The weird history of USAmerican Fascism: A guide (1979-2019)

McGrady, Matthew C. 2019. The weird history of USAmerican Fascism: A guide (1979-2019). PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

The future, as ever, can be read in comic books. Foretold by the Dark Age of Comics, the doom that now comes to Earth arrives in the form of self-realizing eschatologies, horrors born out of the rutting between unfettered capitalism and its favorite child, technological hubris. When the Big Two comic book publishers began hiring British and Irish authors en masse over the course of the 1980s, these writers brought with them a critical eye sharpened by the political and economic cruelty of the decade. The victims of the Iron Lady came to the New World and set their sights on the empire of the Teflon President, using superhero stories to explore the ideological weapons deployed in the service of global capitalism. The Weird History of USAmerican Fascism tracks the interrelated networks of popular culture and fascism in the United States to demonstrate the degree to which contemporary USAmerican politics embodies the future that the fictional dystopias of the past warned us about. Although the trans-Atlantic political developments of 2016 and their aftermath have sparked a widespread interest in a resurgent Anglophone fascism and its street-level movements – seen most obviously in the loose collection of white supremacists known as the ‘alt-right’ – this interest has been hamstrung by the historical aversion to a serious study of popular and ‘nerd’ culture during the twentieth century. By paying attention to the conceptual and interpersonal networks that emerged from the comic books and videogames of the 1980s, The Weird History of USAmerican Fascism fills a critical lacuna in cultural theory while correcting recent oversights in the academic analysis of contemporary fascism, providing an essential guide to the past, present, and future of the bizarre world of USAmerican politics.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Subjects:	E History America > E11 America (General)
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	4 November 2019
Last Modified:	29 Mar 2021 12:51
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/126502

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