The History and Politics of Star Wars: Death Stars and Democracy (Routledge Studies in Modern History)
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This book provides the first detailed and comprehensive examination of all the materials making up the Star Wars franchise relating to the portrayal and representation of real-world history and politics.
Drawing on a variety of sources, including films, published interviews with directors and actors, novels, comics, and computer games, this volume explores the ways in which historical and contemporary events have been repurposed within Star Wars. It focuses on key themes such as fascism and the Galactic Empire, the failures of democracy, the portrayal of warfare, the morality of the Jedi, and the representations of sex, gender, and race. Through these themes, this study highlights the impacts of the fall of the Soviet Union, the War on Terror, and the failures of the United Nations upon the ‘galaxy far, far away’. By analysing and understanding these events and their portrayal within Star Wars, it shows how the most popular media franchise in existence aims to speak about wider contemporary events and issues.
The History and Politics of Star Wars is useful for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars of a variety of disciplines such as transmedia studies, science fiction, cultural studies, and world history and politics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
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Additional information
| Publisher | 1st edition (11 Aug. 2022), Routledge |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Paperback | 252 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 1032318872 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1032318875 |
| Dimensions | 15.6 x 1.45 x 23.4 cm |
by Monny Jayner
This is an excellent independent examination of the ways that real life history and politics is reflected in Star Wars.
The author is not only a historian specialising in depictions of warfare in modern media, but is extremely knowledgeable about Star Wars, including material usually overlooked by academics writing about Star Wars; the decades’-worth of storylines from the Expanded Universe (now known as the Legends continuity).
Absolutely essential reading for anyone wanting to understand not only what George Lucas intended Star Wars to mean, but what elements from modern history and politics other Star Wars creators have drawn on over the years.
Highly recommended.
by Monny Jayner
I thoroughly enjoyed and got a lot of new insights from Chris Kempshall’s exploration of how the evolving Star Wars story-world reflects history and the politics of the past and today. I really appreciated his exploration of the materials in the Extended Universe Star Wars books and para-texts and Chris’s analysis of the political and historical themes has made me want to read more of these texts. In his conclusion Chris states ‘When Star Wars speaks it talks in reference points and languages that we can understand because they come from shared understandings of history.’ This book is a must for any lover of Star Wars and political history. Highly recommend.