Popular Geopolitics Past and Future: Fandom, Identities and Audiences

TLDR

Popular geopolitics has traditionally focused on representation and discourse, but recent scholarship is shifting toward audience interpretation and consumption, mirroring a similar trend in cultural studies. The paper reviews two decades of critical work on popular geopolitics and calls for integrating cultural studies theories with empirical geopolitics research. It proposes treating nationalism and religion as fan‑based identities—serial narrative adherence—and emphasizes studying how audiences construct geopolitical meaning through popular culture consumption.

Abstract

This short and hopefully provocative paper serves as both a retrospective of the past twenty years of critical work on so-called popular geopolitics and also an impetus for a more theoretical connection to related areas within cultural studies, such as fan studies. An overarching theme of the history of popular geopolitics has been a concern over geopolitical representation and discourse, which is only now beginning to shift towards audience interpretation, consumption and attachment. This shift in focus parallels a similar move in cultural studies made several years prior. Therefore, this paper advocates combining theories from cultural studies with empirical studies of concern to popular geopolitics to further our understanding. Specifically outlined as a possibility in this paper is the viewing of nationalism and religion as forms of fan-based identities, in that both can be understood as adherence to serial narratives. This perspective carries several corollaries regarding methodology and object of study, most notably a concern with the making of geopolitical meaning by audiences as they consume popular culture and related texts.