Otherworldly Politics

Otherworldly Politics PDF Author: Stephen Benedict Dyson
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421417170
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
A compelling look at the analogous political worlds of science fiction, fantasy, and international relations. In Otherworldly Politics, Stephen Benedict Dyson examines the fictional but deeply political realities of three television shows: Star Trek, Game of Thrones, and Battlestar Galactica. Dyson explains how these shows offer alternative histories and future possibilities for humanity. Fascinated by politics and history, science fiction and fantasy screenwriters and showrunners suffuse their scripts with real-world ideas of empire, war, civilization, and culture, lending episodes a compelling intricacy and contemporary resonance. Dyson argues that science fiction and fantasy television creators share a fundamental kinship with great minds in international relations. Screenwriters like Gene Roddenberry, George R. R. Martin, and Ronald D. Moore are world-builders of no lesser creativity, Dyson argues, than theorists such as Woodrow Wilson, Kenneth Waltz, and Alexander Wendt. Each of these thinkers imagines a realm, specifies the rules of its operation, and by so doing shows us something about ourselves and how we interact with one another. Combining intellectual and real-world history with lucid theoretical analysis, the book is a vital challenge to scholars and a spur to creative thinking for fans of these three influential shows.

Otherworldly Politics

Otherworldly Politics PDF Author: Stephen Benedict Dyson
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421417170
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 177

Get Book Here

Book Description
A compelling look at the analogous political worlds of science fiction, fantasy, and international relations. In Otherworldly Politics, Stephen Benedict Dyson examines the fictional but deeply political realities of three television shows: Star Trek, Game of Thrones, and Battlestar Galactica. Dyson explains how these shows offer alternative histories and future possibilities for humanity. Fascinated by politics and history, science fiction and fantasy screenwriters and showrunners suffuse their scripts with real-world ideas of empire, war, civilization, and culture, lending episodes a compelling intricacy and contemporary resonance. Dyson argues that science fiction and fantasy television creators share a fundamental kinship with great minds in international relations. Screenwriters like Gene Roddenberry, George R. R. Martin, and Ronald D. Moore are world-builders of no lesser creativity, Dyson argues, than theorists such as Woodrow Wilson, Kenneth Waltz, and Alexander Wendt. Each of these thinkers imagines a realm, specifies the rules of its operation, and by so doing shows us something about ourselves and how we interact with one another. Combining intellectual and real-world history with lucid theoretical analysis, the book is a vital challenge to scholars and a spur to creative thinking for fans of these three influential shows.

Otherworldly Politics

Otherworldly Politics PDF Author: Stephen Benedict Dyson
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421417162
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
"To the extent that politics involves decision-making amidst an array of competing values, most of human interaction may be understood as political. For students of international relations and political science, it can be a daunting task to evaluate value propositions in debate and discussion of issues with equally compelling opposing sides. Fictions found in storybooks, on the stage, and on the silver screen, however, offer scenarios in which value propositions may be sorted out as low-stakes case studies. To help his students think critically about international relations and politics, Stephen Benedict Dyson has found that using the fictional realities of three different television and cable programs, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, and Game of Thrones, so thoroughly engages his students in the classrooms that conversations frequently spill out into the hallways after class and onto Blackboard discussion groups. Students' strong grasp of these shows' events, themes, characters, and plot lines allow them to more easily understand the theory of international relations and politics and then translate that theory into contemporary political scenarios"--

Fictional television and American politics

Fictional television and American politics PDF Author: Jack Holland
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526134241
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
This book explores the relationship between fictional television and American world politics in the period from 9/11 through to the presidency of Donald J. Trump. This period comprises a second golden age for fictional TV. The book therefore explores some of the best TV of all time across two decades of heightened political controversy.

Imagining Politics

Imagining Politics PDF Author: Stephen Benedict Dyson
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472054244
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 163

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Book Description
Imagining Politics critically examines two interpretations of government. The first comes from pop culture fictions about politics, the second from academic political science. Stephen Benedict Dyson argues that televised political fictions and political science theories are attempts at meaning-making, reflecting and shaping how a society thinks about its politics. By taking fiction seriously, and by arguing that political science theory is homologous to fiction, the book offers a fresh perspective on both, using fictions such as The West Wing, House of Cards, Borgen, Black Mirror, and Scandal to challenge the assumptions that construct the discipline of political science itself. Imagining Politics is also about a political moment in the West. Two great political shocks—Brexit and the election of Donald Trump—are set in a new context here. Dyson traces how Brexit and Trump campaigned against our image of politics as usual, and won.

