AJPS Forum on ‘exploring the (multiple) futures of world politics through popular culture,’ edited by Penny Griffin

KEYWORDS:

• International relations
• popular culture
• aesthetic politics

The study of popular culture has become an increasingly sophisticated and important part of research on international relations. Television has received particularly strong attention, in part because the values espoused by televised programs shape how we view and enact the world. Laura Shepherd (2013) and Penny Griffin (2015) reveal how popular culture is imbued with deeply gendered values and how these values have significant political consequences. Other scholars, such as Neumann and Nexon (2006), examine how popular novels tell us a lot about the values that make up our political practices, sometimes more than conventional sources (see also Furman and Musgrave 2017).

Consider how popular culture shapes political identities and the narratives that sustain them. Hollywood is well known to use stereotypes and to glorify national values. Narratives of national cohesion are visualised in films. Representations of who ‘we’ are engender an emotional response that reinforces a narrative of national togetherness. How ‘we’ feel about being part of a greater political community, even if ‘we’ cannot possibly know every single person in it, is both contingent upon and reflected by the images we hold of ourselves and of those around us. But film and television can transform values too. There are moments when prevailing identities are challenged and new forms of political narratives emerge. For instance, many film and television renderings of the War on Terror no longer follow the traditional narrative arc of good versus evil. The hero no longer saves the world. The respective films and television shows now often challenge and critically examine role of the US in the world (see Dodds 2008; Philpott 2010; Duncombe and Bleiker 2015). Likewise, the widely watched TV series Games of Thrones can not only be seen as a fictional metaphor of current power politics but also, and more importantly, offers ways of breaking through stereotypes by humanising enemies or revealing the complexities and political construction of race, gender and class relations (Carpenter 2012; Musgrave 2019).

Processes of globalisation and digitalisation have changed fundamentally how these and other aspects of popular culture function. Today, everyone can take a photograph with a smartphone, upload it on social media and circulate it immediately with a potential world-wide reach. The power of popular culture is thus no longer limited to Hollywood movies and other mainstream forms of media representation. When taken together, seemingly mundane everyday practices – from videogames to memes to fashion trends – now play important roles in confirming, entrenching and transforming societal and political value (see Robinson and Schulzke 2016; Shepherd 2018).

Various compelling overviews of the links between popular culture and global politics already exist. They range from a pioneering conceptual essay by Grayson, Davies, and Philpott (2009) to an impressive volume edited by Caso and Hamilton (2015).

The present Forum, edited by Penny Griffin, offers valuable new insights that are relevant for both specialists on popular culture and international relations scholars in general. It is not my task in this short preface to summarise the individual essays – innovative and impressive as they are. Instead, I would like to draw attention to two important overall contributions that this symposium makes:

First: the symposium brings together and highlights the contributions that Australia-based scholars make to the study of popular culture and global politics. It is the first concerted effort of this type and compellingly shows that Australian scholars – both senior and more up-and-coming – are at the forefront of one of the most important debates in international relations.

Second: the symposium’s key conceptual contribution consists of engaging the politics of seemingly mundane everyday cultural practices, such as television, movies, videogames, fashion and social media. Such practices might, at first sight, neither be very political nor very international. And yet, the contributors to this symposium all show how there are compelling links between the local and the global, between the everyday and the international, and between the cultural and the political. These link shape political phenomena as diverse as war, militarism, gender relations and human rights. But popular culture does more than just influence the construction and conduct of politics. Popular culture also offers sources of alternative knowledge into political dilemmas; sources that provide us with creative insights and possibilities to rethink and re-evaluate the political practices that surround us and are, all too often, taken for granted and accepted at face value.

This is, ultimately, the key contribution of this symposium and the hallmark of all good scholarship: to reveal what has not been seen before; to outline how politics is happening in places where we do not suspect it; to challenge the most powerful form of domination: the construction of common sense – that is, situations where and when norms and values are so omnipresent and so widely rehearsed and accepted that we no longer recognise the political values they espouse and entrench. In this sense, the symposium engages in a form of aesthetic politics because it recognises that the struggle for justice and socio-political change is inevitably aesthetic in nature. It entails understanding and challenging how we collectively have come to represent the world and how these representations have framed and limited what is politically visible, sensible, reasonable and feasible (see Rancière 2004; and, for an application to international relations, Bleiker 2009). This is why the present symposium should be read not only by students of popular culture but also by all scholars who are interested in gaining a more critical and nuanced understanding of international relations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.