Description: In this book, Owen Cantrell focuses on politics and popular culture in the United States from 1980 to 2020 to argue that the twin structures of feeling of nostalgia and paranoia offered a pathway to address the changed relationship to history in this era that were a result of the backlash politics to the gains of the civil rights movement(s).
Brief description: Owen Cantrell is Associate Professor of English at Perimeter College, Georgia State University, USA.
Review Quotes:
"Owen Cantrell's breakthrough work on paranoia and nostalgia is the book that we've been waiting for in our politically disorienting times. It clearly identifies the two most pernicious maladies that confront us today and shows how popular culture feeds these maladies. The book itself provides the armaments necessary to fight against the predominance of these maladies. Not to be missed." --Todd McGowan, Professor of Film and Television Studies, University of Vermont, USA
"In paranoia and nostalgia this book brings together two, sometimes competing sometimes complementary, forces currently shaping American politics, reading them as blockages preventing the imagination of a better future. Through insightful explorations of popular examples of screen media from the 1980s to the present, from Back to the Future to Barbenheimer, Cantrell produces a theoretically motivated and thorough perspective that sheds light on our current political and cultural quagmire." --Matthew Leggatt, Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature, University of Winchester, UK