Paranoia and Nostalgia in American Popular Culture, 1980-2020

In this book, Owen Cantrell focuses on politics and popular culture in the United States from 1980 to 2020 to argue that the twin structures of feeling of nostalgia and paranoia offered a pathway to address the changed relationship to history in this era that were a result of the backlash politics to the gains of the civil rights movement(s).

Drawing on Bifo Berardi's contention that "the future is over" helps explain how the concept of the future effectively ended in this era and made the structures of paranoia and nostalgia eminently more desirable as a cultural response to political dilemmas. As the future lost its place as a locus of value, then, we entered a state of what Mark Fisher calls "a failed mourning" to describe how the narratives of paranoia and nostalgia offered compensation for a future that no longer felt relevant or even possible.

Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century and the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the structures of paranoia and nostalgia mirrored the changing political relationship to history, race, and culture in the United States. From Back to the Future and The Matrix to Get Out and Black Panther, Cantrell demonstrates how paranoia and nostalgia have structured American political and cultural life over the past forty years

Ultimately, this book addresses both how the structures of paranoia and nostalgia functioned in this era, as well as how popular films reflected the failure to imagine the future.