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Political Uses of the Past in Popular Culture

Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)
This comic fantasy about a forty-something woman who travels back to her senior year after attending her high school reunion offered a circular notion…
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Dion Georgiou
New Labour on Desert Island Discs
Labour politicians who appeared on the Radio 4 show between the mid-1990s and mid-2010s used their musical choices to try and tell stories about their…
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Dion Georgiou
6
Progressive Politics, Popular Culture, and Public Memory in Contemporary Britain
In which our intrepid author agrees to write a book about how both politicians and cultural producers vie to tell ‘progressive’ stories about Britain’s…
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Dion Georgiou
Rage Against The X-Factor
The 2009 battle to be UK Christmas No 1 pitted competing ideas of musical tradition against each other, as well as bringing legacy and new media…
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Dion Georgiou
The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941)
In pitting the celebrated nineteenth-century politician against the devil himself, this film reimagines the economic and legal transformations of that…
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Dion Georgiou
The Apprentice
The depicted relationship between Roy Cohn and Donald Trump links law, real estate, and politics, as well as establishing a lineage of the American…
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Dion Georgiou
2
Is It Worth the Aggravation?
Oasis’s reunification this week is the latest development in Britpop’s long afterlife, its leading lights continuing to carve out careers in the music…
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Dion Georgiou
The Bikeriders
This intimate depiction of a Chicago motorcycle club meditates on associational culture, the social changes of the 1960s, and how gender and generation…
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Dion Georgiou
Love Lies Bleeding
This 1980s-set erotic thriller transforms the conventions of the genre through its same-sex couple protagonists, queering the world of bodybuilding it…
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Dion Georgiou
3
Coming down from ‘Cocaine Socialism’
After their 1990s zenith, Britpop and New Labour were frequently evoked to denigrate each other, until a shifting political and cultural climate brought…
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Dion Georgiou
Pride (2014)
Based on real events, Pride offers a message of solidarity between oppressed groups, albeit while centring a whiggish narrative of gay rights and…
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Dion Georgiou
3
Made in Dagenham (2010)
Based on a real strike by women workers, Made in Dagenham depicts its protagonists as overcoming class and gender divisions, but its narrative of…
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Dion Georgiou
2
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