Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to 'The X-Files' Review

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(More customer reviews)Peter Knight is a scholar of American Studies now at the University of Manchester (UK), with an excellent reputation and a demonstrated empirical in the largely American phenomenom that calls into question what Knight would call "the narratives of authorities and the authority of narratives."
This excellent book is a demonstration of why American Studies scholars from abroad often can brilliantly inform our understanding of ourselves.
He generally uses methods from the cultural studies field not, as the previous reviewer would have it, to bash conspiracy theorists themselves or their notions of reality.
His goal is to demonstrate how American conspiracy culture of the last 50 years tries to make sense of ideas about causality, agency and responsibility in the global era, one in which we suffer from too much information and an overload of "meaning."
He certainly lit up the attic for me.

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Conspiracy theories are everywhere in post-war American culture. From postmodern novels to The X-Files and from gangsta rap to feminist polemic, there is a widespread suspicion that sinister forces are conspiring to take control of our national destiny, our minds, and even our bodies. Conspiracy explanations can no longer be dismissed as the paranoid delusions of far-right crackpots. Indeed, they have become a necessary response to a risky and increasingly globalized world, in which everything is connected but nothing adds up.Peter Knight provides an engaging and cogent analysis of the development of conspiracy culture, from 1960s' countercultural suspicions about the authorities to the 1990s, where a paranoid attitude is both routine and ironic. Conspiracy Culture analyses conspiracy narratives about familiar topics like the Kennedy assassination, alien abduction, body horror, AIDS, crack cocaine, the New World Order, as well as more unusual ones like the conspiracies of patriarchy and white supremacy.Conspiracy Culture shows how Americans have come to distrust not only the narratives of the authorities, but even the authority of narrative itself to explain What Is Really Going On. From the complexities of Thomas Pynchon's novels to the endless mysteries of The X-Files, Knight argues that contemporary conspiracy culture is marked by an infinite regress of suspicion. Trust no one, because we have met the enemy and it is us.

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