The word “wargames” might seem like a contradiction in terms. After all, the declaration “This is war” is meant to signal that things have turned deadly serious, that there is no more playing around. Yet the practices of war are intimately entangled with practices of gaming, from military videogames to live battle reenactments. How do these forms of play impact how both soldiers and civilians perceive acts of war?This Quick Take considers how various war games and simulations shape...

Imperial Affects is the first sustained account of American action-based cinema as melodrama. From the earliest war films through the Hollywood Western and the late-century action cinema, imperialist violence and mobility have been produced as sites of both visceral pleasure and moral virtue. Suffering and omnipotence operate as twinned affects in this context, inviting identification with an American national subject constituted as both victimized and invincible—a powerful and pe...

Hollywood at the Intersection of Race and Identity explores the ways Hollywood represents race, gender, class, and nationality at the intersection of aesthetics and ideology and its productive tensions. This collection of essays asks to what degree can a close critical analysis of films, that is, reading them against their own ideological grain, reveal contradictions and tensions in Hollywood’s task of erecting normative cultural standards? How do some films perhaps knowingly unde...