Robert A. Saunders

Undead Spaces: Fear, Globalisation, and the Popular Geopolitics of Zombiism

In recent years, zombies have enjoyed a dramatic renaissance in various forms of popular culture. This essay argues that the current obsession with the walking dead, and particularly the looming threat of human-zombie conflicts, is a reflection of the dangers of invasive alterity associated with uncontrolled spaces in a globalised world. This shift is especially prevalent in the United States following 9/11, as zombies have become phantasmal stand-ins for Islamist terrorists, illegal immigrants, carriers of foreign contagions, and other ‘dangerous’ border crossers. Through three case studies which examine zombie ‘outbreaks’ on the local, national, and global levels, respectively, I discuss the importance of borders and geopolitical spaces in recent fictional depictions of human-zombie conflicts. As metaphors for illicit globalisation, zombies have emerged as a key pop-culture referent of the porous nature of socio-cultural, political, and physical boundaries in a global age defined by an emotional geopolitics of fear.

In Defence of Kazakshilik: Kazakhstan's War on Sacha Baron Cohen

This article explores the controversy surrounding Borat Sagdiyev—the fictitious Kazakhstani reporter whose foibles mock Kazakhstan in particular and post-Soviet culture in general. With his appearances on Da Ali G Show, Sacha Baron Cohens Borat persona long ago became the bête noire of the Kazakhstani government. However, when Borat was selected to host the MTV Europe Music Awards, the dispute over Borats authenticity as a Kazakhstani became an international incident. In response to his negative portrayal of Kazakshilik (Kazakhness) through the deterritorialized medium of MTV, the government of President Nazarbayev threatened Baron Cohen with legal action and brought down his web site borat.kz. Baron Cohen immediately responded in character via his new domain (.tv) and defended the actions of Kazakhstan, thus fuelling the controversy. The ongoing feud has prompted an interesting postmodern praxis—one in which a fictional persona and national government can carry on a mass-mediated dialogue. As I document the details of this ongoing conflict on the global and local levels, I seek to explain the changes in the international system which have enabled this intriguing paradox. In doing so, I attempt to draw some larger conclusions on the importance of protecting national identity in the postmodern era, especially from threats (both internal and external) which weaken a countrys global brand.

Pagan places Towards a religiogeography of neopaganism

Focused on religiogeographic practices in contemporary western paganism (neopaganism), this paper aims to fill a gap in the existing literature through a critical assessment of how neopagans imagine, delimitate, and interact with space, place, and territory. Employing a novel categorization of religious space along four overlapping geographies (numinous, poetic, social, and political), this essay addresses the need for geographers to produce publicly relevant studies that analyze religiously rooted ideologies and define cultural interpretations of places, terrains, and landscapes. Furthermore, I put forth a tentative research agenda for subsequent studies of how neopagans conceive of and interact with real and imagined geographies.

Digital Dragons and Cybernetic Bears: Comparing the Overseas Chinese and Near Abroad Russian Web Communities

This article compares and contrasts the Internet-based national identity projects of overseas Chinese and near abroad Russians. Our study, which is based on two diasporic communities of similar size and both characterized by a historical weakness of national identity, finds that while Internet use seems to be increasing nationalism and reifying national identity among the ethnic Chinese living in the Pacific Rim, it is paradoxically dampening nationalism and weakening national identity among the Russians living in post-Soviet space. Our thesis is that this divergence results from a combination of factors rooted in the real world, not the virtual. These factors include: the perceived benefits of stressing national identity in ingroup/outgroup interactions, conflicts or competition with other identity anchors, and the political and economic stature of their respective ethnic homelands.

