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America's Disaster Culture: The Production of Natural Disasters in Literature and Pop Culture
Are we inside the era of disasters or are we merely inundated by mediated accounts of events categorized as catastrophic? America's Disaster Culture offers answers to this question and a critical theory surrounding the culture of “natural” disasters in American consumerism, literature, media, film, and popular culture.
In a hyper-mediated global culture, disaster events reach us with great speed and minute detail, and Americans begin forming, interpreting, and historicizing catastrophes simultaneously with fellow citizens and people worldwide. America's Disaster Culture is not policy, management, or relief oriented. It offers an analytical framework for the cultural production and representation of disasters, catastrophes, and apocalypses in American culture. It focuses on filling a need for critical analysis centered upon the omnipresence of real and imagined disasters, epidemics, and apocalypses in American culture. However, it also observes events, such as the Dust Bowl, Hurricane Katrina, and 9/11, that are re-framed and re-historicized as “natural” disasters by contemporary media and pop culture. Therefore, America's Disaster Culture theorizes the very parameters of classifying any event as a “natural” disaster, addresses the biases involved in a catastrophic event's public narrative, and analyzes American culture's consumption of a disastrous event. Looking toward the future, what are the hypothetical and actual threats to disaster culture? Or, are we oblivious that we are currently living in a post-apocalyptic landscape?
In a hyper-mediated global culture, disaster events reach us with great speed and minute detail, and Americans begin forming, interpreting, and historicizing catastrophes simultaneously with fellow citizens and people worldwide. America's Disaster Culture is not policy, management, or relief oriented. It offers an analytical framework for the cultural production and representation of disasters, catastrophes, and apocalypses in American culture. It focuses on filling a need for critical analysis centered upon the omnipresence of real and imagined disasters, epidemics, and apocalypses in American culture. However, it also observes events, such as the Dust Bowl, Hurricane Katrina, and 9/11, that are re-framed and re-historicized as “natural” disasters by contemporary media and pop culture. Therefore, America's Disaster Culture theorizes the very parameters of classifying any event as a “natural” disaster, addresses the biases involved in a catastrophic event's public narrative, and analyzes American culture's consumption of a disastrous event. Looking toward the future, what are the hypothetical and actual threats to disaster culture? Or, are we oblivious that we are currently living in a post-apocalyptic landscape?
208 pages, Paperback
Published April 18, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 10, 2019
The central argument of this book is that "natural disasters" are manufactured by neoliberal capitalism for the proliferation of capital. Or, as in the case of Katrina, "natural disasters" do not occur. The authors do not make the typical arguments surrounding this topic by stating the anthropogenic causes of disasters. Rather, they follow the logic laid out by Baudrillard and argue that the 'disaster' is a simulacrum of reality. This was a refreshing line of argument to read, as was their formulation of 9/11 as a true "natural disaster."
Although this book treks some difficult intellectual terrain, it does so with clarity and insight. However, I will say that Bell and Ficociello sometimes do not devote enough time teasing out *exactly* what they mean by 'neoliberal capitalism'. Their discussions of media narratives and the rise of 'disaster culture' was interesting, but slightly repetitive of what other theorists have already said. For a book with 'literature' in the title, there was hardly any textual analysis of traditional literature. Most of the primary analysis is on media discourse.
This book is essentially a mash-up of Ted Steinberg's Acts of God and Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine. The best chapters are 3-5.
Although this book treks some difficult intellectual terrain, it does so with clarity and insight. However, I will say that Bell and Ficociello sometimes do not devote enough time teasing out *exactly* what they mean by 'neoliberal capitalism'. Their discussions of media narratives and the rise of 'disaster culture' was interesting, but slightly repetitive of what other theorists have already said. For a book with 'literature' in the title, there was hardly any textual analysis of traditional literature. Most of the primary analysis is on media discourse.
This book is essentially a mash-up of Ted Steinberg's Acts of God and Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine. The best chapters are 3-5.
May 9, 2021
This book looks at how narratives shape our understanding and experience of disasters. I was impressed by how the authors mixed more abstract critical theory with the on-the-ground lived reality of people caught in major disasters. It helped make the book accessible, which can be a tough challenge for anybody wanting to write about the complexities that infiltrate our cultural perspectives.
It's interesting in comparing, for example, the Gulf War coverage, which had a certain collapsing of themes and perspectives in support of the war (and the daunting question of what that means about the war's existence) to the more fractured lens provided through modern social media accounts and Facebook's role in creating a narrative of Hurricane Sandy. In all of these digital developments, the authors did a solid job tracking the influence of late capitalism on the functioning of these institutions in their competition for views during some of the hardest and most heart-wrenching tragedies.
It's easier, I think, to feel like natural disasters come from a place totally outside of us -- and that we should just work to understand them and their impact. But the author's continuously shine a light on our participation in the construction of disasters, with all of the complexity and (occasional) tragedy that entails. I'm not sure I'll ever look at news coverage of a disaster the same, again.
It's interesting in comparing, for example, the Gulf War coverage, which had a certain collapsing of themes and perspectives in support of the war (and the daunting question of what that means about the war's existence) to the more fractured lens provided through modern social media accounts and Facebook's role in creating a narrative of Hurricane Sandy. In all of these digital developments, the authors did a solid job tracking the influence of late capitalism on the functioning of these institutions in their competition for views during some of the hardest and most heart-wrenching tragedies.
It's easier, I think, to feel like natural disasters come from a place totally outside of us -- and that we should just work to understand them and their impact. But the author's continuously shine a light on our participation in the construction of disasters, with all of the complexity and (occasional) tragedy that entails. I'm not sure I'll ever look at news coverage of a disaster the same, again.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews