Uncovering the history of Americans’
responses to disaster from their colonial past up to the present, Kevin
Rozario reveals the vital role that calamity—and our abiding
fascination with it—has played in the development of this
nation. Beginning with the Puritan view of disaster as God’s
instrument of correction, Rozario explores how catastrophic events
frequently inspired positive reactions. He argues that they have shaped
American life by providing an opportunity to take stock of our values
and social institutions. Destruction leads naturally to rebuilding, and
here we learn that disasters have been a boon to capitalism, and,
paradoxically, indispensable to the construction of dominant American
ideas of progress.
As Rozario turns to the present, he finds that the impulse to respond
creatively to disasters is mitigated by a mania for security. Terror
alerts and duct tape represent the cynical politician’s
attitude about 9/11, but Rozario focuses on how the attacks registered
in the popular imagination—how responses to genuine calamity
were mediated by the hyperreal thrills of movies; how apocalyptic
literature, like the best-selling Left Behind series, recycles Puritan
religious outlooks while adopting Hollywood’s style; and how
the convergence of these two ways of imagining disaster points to a new
postmodern culture of calamity. The
Culture of Calamity will stand as the definitive diagnosis
of the peculiarly American addiction to the spectacle of destruction.
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The Culture of
Calamity
Disaster
and the Making of Modern America
by Kevin Rozario
University of Chicago Press,
2007
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a copy
Reviewed in
Out of the Past
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