchanging in their particu-
lar inchoate and inarticulate way, the world had rapidly changed in the
intervening years. The Berlin Wall had been torn down, and the Soviet
Union had splintered into fifteen different countries. The world seemed
to be progressing in the ways that Star Trek had predicted: democracy was
ascendant, and the utopia of the Federation seemed a few steps closer.
The Gulf War (1991) had seemed to promise a “new world order” based
on collective security, in which violence was occasionally necessary but
only for liberal internationalist purposes. My interest in geopolitics began
to blossom as I considered my career options in a world characterized by
a peace guaranteed via American might and UN diplomacy.
Star Trek had similarly been reimagined, with the Klingons in Star Trek:
The Next Generation no longer the enemy of the Federation but rather
x Preface to the First Edition

a somewhat subordinate ally (following the collapse of their economy,

portrayed with great end-of-Cold-War allegory in Star Trek VI) quite
similar to post-Soviet Russia, which during the Yeltsin era had under-
gone Western-proscribed “shock therapy” to jump-start its economy
and had adopted a Western-style constitution. Rather than just warlike
and aggressive, in The Next Generation the Klingons were portrayed as
dedicated to personal honor above all else. While this is “different” from
many Western cultures at the time the show was made, it is seen as an
admirable, and understandable, trait, thus showing a way forward for
different cultures (the Federation and the Klingons) to coexist peacefully,
without enmity.
In 1999 I started my PhD in geography, planning to go into the U.S.
State Department, but by then the bloom was off the rose. Conflicts in the
former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda indicated that a pacific future had not
yet arrived, and the present seemed very much one of bloody violence,
characterized by the media as intractable ethnic conflict. Further, Ameri-
can power seemed unable (or unwilling) to address these new threats,
and utopia could be seen disappearing in the rearview mirror as mass
graves and genocide proliferated. My own role in this future seemed
more problematic than before, as the ethical basis for American power
seemed shakier than ever.
All of this was, as you by now expect, mirrored in the universe of Star
Trek. The Next Generation had gone off the air when I started college and
had been replaced by a new series called Deep Space 9. Darker in tone than
previous incarnations of Star Trek, the story centered on a space station
located simultaneously at the border of Federation territory with a cruel
race known as the Cardassians and outside a wormhole that provided
access to an unexplored part of the galaxy. This provided the basis for a
deeply geopolitical narrative that illustrated the ethical tensions found
in operating a huge, multicultural enterprise like the Federation. The
Klingons and other familiar races like the Romulans featured in a shift-
ing array of alliances with the Federation as new aliens threatened all
three from the distant areas found through the wormhole, a parallel to
the seeming instability of a unipolar geopolitical order. At the same time,
the uneasy relationship between the Federation and the Cardassians is
tested by the Maquis, a group of ex-Federation settlers who gave up their
citizenship when the colonies they founded were ceded by the Federation
to the Cardassians. The Maquis fight a guerilla war against the Cardas-
sians, pulling the Federation into ethical quandaries where action and
inaction both seem “right” depending on your geopolitical perspective,
paralleling the conflicts over ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and religious
settlements in the West Bank. My own cynicism grew in parallel to Deep
Space 9’s complicated and ambiguous narratives, leaving me unsure of a
 Preface to the First Edition xi

career in government service and much more comfortable with a more

ambiguous position myself—that of the scholar, unattached to an official
foreign policy.
While it would be easy to see Star Trek as simply reflecting trends in
world politics in a crass attempt to cash in on conflict, that would be too
simple an analysis. It is important to consider the full cycle of events
described above. As a fan of Star Trek during the first two decades of my
life, I was predisposed to look at the world in ways that Star Trek laid
out for me. In fact, I was aware of Star Trek’s narrative of progress long
before I had any formal education about the Cold War—to say that Star
Trek followed from “real” geopolitics is to miss out on Star Trek’s role in
formulating my own geopolitical perspective. For me, it was geopolitics.
It is this experience, and many others like it, that brought me to study
the intersection of popular culture, geopolitics, and identity. This book is
an attempt to provide an introduction to the history, concepts, and some
of the academic literature that constitute this increasingly popular area
of study. Although it is written primarily for advanced undergraduates
and beginning graduate students, I hope that it will find its way into the
hands of other interested people. After all, everyone has a part to play in
the creation of new geopolitical orders—and just because the utopia of
Star Trek has not yet unfolded does not mean that we should give up on
making this universe a better place.
Preface to the Second Edition*
Daniel Bos

