Hegemony, popular culture and geopolitics: the Reader&#x27;s Digest and the construction of danger

doi:10.1016/0962-6298(96)00031-5

Political Geography

Volume 15, Issues 6–7, July–September 1996, Pages 557-570

https://doi.org/10.1016/0962-6298(96)00031-5 Get rights and content

Abstract

This paper is a continuation of one published in 1993. In the earlier piece, I joined the call for a ‘critical geopolitics’. Here I want to both illustrate and develop the programmatic calls of critical geopolitics with the use of an empirical example. Critical geopolitics has demanded the siting of any geopolitical praxis—a refusal to accept the abstract logic of geopolitics but instead embody it in historically and culturally specific interests. In line with this, I contextualize the production of a geopolitical discourse by studying both the text produced and the institutional location within which it was generated. The example used is the popular American magazine the Reader's Digest and its changing perception of the Soviet Union and communism between 1930 and 1945.

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Hegemony, popular culture and geopolitics: the Reader's Digest and the construction of danger

Abstract

Political Geography

Moscow goes to the races

Reader's Digest

The crisis in character

Reader's Digest

The American character

Reader's Digest

Is capitalism doomed?

Reader's Digest

Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

The geopolitics of geopolitical space: toward a critical social theory of international politics

Alternatives

The decay of self-reliance

Reader's Digest

The new communist conspiracy

Reader's Digest

Our confusion over national defense

Readers Digest

Americans: heirs of the future

Reader's Digest

Outline of a Theory of Practice

Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity

Why I became an American

Reader's Digest

Russia bows to human nature

Reader's Digest

Common sense about strategic defense

Reader's Digest

Social forces, states and world orders: beyond international relations theory

Gender and geopolitics: reading security discourse in the New World Order

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

The American Style of Foreign Policy: Cultural Politics and Foreign Affairs

The Empire 's Old Clothes: What the Lone Ranger, Babar, and Other Innocent Heroes Do to Our Minds

The City as Text

Socialism doesn't jibe with human nature

Reader's Digest

To collaborate successfully—we must face the facts about Russia

Reader's Digest

Bananas, Bases and Beaches: Making Feminist Sense of International Relations

The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War

The repressive hypothesis

The Constitution of Society: Outline of a Theory of Structuration

Selections from Prison Notebooks

Theirs was the Kingdom: Lila and DeWitt Wallace and the Story of the Reader's Digest

The inner threat: our own softness

Reader's Digest