Popular Apocalypse: Religion, Race, Popular Culture, and the Eschatological Imagination

Catalog description

As the world confronts political gridlock, newly-energized movements promoting Christian nationalism, white supremacy, and the alt-right in the US, expanding authoritarianism abroad, bloody terrorism, warfare, and economic and political uncertainty elsewhere in the world, human beings have also had to reckon with the dangers of global climate change, epidemic disease, famine, and overpopulation. These political, environmental, and epidemiological anxieties have found expression in a popular fascination with the end of the world. Movies, books, and television shows have given wide expression to these concerns. In this course, we will examine recent popular culture's fixation on the end of time in order to draw some conclusions about the ways that underlying religious convictions and racial anxieties play out in the cataclysms that we, as humans, have imagined. If we were to extrapolate the history of our epoch from the monsters—and the cataclysms—we have imagined, what could we learn about this contemporary moment?