We live in an era in which the politics of representation has never been

more important. Whether it is the debate over Wonder Woman (2017) being
a feminist, or where Confederate memorial statues ought to be located,
or how Muslims are portrayed in television and film, it is now common-
place to discuss the role of media and popular culture in shaping our
understandings of the world around us. Likewise, over the past decade
the scholarly study of popular culture and geopolitics has gained further
traction within the academy, presenting new ways of thinking about and
theorizing its significance (see, for example, Caso and Hamilton 2015;
Funnell and Dodds 2016; Saunders 2017; Saunders and Strukov 2018).
There has been a growing acknowledgment of a more embodied, perfor-
mative dimension to popular geopolitics—inspired by feminist scholar-
ship—that shifts attention away from screens and texts and instead thinks
through what we do rather than what we see. For instance, contemporary
debates around “clicktivism” and the politics of social media destabilize
the production/consumption binary that structures much of early popu-
lar geopolitics. Further, the rise of “fake news” on social media platforms
during the 2016 elections has contributed to the development of a deeply
cynical and skeptical popular perspective on democratic political sys-
tems, which inflects any subsequent specific geopolitical representation.
There is a vast need for conceptual tools to aid in rigorous, conceptual
thinking about such matters. Therefore, this edition of Popular Culture,

* I told you so! —Jason

xiii
xiv Preface to the Second Edition

Geopolitics, and Identity will speak to highly contemporary issues using the
latest ideas from social theory.
Besides a new cover, we have made a number of changes to this second
edition of the book. We have included a new chapter solely focusing on
the methodological approaches and techniques used to study popular
geopolitics. While interest in the relationship between (geo)politics and
popular culture has grown, there has been less attention given to the
practice of doing such research. This chapter may not be of relevance to
everyone, but we do hope it can provide a starting point for students who
are keen to pursue their interests in popular culture and geopolitics. Each
chapter has been edited to keep up with the ebbs and flows of popular
culture. As with any book attempting to consider popular culture, exam-
ples and case studies can date very quickly. The increasing significance of
social media (see chapter 8) and the wider deliberation over what can be
considered popular culture (as explored in terms of heritage in chapter 7)
has encouraged us to make substantial updates and edits to the examples
used throughout the book. Likewise, theoretical and methodological
toolkits that help us understand popular geopolitics do not remain static.
Indeed, we attempt to offer important emerging theoretical insights into
the materiality of popular culture (see chapter 2); the ways popular geo-
politics is experienced, practiced, and understood within everyday life
(see chapters 1, 6, and 7); and the increasing significance of social connec-
tions and networks in a digital age (see chapter 8). Throughout this new
edition, we draw on and update scholarly debates that help push and
develop our understandings of popular geopolitics.
Certain aspects of the book have stayed the same. We have maintained
a similar style and format to help introduce core ideas. The initial three
chapters provide broad overviews of geopolitics, popular culture, and
methods. The rest of the chapters outline and take forward a key concept
within popular geopolitics, draw attention to scholarly debates, intro-
duce a case study to outline its significance, and provide questions to
encourage readers to consider how these ideas extend into their everyday
lives. Similarly, we have increased the number of key terms, helpfully
presented in individual textboxes, which provide succinct definitions of
terms and concepts used throughout the book.
 Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank everyone who made the first edition
successful enough to warrant a second edition. When Jason wrote the
first edition, he honestly envisioned that the book would only be used
in his own popular geopolitics course, as he considered it too niche to be
widely adopted. However, since then, reports have surfaced of the book
being used all over the world and in many disciplines beyond geography.
So, credit for the second edition begins with all those who teach popular
geopolitics, wherever and whoever you might be. More personally, the
authors would like to thank Susan McEachern at Rowman & Littlefield
for her faith in the project and her patience in its completion (twice). Bar-
ney Warf, who edits this book series, has been a great friend and mentor
to Jason over the years and was key to the launch of the first edition. Fur-
ther, in the last decade, the community of scholars working in and around
popular geopolitics has grown and pushed the field in new and exciting
directions. Some of that work has been incorporated in this book, but so
much great work had to be left out. Still, that work remains an inspiration,
and we are grateful for those scholars’ great work.
Personally, Jason would like to thank his family. The period in which
this second edition has been planned and written coincides with a period
in which the bonds of family have been renewed and deepened. Daniel
would like to extend his personal gratitude to Jason for providing him
the opportunity to work on the second edition of this book and for his
support throughout the process. He would also like to acknowledge his
family’s continuing love and devotion.

