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Twentieth century cinema involving monster conflict featured solitary monsters in combat (Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, for example). The writing of Anne Rice and the RPG Vampire: The Masquerade by White Wolf Games introduced the idea of Gothic communities and civilisations in conflict. It was not until after the terror attacks of 11 September that the idea of a clash of civilisations between supernatural societies fully emerged into the mainstream of popular culture. This essay explores the construction of a clash of civilisations between supernatural communities as a form of using the Gothic as a metaphor for contemporary terrorism in film and television series such as Underworld, Twilight, True Blood and The Vampire Diaries. Inevitably, it is the lycanthropes that are the disempowered and disenfranchised society and are alternately exploited by and rebel against the dominant vampire civilisation grown decadent and on the verge of collapse. Post-9/11 Gothic posits a world in which vampire society is the new normal, and werewolves represent a hidden danger within. Lycanthropes must be controlled, profiled and/or fought and defeated. Through close readings of the cinematic and televisual texts, I explore the vampire/werewolf clash as metaphor and metonym for the war on terror.
In terms of the so-called 'clash of civilisations' after '9/11', Islamic states such as Algeria have too often been perceived in the West as 'other' and hence as threatening. This book, via an analysis of cinema, provides a discussion on some misunderstandings and assumptions about Algeria, which remains to a large extent underrepresented or misrepresented in the UK media. It is about Algerian national cinema and illuminates the ways in which the official mythologising of a national culture at the 'centre' of the postcolonial state has marginalised the diverse identities within the nation.
according to what readers perceived as its stance in the great contest of cultures. It was simultaneously praised for depicting Islam as a threatening creed that justified violent opposition to it and condemned for minimising the Islamic threat in the middle ages and, by no leap of imagination, today. Either way, the litmus test was the crudest form of the already crude ‘clash of civilisation’ theory, itself a heated-up version of Cold War propaganda. The debate formed a cocktail of debased Enlightenment positivism, ignorant cultural supremacism and historical illiteracy
, understood in that way, they might contribute to the clash of civilisations announced by Huntington. Taking his bearings from Panikkar, Sousa Santos also stresses the importance of looking for functional equivalents of the idea of human rights in other cultures. The very suggestion that human rights are universal in nature, he says, indicates their Western provenance; it is an index of a specific culture. The focus on universality is characteristic of Western culture and this goes some way to suggesting why human rights cannot be presented as culturally invariant. While
offer European politics. In the context of the debate on the futures of European order, Blair’s construction of the Kosovo war may be seen as an illustration of Samuel Huntington’s scenario of some forthcoming ‘clash of civilisations’. 3 Was Blair not arguing that, while war has ceased to be a means of politics in the relations between Western states, the West’s relations with other
against ‘Another clumsy, ill-informed American intervention’ in the country (Guardian, 13 December). Although there was some support for Blair’s attempt to cast the crisis in Afghanistan in the mould of 1990s-style humanitarianism, then, past examples of interventionism could just as easily be mobilised by those critical of the current war. A clash of civilisations and a
bad things? One worry that Mouffe expresses is that this invention can be – is being – used to support some very bad things. It is used as part of the legitimating ideology of contemporary Western imperialism, for example as expressed in U.S. foreign policy and the so-called ‘War on Terror’. It all too easily rationalises a ‘clash of civilisations’ that could issue in catastrophe. But there are at least three replies to this. First, the fact that the idea of human rights features in one or more of the premises of arguments used to try to justify, say, the 2003
indirect speech acts when speaking about Islam. For these speakers, the war, or clash of civilisations, was not framed between Islam and the West, but within Islam itself, between the ‘reactionary fanatics’ and the ‘moderates’ (Bosco 2014 ). Because indirect securitising speech acts allow actors to avoid the worst possible outcomes, indirect securitising speech acts are used as strategic securitising devices. Examining this covert practice can bring attention to the ways in which hate speech is reinvented in the US in the twenty-first century. While this is not yet
. Huntington argued that the post-Cold War world was riven by a ‘clash of civilisations’: the motor of conflict was not political ideology but deep-seated ethnic antagonism. Hence, for example, one of the civilisational ‘fault lines’ which, he argued, divided the world ran ‘almost exactly along the line now separating Croatia and Slovenia from the rest of Yugoslavia’ (Huntington 1993 : 30). Huntington
, but neither are they amenable to a ‘clash of civilisations’ approach. Here the author corroborates the 2004 collection Cultures of Creationism, edited by Coleman and Carlin. That work tells us that the Institute for Creation Research (ICR, located in southern California) produces and exports a particular vision of creationism. That vision is well received in many places by conservative Christians, e.g. certain missionaries and their converts in Kenya and South Korea, but then the host cultures adapt the ICR message to local circumstances. One might say that these