Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s: The Bunkered DecadesCold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s: The Bunkered Decades studies the two periods in which Americans were actively encouraged to excavate their own backyards while governments the world over exhausted their budgets on fortified super-shelters and megaton bombs. The dreams and nightmares inspired by the spectre of nuclear destruction were expressed in images and forms from comics, movies, and pulp paperbacks to policy documents, protest movements, and survivalist tracts. Illustrated with photographs, artwork, and movie and television stills of real and imagined fallout shelters and other bunker fantasies, award-winning author David L. Pike's continues his decades-long exploration of the meanings of modern undergrounds. Ranging widely across disciplines, this volume finds unexpected connections between cultural icons and forgotten texts, plumbs the bunker's stratifications of class, region, race, and gender, and traces the often unrecognized through-lines leading from the 1960s and the less-studied 1980s into the present. Although the Cold War ended over 30 years ago, its legacy looms large in anxieties around security, borders, and all manners of imminent apocalypse. Treating the bunker in its concrete presence and in its flightiest fantasies while attending equally to its uniquely American desires and pathologies and to its global impact, Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s proposes a new way to understand the outsized afterlife of the bunkered decades. |
Contents
The Bunker Fantasy before and after the Bunkered Decades | 1 |
America 1962 The New Mutants and Where They Lived | 35 |
America 1983 The New Survivalism and Where It Hid | 143 |
281 | |
Other editions - View all
Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s: The Bunkered Decades David L. Pike Limited preview - 2021 |
Common terms and phrases
accessed action affords alien alternate American apocalypse argues Atomic become bomb bunker fantasy called cave Chapter civil Cold Cold War comics Coming containment continues created critical culture dark David decades destruction dome dominant early earth effects emerged enclave equally existence experience fact fallout shelter fiction figures final force function future ground human imaginary imagined individual late later less living look meaning military Music mutants narrative nature never novel nuclear condition nuclear war original past play political positive possibility postapocalyptic present protect provides question reading remains response Rights Science Fiction sense shelter social society space spatial story suggests supershelter survival survivalist survivors thinking threat turns underground University Wall women writing York