Books in the Popular Culture and World Politics series

This innovative new work suggests that The Wire reflects, not simply a cultural take on contemporary America, but a structural critique of the conditions of late-modernity and global capitalism. As such, it is a visual text worth investigating and exploring for its nuanced examination of power, difference and inequality.

By using a poststructuralist feminist perspective and by analysing empirical cases from a Western `war on terror¿ cultural context, Ahall seeks to demonstrate that motherhood is not simply a discourse denying women agency in political violence, but also central as to how agency in political violence is enabled.

This book takes a broad cross-cultural approach to analyzing the literature of our increasingly transnationalized world system, considering how its key constituent features and local-level manifestations have been thematized and imaginatively embraced by literary fiction produced from the perspective of the periphery of the capitalist world system.

This innovative new work suggests that The Wire reflects, not simply a cultural take on contemporary America, but a structural critique of the conditions of late-modernity and global capitalism. As such, it is a visual text worth investigating and exploring for its nuanced examination of power, difference and inequality.

This edited collection brings together scholarly works of both a theoretical and empirical nature to critically analyse the forms and functions of the contemporary celebrity activist, and to examine how these intersect with the political economic structures in which celebrity activists operate.

This book seeks to address and fill a puzzling omission in contemporary critical IR scholarship. Following on from the aesthetic turn in IR, critical and `postmodern¿ IR has produced an impressive array of studies into movies, literature, music and art and the way these media produce, mediate, and represent international politics. By contrast, the proponents of the aesthetic turn have consistently overlooked and ignored fashion as a source of knowledge about global politics.

As a central component of contemporary culture, films mirror and shape political debate. Reflecting on this development, scholars in the field of International Relations (IR) increasingly explore the intersection of TV series, fiction film and global politics. So far, however, virtually no systematic scholarly attention has been given to documentary film within IR. This book fills this void by offering a critical companion to the subject aimed at assisting students, teachers and scholars of IR in understanding and assessing the various ways in which documentary films matter in global politics. The authors of this volume argue that much can be gained if we do not just think of documentaries as a window on or intervention in reality, but as a political epistemology that - like theories - involve particular postures, strategies and methodologies towards the world to which they provide access. This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of international relations, popular culture and world politics and media studies alike.

Historically, there has been reluctance, from mainstream IR scholars as well as feminists, to seriously engage with women''s agency in warfare. Instead, scholarship has tended to focus on women''s activism for peace or to ignore women''s agency altogether. This book rectifies this omission by exploring the cultural understanding of actors, agents and structures of war and how can we make sense of attitudes towards women, agency and war today. By using a poststructuralist feminist perspective and by analysing empirical cases from a Western ''war on terror'' cultural context, Ahall argues that all types of stories are informed by ideas about motherhood and maternal reproduction as the foundation of sexual difference. This does not only mean that women are judged/read/valued based on the shape of their, maternalised, bodies, rather than what they actually do, but, it means that ideas about motherhood, not motherhood itself, function to police contemporary gender norms and contemporary understandings of agency in war. Overall, this book argues that maternalist war stories function to reiterate traditional heteronormative gender roles. This is how a ''body politics'' of war is not only policing gender norms but actually writing ''sex'' itself. The body politics of war told through maternalist war stories is a process in which the sexing of war means the policing of gender borders, with motherhood acting as the border agent. This work will be of interest to students and scholars in areas such as gender, political violence and international relations.