Overview

Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s: The Bunkered Decades studies the two periods in which Americans were actively encouraged to excavate their own backyards while governments the world over exhausted their budgets on fortified super-shelters and megaton bombs. The dreams and nightmares inspired by the spectre of nuclear destruction were expressed in images and forms from comics, movies, and pulp paperbacks to policy documents, protest movements, and survivalist tracts. Illustrated with photographs, artwork, and movie and television stills of real and imagined fallout shelters and other bunker fantasies, award-winning author David L. Pike's continues his decades-long exploration of the meanings of modern undergrounds. Ranging widely across disciplines, this volume finds unexpected connections between cultural icons and forgotten texts, plumbs the bunker's stratifications of class, region, race, and gender, and traces the often unrecognized through-lines leading from the 1960s and the less-studied 1980s into the present. Although the Cold War ended over 30 years ago, its legacy looms large in anxieties around security, borders, and all manners of imminent apocalypse. Treating the bunker in its concrete presence and in its flightiest fantasies while attending equally to its uniquely American desires and pathologies and to its global impact, Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s proposes a new way to understand the outsized afterlife of the bunkered decades.

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9780192846167

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Indeed, this is undeniably an incredibly well-researched book, brimming with detail and the ability to connect even the most mundane piece of popular culture to the fear- driven Cold War. As such, it is an essential read for anybody interested in Cold War culture or how apocalyptic themes manifest themselves in film, literature, and other forms of culture. As Pike suggests in his conclusion, other existential threats such as the climate crisis will ensure that the bunker fantasy continues to mutate and influence our culture. * John A. Riley, Pop Matters * This is not just a beautifully written book about Cold War culture, but an intensely relevant meditation on the gendered and racialized anxieties about health and the state that continue to ease the migration of the extreme right into mainstream politics and fuel the survivalist 'prepper' movement today. * Max Paul Friedman, Interim Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, American University, Washington, D.C. News *

This is not just a beautifully written book about Cold War culture, but an intensely relevant meditation on the gendered and racialized anxieties about health and the state that continue to ease the migration of the extreme right into mainstream politics and fuel the survivalist 'prepper' movement today. * Max Paul Friedman, Interim Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, American University, Washington, D.C. News *

Author Information

David L. Pike has taught in the Department of Literature at American University since 1995. He is the author of Passage through Hell: Modernist Descents, Medieval Underworlds; Subterranean Cities: The World beneath Paris and London 1800-1945; Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800-2001; Canadian Cinema since the 1980s: At the Heart of the World; and articles on medieval literature, modernism, film, neo-Victorianism, subterranea, urban fantasy, global urban culture, and Paris and London. He is co-author of Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City and of Literature: A World of Writing, and co-general editor of the Longman Anthology of World Literature.

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