xv
 Introduction
Popular Culture—
Between Propaganda and Entertainment

In November 2014, the international film studio Sony Pictures was

hacked. Calling themselves the Guardians of Peace, the hackers were able
to obtain confidential data and unreleased movies, including the action-
comedy film The Interview. In this film, Hollywood A-listers Seth Rogen
and James Franco play a pair of journalists who are given an exclusive
opportunity to interview the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Catching
wind of this, the CIA quickly moves in to recruit them to assassinate the
leader. The movie’s premise caused outrage among North Korean gov-
ernment officials, who promised a “merciless” response if and when the
movie should be released. Threats were made to launch terrorist attacks
on any theater that showed the movie and to decimate Sony’s potential
future revenues by making their yet-to-be-released films freely accessible
online. While the North Korean government denies any involvement in
the hack, it is unclear who else would have such a specific interest in this
particular film. One theory is that the North Korean leadership was afraid
of what would happen if it made its way into North Korean society. The
concern was that the film’s portrayal of Kim Jong-un as corrupt, weak,
and of course possible to assassinate could be seen as damaging and a
threat to the regime’s ability to govern. What many would regard as a
mere source of frivolous entertainment became a (geo)political event.
While the analysis of the film and its representational politics is im-
portant, as it freights the film with geopolitical meaning, the politics of
the above event are much broader in scope. It encompasses a material-
ist understanding of the film, both in terms of the digital form in which
films are now produced (in contrast to the celluloid of the past) that lo-

xvii
xviii Introduction

cates them within global information networks vulnerable to hacking, as

well as the political economy of film production and distribution (which
leaves big studios extremely susceptible to threats). Any viewer of the
film (it was eventually released on a range of digital platforms) could not
watch it without some awareness of the geopolitical events surrounding
it, thus changing the context of reception and allowing viewers to, per-
haps, view their consumption of the film as a blow for free speech against
totalitarianism. This example is illustrative of the ways popular culture is
linked to questions of geography, power, and, as we shall explore in this
book, geopolitics.
But how exactly is popular culture geopolitical? One word that is often
associated with media and geopolitics is “propaganda.” Propaganda re-
fers to the intentional use of the media to generate public sentiments that
benefit the propagandist. However, it is most often used to designate
other people’s attempts to do this, as a way of invalidating the message
of the mediated culture. This can be in the form of news stories that are
purportedly “slanted” against another government, or a film in which
the villain is a particular nationality, or just a song that inspires martial
feelings at a critical moment in diplomatic relations. The difference be-
tween “propaganda” and “truth” often depends on where you stand and
perhaps on the intentions of the producer, which are difficult to assess
in the world of popular culture. The Interview’s plot puts the spotlight on
the North Korean state’s use of propaganda by mocking it. South Korean
activists even used balloons to airlift DVDs of the movie across the North
Korean border as a means of drawing the North Korean population’s
awareness to their tightly controlled media and culture. However, other
commentators argue that the movie is itself a form of U.S. propaganda
whose aims work in the interest of the U.S. government’s own desire to
remove the Kim dynasty (reportedly U.S. government officials approved
the movie’s grisly death scene of Kim Jong-un) and to undermine the
legitimacy of the regime. This book will not engage with the idea of
propaganda itself, but it is useful as a test—if popular culture does not
matter to geopolitics, then a lot of people are going to a lot of trouble to
contest it for nothing.

