This is a necessary and urgent read for anyone concerned about the United States’s endless wars.  Investigating multiple genres of popular culture alongside contemporary U.S. foreign policy and political economy, Imperial Benevolence shows that American popular culture continuously suppresses awareness of U.S. imperialism while assuming American exceptionalism and innocence. This is despite the fact that it is rarely a product of the state. Expertly coordinated essays by prominent historians and media scholars address the ways that movies and television series such as Zero Dark Thirty, The Avengers, and even The Walking Dead, as well as video games such as Call of Duty: Black Ops, have largely presented the United States as a global force for good. Popular culture, with few exceptions, has depicted the U.S. as a reluctant hegemon fiercely defending human rights and protecting or expanding democracy from the barbarians determined to destroy it.

ENDORSEMENTS

"These are nuanced, detailed accounts of the complex work of popular media, written by some of the finest scholars of U.S. imperial culture. The fundamental argument here—that U.S. culture has imagined America as a reluctant and moral hegemon—is compelling and more important than ever. There are excellent studies of gender, with analysis of everything from female tears in films about the war on terror to masculine toughness in video games. The accounts of violent images go far beyond the expected, looking at narratives that embrace violence-as-healing as well as those that promise healing-from-violence-done. This book should be widely read, and taught—in classes on U.S. cultural history, the United States in the world, imperialism and culture, as well as classes on race, gender, and media. A truly outstanding collection."

— Melani McAlister, Professor of American Studies and International Affairs, George Washington University

"This is an exceptionally valuable and truly terrifying anthology. As a model of American Studies scholarship, its tapestry—woven of multiple genres of popular culture, contemporary U.S. foreign policy, political figures, and economic forces—reveals how profoundly and thoroughly the ethos of empire has come to shape the life and thought of twenty-first-century America."

— H. Bruce Franklin, author of Crash Course: From the Good War to the Forever War

"Imperial Benevolence is a smart and compelling set of essays on how post-9/11 popular culture has enabled a disavowal of U.S. empire. These authors demonstrate with sharp insight that, when U.S. foreign policy has been at its most globally unpopular, popular culture has sold American audiences on narratives of benevolence and innocence that recast the devastating effects of U.S. imperial aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan, and on U.S. veterans, into fantasies of sniper heroes, just wars, first person shooter invulnerability, and super hero saviors."

— Marita Sturken, author of Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero

REVIEWS

“[Imperial Benevolence] is remarkably cohesive in terms of content and approach, and each essay contributes to the main argument about the role of popular culture productions as a tool in the U.S. government's imperial project. [...] The essayists make a convincing argument for commercially successful popular culture productions contributing to the soft power of U.S. imperialism by underscoring the message that the United States is a benevolent power in its fight for freedom and by eliding naked self-interest.”

— Maureen E. Montgomery, Journal of American History