Small Screen IR: A Tentative Typology of Geopolitical Television

ABSTRACT Daniel Drezner recently stated: ‘We live in a Golden Age of international relations programming on television’; however, while geopolitical television dramas have flourished since the new millennium, IR scholars and political geographers have paid relatively little attention, instead focusing more attention on films. Given the capacity of television series to respond to headlines from around the world, as well as cater to audience tastes, the medium provides a substantively different platform for engaging and interrogating world affairs and negotiating geopolitical realities. In this article, I will discuss the emergence of the so-called geopolitical TV or small screen IR, and examine how technological advances and social transformations have created conditions for increasingly sophisticated offerings that interrogate a wide variety of issues in world politics. Addressing the shift towards more intellectually demanding fare since 2001, I provide a brief overview of the evolution of geopolitical TV since 2001, focusing initially on American dramas such as Lost, The Wire and 24, before moving on to more recent examples of geopolitically inflected programming which include case studies from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and the US. In its empirical and structural contributions, this article provides a tentative typology of the genre, classifying geopolitical television series into five distinct groups with a representative empirical case study for each: 1) exotic-irrealist (Berlin Station); 2) parliamentary-domestic (Borgen); 3) procedural-localised (The Bridge); 4) historical-revisionist (Deutschland 83); and 5) speculative-fantastical (Occupied). In its normative and theoretical contributions, this article seeks to advance the study of small screen geopolitical interventions, arguing that geopolitical television series function both as a mirror/reflection of IR and an imaginative/predictive force in contemporary world politics.

Televisual diplomacy: I am the Ambassador and Danish nation branding at home and abroad

In a time when the current US president came to office via a career in reality television, it seems unnecessary to argue that popular culture and International Relations intersect in meaningful and dramatic ways. Operating from this premise, mass-mediating the act of diplomacy via a television series presents a fecund object of analysis that questions many of the myths surrounding what we call the ‘diplomatic community’. Consequently, this article is interested in the geopolitical interposition of Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) via the popular culture form of reality television. We achieve this through a close reading of the DR series I am the Ambassador/Jeg er ambassadøren fra Amerika (2014–2016), ‘starring’ the real US ambassador to Denmark. We situate Ambassador within the evolving space of ‘new diplomacy’ through an evaluation of how it imagines, popularises, and expands ‘everyday’ sites of diplomacy via mass-mediation. However, as we argue, the series – when viewed holistically – says more about the Danish state and its people than it does about the role of the US ambassador, thus functioning as a tool of nation branding as much at home as abroad.

Nerd ecology: defending the earth with unpopular culture

In conclusion, Ness’ goal of developing an ‘eco-semeiotic’ is most certainly achieved. The first two thirds of the book are strong and inspiring, and while the final chapters leave slightly more to be desired they nevertheless extend the scope of the performance theories presented in the preceding chapters. The author’s precise language and careful tracing of theoretical trajectories and overlaps are the book’s greatest strengths. Ness’ deep engagement with performance theories and her engagement with multiple theorists opens up new possibilities for examining landscape performances at multiple scales.

The identity politics of Elfquest at 40: moving beyond race, class and gender?

ABSTRACT This article provides a critical analysis of the political content of Wendy and Richard Pinis’ independent comic series Elfquest (1978–present), focusing on the identity triad of race, class and gender. In my analysis of Elfquest (EQ) as a popular culture-based political intervention, I make a threefold contribution to the literature of popular geopolitics. First, in a normative contribution challenging the norms of male-dominated 1970s-era comics, I situate EQ as subversive medium that imagined a new world ordered by the progressive values of the ‘1968 generation’. Second, via a theoretical contribution, I present EQ fandom as a form of transformative political engagement, wherein the reader/seer maps their own situatedness in the US’s changing socio-political milieu. And, third, in an empirical contribution, I provide a critical analysis of the original series, interrogating Elfquest’s engagement with identity politics through a close reading of the visuals and text of the ‘Original Quest’ (Issues #1–21, 1978–1984), fan feedback (letters to the editor), and interviews with the creators (including my own, conducted in 2017). In the conclusion, I reflect on EQ’s transition to the post-identity politics of the contemporary era as the series concludes its fourth decade in publication.

The Popular Geopolitics Feedback Loop: Thinking Beyond the ‘Russia against the West’ Paradigm

Abstract Treating popular geopolitics as an interdisciplinary environment, this essay interrogates the viability of employing popular geopolitics as a tool for understanding the relationship between the popular and the political on the international stage as it relates to the Russian Federation. Using several representative artefacts of pop-culture and their reception, we attempt to demonstrate that a powerful trans-regional feedback loop has been established, wherein Russian and ‘Western’ currents feed into and off of each other. These flows sustain older geopolitical codes and frames, while steadily developing new patterns and dimensions of exchange that ‘explain’ variations triggered by the vagaries of globalisation.