The Naked Communist: Cold War Modernism and the Politics of Popular Culture
The Naked Communist argues that the political ideologies of modernity were fundamentally determined by four basic figures: the world, the enemy, the secret, and the catastrophe. While the "world" names the totality that functioned as the ultimate horizon of modern political imagination, the three other figures define the necessary limits of this totality by reflecting on the limits of representation.
The book highlights the enduring presence of these figures in the modern imagination through detailed analysis of a concrete historical example: American anti-Communist politics of the 1950s. Its primary objective is to describe the internal mechanisms of what we could call an anti- Communist "aesthetic ideology." The book thus traces the way anti-Communist popular culture emerged in the discourse of Cold War liberalism as a political symptom of modernism. Based on a discursive analysis of American anti-Communist politics, the book presents parallel readings of modernism and popular fiction from the 1950s (nuclear holocaust novels, spy novels, and popular political novels) in order to show that, despite the radical separation of the two cultural fields, they both participated in a common ideological program.
I think this is from the Daily Mail.
More than 75 years ago, the British oversaw the partition of India.
The British may once again oversee a partition, only this time it will be a British Hindu leader of Indian origin and a British Muslim leader of Pakistani origin who may supervise the partition of the United Kingdom.
The obvious difference of course is that this partition will be done via a referendum - the people of Scotland will have to vote to break away from the U.K.
Despite the potentially serious nature of the situation, many observers could help notice the irony.
If the partition occurs, it will have consequences in the James Bond universe, Sir Sean Connery and Sir Roger Moore may no longer be from the same country.
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