IDENTITIES: BETWEEN THE GLOBAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL

The idea of propaganda, as stated earlier, is often used as an opposite

of the self-evidently true position espoused by the speaker. This is true
whether talking about national identities or individual ones (or anything
in between). Therefore, who we think we are, and who others think we
are, is critical to how we evaluate popular culture. In other words, whether
 Introduction xix

popular culture is propaganda or just entertainment is determined not by

its content but rather by the identity of the consumer. Identity is thus a
thread that runs through every chapter of this book.
“Identity” has become a very politicized term since the 1960s, when
various social movements (such as the women’s liberation, peace, civil
rights, and various anti-imperial movements) highlighted the various
ways in which it was possible for people to conceive of themselves as lo-
cated within society. Since then, processes of globalization have not elimi-
nated identity, as some claimed they would, but instead have heightened
attention both to it and the efforts needed to bolster stable place-based
identities in the face of ongoing processes of migration and other global
circulations of people, goods, and ideas. With people’s possible identi-
ties drawing on numerous overlapping geographical definitions, and
with culture being produced and consumed in new and various places,
identity has become less of a taken-for-granted concept than in the past.
Instead it has moved to the forefront of the study of both popular culture
and geopolitics.
Popular culture conveys information about places and also originates
in certain contexts, only to be consumed in various others. In this way it
is doubly geographical, conveying ideas about places from one place to
another. Identity and power are thus invoked in multiple dimensions.
Similarly, geopolitics is about the assignment of values to places, and it
constructs hierarchies of people and places that matter and those that do
not. While geopolitics is usually considered to be conducted in very elite
contexts, this book argues that it in fact circulates in everyday contexts
through popular culture. The idea that geopolitics is only for elites is itself
a way of producing identities—those who are active in shaping the world
and those who are passive. Like popular culture, geopolitics is doubly
geographic—shaping places in various ways and also demarcating the
places and people who do the shaping and those who do not. Identity,
then, is key to both popular culture and geopolitics. The juxtaposition of
these words in the title of this book is therefore not just a label but a call
to consider each topic in relation to the others. Let us briefly turn our at-
tention to this book and its subject matter, popular geopolitics.

THIS BOOK

Popular geopolitics is a niche within political geography wherein scholars

study the everyday experience of geopolitics. As such, the term refers to
both the subject matter (which will be outlined through the rest of this
book) as well as to the project devoted to improving our understanding
of that subject matter. The latter is interesting in that over the past several
xx Introduction

decades the project has moved in fits and starts, as various scholars of
geopolitics have decided to engage with it and then move on. There have
been notably few people who have devoted themselves to it for years
at a time (see Dittmer 2018 for an overview). In fact, one of the defining
features of popular geopolitics has been its lack of definition—not as a
subject matter but as a group of people.
However, another key feature of the project thus far has been its
links to various other academic fields, such as cultural geography, in-
ternational relations, and cultural studies. Scholars in these fields often
produce work that is easily aligned with the project of popular geopoli-
tics, even if they would never label themselves as scholars of popular
geopolitics. This is because the past twenty years or so have seen an ef-
florescence of research on popular culture and identity across academia,
much of which is relevant to popular geopolitics even if not couched
self-consciously within its terminology. Thus, popular geopolitics can
be seen as a tiny niche within political geography (itself a niche within
a relatively small discipline) or, perhaps more optimistically, as part of
a large interdisciplinary project that spans many different perspectives
(Saunders and Strukov 2018). This book seeks to position itself within
both perspectives, adopting the terminology and theoretical perspec-
tives specifically associated with popular geopolitics but reaching out to
surrounding niches for conceptual insights or particularly excellent case
study materials.
This book is intended to be used as a textbook for advanced under-
graduate students and as a quick guide for beginning graduate students
who are hoping to get a sense of popular geopolitics and perhaps how
to go about researching it. As such, it is written in a casual, conversa-
tional style that uses numerous examples to convey what can be quite
complex concepts. A book devoted to popular culture must necessarily
leave out vast swathes of the world’s popular culture because the book
itself is limited in pages and scope, and the world’s culture is not; rather,
it is nearly infinite in scope and continually evolving into new forms
and practices. While we have been mindful in drawing on an array of
global case studies, tough decisions still had to be made about what to
include and what to exclude. These tough decisions are made somewhat
easier by the authors’ own limits—drawing upon popular culture that
is beyond our own experience to create examples is a surefire way to
undermine the accuracy of the book. Therefore, we draw primarily on
popular culture from North America and to a lesser extent the United
Kingdom. Consequently, readers from these regions are more likely to
find the examples illuminating, and apologies are due to readers from
other parts of the world.
 Introduction xxi

