The dark fantasies of the military imagination
An excellent review of Stephen Graham's Cities Under Siege in the October edition of Red Pepper:
The Pentagon's vision of the city is made up of many different components, from Christian fundamentalism, cyberpunk fantasies of urban breakdown and a right-wing aversion to the cosmopolitanism of the modern city to a generalised 'othering' of the Arab world ...
All these tendencies are dissected by Graham in sharp, lucid and elegant prose. Whether analysing the dystopian implications of military robotics, deconstructing orientalist fantasies in the mock 'Arab' cities constructed by the US and Israeli armies, or analysing the phenomenon of "ubiquitous borders," Graham is consistently insightful and compelling. He has produced an indispensable analysis of the dark fantasies that the military imagination is seeking to realise in the coming century.
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