Stranger Gods

Stranger Gods PDF Author: Roger Young Clark
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773521070
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
"Wide-ranging study of Salman Rushdie's seven published novels"--Bk. jacket.

Out of Whiteness

Out of Whiteness PDF Author: Vron Ware
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226873411
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Outside the Whale1. Otherworldly Knowledge: Toward a "Language of Perspicuous Contrast"2. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? The Political Morality of Investigating Whiteness in the Gray Zone3. Seeing through Skin/Seeing through Epidermalization4. Wagner and Power Chords: Skinheadism, White Power Music, and the Internet5. Mothers of Invention: Good Hearts, Intelligent Minds, and Subversive Acts6. Syncopated Synergy: Dance, Embodiment, and the Call of the Jitterbug7. Ghosts, Trails, and Bones: Circuits of Memory and Traditions of Resistance8. Out of Sight: Southern Music and the Coloring of Sound9. Room with a ViewNotesIndex Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie PDF Author: Robert Eaglestone
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441173455
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
New critical perspectives on Salman Rushdie's fiction and non-fiction by leading scholars.

A Different Trek

A Different Trek PDF Author: David K. Seitz
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496236599
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
A different kind of Star Trek television series debuted in 1993. Deep Space Nine was set not on a starship but a space station near a postcolonial planet still reeling from a genocidal occupation. The crew was led by a reluctant Black American commander and an extraterrestrial first officer who had until recently been an anticolonial revolutionary. DS9 extended Star Trek’s tradition of critical social commentary but did so by transgressing many of Star Trek’s previous taboos, including religion, money, eugenics, and interpersonal conflict. DS9 imagined a twenty-fourth century that was less a glitzy utopia than a critical mirror of contemporary U.S. racism, capitalism, imperialism, and heteropatriarchy. Thirty years after its premiere, DS9 is beloved by critics and fans but remains marginalized in scholarly studies of science fiction. Drawing on cultural geography, Black studies, and feminist and queer studies, A Different “Trek” is the first scholarly monograph dedicated to a critical interpretation of DS9’s allegorical world-building. If DS9 has been vindicated aesthetically, this book argues that its prophetic, place-based critiques of 1990s U.S. politics, which deepened the foundations of many of our current crises, have been vindicated politically, to a degree most scholars and even many fans have yet to fully appreciate.

Liturgical Power

Liturgical Power PDF Author: Nicholas Heron
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823278700
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Is Christianity exclusively a religious phenomenon, which must separate itself from all things political, or do its concepts actually underpin secular politics? To this question, which animated the twentieth-century debate on political theology, Liturgical Power advances a third alternative. Christian anti-politics, Heron contends, entails its own distinct conception of politics. Yet this politics, he argues, assumes the form of what today we call “administration,” but which the ancients termed “economics.” The book’s principal aim is thus genealogical: it seeks to understand our current conception of government in light of an important but rarely acknowledged transformation in the idea of politics brought about by Christianity. This transformation in the idea of politics precipitates in turn a concurrent shift in the organization of power; an organization whose determining principle, Heron contends, is liturgy—understood in the broad sense as “public service.” Whereas until now only liturgy’s acclamatory dimension has made the concept available for political theory, Heron positions it more broadly as a technique of governance. What Christianity has bequeathed to political thought and forms, he argues, is thus a paradoxical technology of power that is grounded uniquely in service.

Spirits and Scientists

Spirits and Scientists PDF Author: David J. Hess
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271040807
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Brazilian Spiritism (espiritismo, kardecismo) is an important middle-class religious movement whose followers believe in communication with the dead via spirit mediums and in healing illnesses by means of spiritual therapies. Unlike Anglo-Saxon Spiritualists, Brazilian Spiritists count among their number a well-developed and institutionalized intellectual elite that has reinterpreted northern hemisphere parapsychology and developed its own alternative medicine and sociology of religion. As a result, the mediation between popular religion (especially Afro-Brazilian religious practices) and the orthodoxies of the universities, the state, and the medical profession. Situating Spiritist intellectual thought in what he calls a broader ideological arena, Hess examines Spiritism in the context of religion, science, political ideology, medicine, and even the social sciences. Hess challenges the legacy of French sociologist Roger Bastide, who saw in Spiritism an elitist, middle-class ideology. In the process, Spirits and Scientists provides a new approach to middle-class religious movements in Latin America.