Popular Culture and Political Economic Thought: Fables of Commonwealth in Bloomington, MN

We live in an era of economic fabling where often fantastic representations of economic life in popular culture sit uncomfortably alongside a neoliberal capitalist fairy tale that the Earth's resources can continue to be exploited into an indefinite future. Popular Culture and Political Economic Thought: Fables of Commonwealth examines a variety of animated movies, TV shows, written fictions, adventure travelogues, and Paleo archeologies (and diets) to suggest that popular culture poses a multiform challenge to the failing theories and practices of neoclassical economics. This book contends that it does so most successfully by implementing older formations of political economic thought: stages theory, bioeconomics, and a robust discourse on commonwealth. An era of eco-crisis demands a new economics. It, therefore, also requires a new appraisal of the popular imaginary and its potential for leveraging alternative conceptions of economic and political relations. This book begins that conversation.