Hearts and Mines
The US Empire's Culture Industry

Tanner Mirrlees (Author)

9780774830157

Paperback / softback, published 1 June 2016

336 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm, 0.5 kg

Tanner Mirrlees' most exquisite book on the US culture industry starts with a rhetorical question: Is 'the relationship between the US government and the culture industry one of conflict or symbiosis?' (p. xiii). Mirrlees answers this with 'symbiosis'… While Mirrlees' book is most insightful and illuminating it is also devastatingly pessimistic, perhaps even dystopian." - Thomas Klikauer, Western Sydney University, Australia (European)

From Katy Perry training alongside US Marines in a music video, to the global box-office mastery of the US military-supported Transformers franchise, to the explosion of war games such as Call of Duty, it's clear that the US security state is a dominant force in media culture. But is the ubiquity of cultural products that glorify the security state a new phenomenon? Or have Uncle Sam and Hollywood been friends for a long time? Hearts and Mines examines the rise and reach of the US Empire's culture industry – a nexus between the US's security state and media firms and the source of cultural products that promote American strategic interests around the world. Building on and extending Herbert I. Schiller's classic study of US Empire and communications, Tanner Mirrlees interrogates the symbiotic geopolitical and economic relationships between the US state and media firms that drive the production of imperial culture.

Preface: The Personal is Geopolitical