America and the Misshaping of a New World Order [Paperback]

The attempt by the George W. Bush administration to reshape world order, especially but not exclusively after September 11, 2001, increasingly appears to have resulted in a catastrophic “misshaping” of geopolitics in the wake of bungled campaigns in the Middle East and their many reverberations worldwide. Journalists and scholars are now trying to understand what happened, and this volume explores the role of culture and rhetoric in this process of geopolitical transformation. What difference do cultural concepts and values make to the cognitive and emotional weather of which, at various levels, international politics is both consequence and perceived corrective? The distinguished scholars in this multidisciplinary volume bring the tools of cultural analysis to the profound ongoing debate about how geopolitics is mapped and what determines its governance.

Giles Gunn is Professor and Chair of Global and International Studies and Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Carl Guti?rrez-Jones is Professor of English and Director of the Chicano Studies Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Contributors: Eileen Boris, Richard Falk, Giles Gunn, Mark Juergensmeyer, Lisa Lowe, Simon Ortiz, David Palumbo-Liu, Lisa Parks, Donald Pease, Wade Clark Roof, John Carlos Rowe, Gabriele Schwab, Ronald Steel

An important and telling critique of the myth and rhetoric of contemporary American expansionism and grand strategy. What is particularly original about these essaysand unusually rare in studies of American foreign policyis their provocative combination of cultural and literary analysis with a subtle appreciation of the historical transformation of political forms and principles of world order. Stephen Gill, author ofPower and Resistance in the New World Order