Military Geographies of Popular Culture

Popular culture and the media play an integral role in shaping public perceptions concerning the geographies of military activities and power. Critical approaches in studying military geography have started to pay closer attention to cultural representations of the military and their constitutive role in legitimizing and justifying military presence and practices within varying geographical contexts. It is important to note that there is no definitive or coherent scholarship on the topic of military geographies of popular culture. Therefore, this review does not chart a single cohesive body of scholarship. Instead, it offers an illustrative account of the interdisciplinary nature of studying the popular cultural geographies of militarism and militarization. There are several ways in which geographical scholarship, especially in the field of popular geopolitics, has contributed to understanding the relationship between the military and popular culture. First, geographical work has offered critical insights into the political-economic structures of what has been termed the “military-entertainment complex,” revealing the intimate symbiotic relationship between military institutes and the entertainment industries. Second, and where the predominant focus lies, geography has brought critical attention to the cultural politics of popular military representation. This has involved a detailed critical analysis of various popular cultural forms, texts, and visual media, exposing the geopolitical imaginaries that are both reflective and constitutive of the militarized violence they depict. More recently, such work has been advanced through an interest in material cultures and “more-than-representational” accounts to consider how cultures of militarism become embedded within the context of everyday geographies. Finally, geographers have reflected on the significance of place and the everyday situated contexts in which popular militarized cultures are embedded, experienced, and negotiated. Such work has considered the role of scale, highlighting how cultures of militarism are performed and internalized, especially within the domestic setting. Such work has adopted in-depth qualitative methodological approaches to recognize how popular forms of militarism are experienced in everyday life. The review article begins with an overview of the interdisciplinary work that seeks to expose and explore the military-entertainment complex. It then proceeds with thematic sections drawing attention to how scholars, within and beyond the discipline of human geography, have critically analyzed an array of diverse popular cultural militarized texts, representations, and material objects. It ends by drawing attention to the emergent methodological approaches and techniques to studying popular military geographies.