Contribution to Book
The 1980s Action Film and the Politics of Urban Expulsions
A Companion to the Action Film
(2019)
Abstract
In the 1980s, American cities started a profound transformation from industrial centers to post‐industrial network points in a deregulated global economy. As real cities began to expel working‐class and middle‐class populations as they transformed into business, residential, and leisure areas for the rich, some action films used the expulsive imagination, where nostalgia masked these demographic shifts in order to remember these areas as spaces for and defined by the white working class. Other films offered a counterhegemonic view and used violence to allegorize how the working class were victims of a brutal economy that tried to eliminate them from urban space. Films of the expulsive imagination made it seem like working class white males still belonged in post‐industrial cities, while the films that challenged that project highlighted how the political economy of urban expulsions was unjust in its brutality.
Keywords
- 1980s action films,
- global economy,
- middle‐class population,
- political economy,
- urban expulsions,
- working‐class population
Disciplines
Publication Date
2019
Editor
James Kendrick
Publisher
Wiley Blackwell
ISBN
9781119100744
DOI
10.1002/9781119100744.ch17
Citation Information
Jonathan Kraszewski. "The 1980s Action Film and the Politics of Urban Expulsions" HobokenA Companion to the Action Film (2019) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/jonathan-kraszewski/14/