Product Description

Conspiracy Culture investigates conspiracy theories in contemporary American culture, asking why conspiracy narratives are so popular and so ubiquitous, and relates conspiracy culture to postmodernity and millennial anxieties.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #275180 in Books
• Published on: 2000-11-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

From the Back Cover
Conspiracy theories are everywhere in postwar American culture. But, where once they served to bolster national and personal identity by imagining the self and the nation under threat from a convenient scapegoat, in recent decades Cold War paranoia has been replaced by an increasing insecurity about exactly who or what the enemy is. Conspiracy Culture argues that talk of conspiracy is no longer necessarily the sign of a crackpot delusion, but is an everyday part of our political and cultural life, giving voice to an infinite regress of suspicion about identity, causality and agency.
From conspiracy websites to the novels of Don DeLillo, and from gangsta rap to Hollywood films, Peter Knight explores the proliferation of conspiracy narratives about the Kennedy assassination, alien abduction, body panic, patriarchy and white supremacy. Tracing the shifts in conspiracy culture from the countercultural suspicion of authorities in the 1960s, to the routinized and ironic culture of paranoia in the X-Files, he argues that conspiracy thinking is now a creative and vital response to life in a globalized environment of risk in which everything is connected but nothing adds up.

About the Author
Peter Knight is Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Manchester.