CHAPTER OUTLINE AND STRUCTURE

The first two chapters set out the history and theorizations of geopolitics
(chapter 1) and the definitions and theories utilized in the study of popu-
lar culture by current research in popular geopolitics (chapter 2). In these
chapters there will be some references to popular culture when discuss-
ing geopolitics, and to geopolitics when discussing popular culture, but
the two topics are kept relatively separate so as to give the reader a firm
grasp of where the disciplinary concepts come from and how they can be
seen to overlap in isolation. As interest in the field has expanded, so too
have the different approaches to doing research. In this new edition, we
have devoted a chapter (chapter 3) to the methods that have been used to
study popular geopolitics. By exploring methodological approaches, we
hope to encourage and highlight to students some of the possible ways
they might design and undertake a research project in this field.
The subsequent chapters of this book (excepting the conclusion) are
case studies of popular geopolitics, describing some of the most impor-
tant concepts and trends in the field. Chapter 4 discusses representation
of place, which has been one of the most significant strands of research
in popular geopolitics. The British Empire was chosen as a framing de-
vice for this chapter because the construction of ideologies of empire in
a society based on principles from the Enlightenment has often involved
representing places and the people from there as fundamentally different
from those in the imperial center. Thus, representation, particularly in
regard to race, is critical to understanding how people can justify their
(and their government’s) treatment of people abroad.
Chapter 5 discusses the role of narrative in national identity, drawing
on the post–World War II United States as an example of the importance
of narrative because the United States is a nation that more obviously than
most is an imagined community, one that is tied to a narrative of progress
and innocence. The importance of popular culture in constituting that
narrative will be the focus of this case study, drawing mostly on Captain
America comic books. Chapter 6 introduces the idea of affect, outlining its
connections to both cultural studies and psychology. Affect, in contrast
to representation, is fundamentally focused on the body—dealing with
the ways in which popular geopolitics becomes embodied biologically
as adrenaline, passion, and other sites at the interface between the inside
and outside of our bodies. The popular culture to be studied in this case
study comes from the commercial video game industry, in particular the
popular military-themed video game series Call of Duty.
Chapter 7 brings forth the critique that many of the chapters ignore the
role of the audience in producing geopolitical knowledge. This chapter
starts with the idea of the active audience before building toward an
xxii Introduction

understanding of popular geopolitics through the lens of assemblage, in

which culture is coproduced by producers and audiences through en-
counter. The case study for this chapter is military heritage, showing how
objects, artifacts, and technologies come together to produce the sensation
of the past in the present, shaping our geopolitical action. In chapter 8, we
build on the concept of assemblage introduced in chapter 7. This will en-
able a consideration of the “networked self,” a concept of the individual
that is particularly important to our current social media–saturated
world. The case study for this chapter examines the role of social media
in the emergence of digital geopolitics, most clearly seen in the 2016 U.S.
presidential election and its impact on relations between Russia and the
West. The final chapter, chapter 9, is not a case study but rather pulls all
these ideas together and more fully theorizes the role of popular culture
in shaping individuals’ geopolitical attitudes. This chapter will also show
interested students where they can go to get more information and also
how they themselves can contribute to the practice of popular geopolitics.
Similar to the previous edition, each case study begins with an in-
troduction to the terminology of the new concept or perspective before
briefly outlining any debates in the literature. This section is followed
by an introduction to ideas from media or political geography that are
necessary to understand that particular case study. The actual case study
then draws on published research and illustrates the relevance of popular
culture to the particular understanding of geopolitics highlighted in the
chapter. The case study is intended to be both informative and interesting
(hopefully you will find it so). The chapter concludes with a summary of
what has been discussed and other areas in which the concept could be
relevant in everyday life.