ABSTRACT
Struggles to shift the direction of human history, away from ecological destruction and resource depletion, imperial militarism and fundamentalist terrorism, authoritarian regimes and failed states, ethnic nationalism and growing inequality, entrenched hierarchies of gender and of race – in short, from barbarism towards more just and sustainable futures – are emerging and continuing on many fronts. One of the prime terrains of struggle is the politics and culture of the North Atlantic heartland of global capitalism – the United States, United Kingdom and Canada.1
That is not to blame these countries for all the world’s ills, nor to commit the hubris, characteristic of yesteryear’s scholarship and today’s political rhetoric, of equating these countries’ governments with ‘the international community’, or asserting that only they are the subjects of history, or that societal trends in that corner of the world have universal purchase.2 Rather, it is to recognize that even as other regions (Europe, China, India) sometimes contest their current hegemony, the culture, politics and policies of the North Atlantic Anglo-American democratic capitalist states are pivotal, both positively and negatively, to alternative global futures. Their global influence is evident in international institutions from the World Trade Organization (WTO) to the United Nations, and more broadly in the trajectory of economic globalization, reinforced by military interventions such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq and by the ‘imperial commodities’ of the Hollywood dream machine (Forsyth 2004).
