After the End - by David L Pike (Hardcover)

About the Book

Through sources from literature and film to comics, music and the built environment across the globe, this work studies the enduring legacy of Cold War culture in current debates and concerns around risk, security, borders, environmental justice, inequality and apocalypse.

Book Synopsis

After the End argues that the cultural imaginaries and practices of the Cold War continue to deeply shape the present in profound but largely unnoticed ways across the global North and in the global South. The argument draws examples from literature and literary criticism, film, music, the historical and social scientific record and past and present physical sites to consider the bunker as a material form, an image and as a fantasy that took shape in the global North in the 1960s and that spread globally into the twenty-first century. After the End reminds us not only that most of the world's peoples have lived with or died from apocalyptic conditions for centuries, but that the Cold War imaginaries that grew from and fed those conditions, continue to survive as well.

From the Back Cover

After the end studies the enduring legacy of Cold War culture in current debates and concerns around risk, security, borders, environmental justice, inequality, and apocalypse. The chapters trace this legacy from the ideologies of survivalism through global fantasies of bunkering from Switzerland and Albania to Taiwan and India to current imaginings of post-apocalyptic worlds.

Pike argues that the real and imagined spaces of sheltering continue to inform in foundational and often unrecognized ways; not only in cultural forms such as literature, film, comics, music, and the built environment, but also policy and political formulations. The book documents the ways the Cold War affected its primary antagonists and how the rest of the world processed the fallout of this antagonism. It surveys the fate of Cold War fortifications and shelters as they are repurposed for twenty-first century needs.

After the end shows how counter-visions appropriating those same apocalyptic forms have emerged from the global South and from marginalized populations within the US and elsewhere to challenge the lingering verities of the Cold War years.

Review Quotes

'Pike examines the legacy of the Cold War through what he calls "the bunker fantasy," an ambivalent desire containing not only the promise of safety and shelter but also the prospect of fear, isolation, and confinement.'
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About the Author

David L. Pike is a Professor of Literature at American University