TV nationalisms: Reflections on the contemporary state and/of United States imperialism.

摘要

This dissertation examines television's operation as a technology of empire in the late twentieth century. Specifically, it investigates the ways that TV has helped to produce, reproduce, and deploy a symbolic American identity that may be mistaken for the source of power and agency within an emerging global capitalist system defined by the transgression of older territorial, political, and conceptual boundaries. It does this by analyzing TV's material and symbolic impact on the wars in Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, and Bosnia, as well as during the Iran-contra scandal and the early phases of the Drug War.;Much has recently been written about the disarticulation of the nation from its traditional embodiment in the territorial state, but little has been said about the new forms of imperialism enabled by this disarticulation. As the locus of imperial agency has shifted from the state to the transnational corporation, violent military exploits have assumed a primarily symbolic function: to generate a reassuring fiction of national self-identity for a public increasingly insecure about its place in the world. US corporate dominance of the global media circuitry assures that its fiction is projected as the social ideal for all other nations in the world system. In theory, this structural dominance enables the US to fashion a symbolic geography of power that is advantageous to, because identical with, its national interests. In practice, however, this symbolic geography is highly unstable. The growing disjunction between national-popular, state, and corporate interests makes the consolidation of power an infinitely more complex affair while the global scope and immediacy of the media multiply the opportunities for the disruption of this process. My analyses attend to both the repressive and the liberatory potentials activated by these new material conditions.