In a world dizzyingly shifted on its axis since 9/11, nothing has aided understanding of the profound twenty-first-century geopolitical slippages more than the revelations from Julian Assange's WikiLeaks site and the actions of whistle-blower Edward Snowden. Much has been written about the pair but little has investigated their persona and pronouncements onscreen. This article sets out to compare and contrast Snowden's and Assange's real as well as fictional cinematic portrayals, therefore. We find that their screen image conforms to notions of star celebrity but at the same time also challenges surveillance activism itself, on film as well as within wider political frames of reference. The movies about them may have deliberately foregrounded reactions towards the politics of surveillance, but that agenda has been conditioned by responses not only towards Assange and Snowden but also to the filmmakers producing these texts. We give resonance, in other words, to a wider discourse that goes beyond the cinematic in contemporary surveillance culture. There is an interlocutory discourse at play that sees cinema as not just a disruptive presence, but now more than ever as an active participant in mapping out the terrain under investigation. The challenge this presence brings to activism, we conclude, affects film's capacity to expose and contest contemporary state surveillance.

The Korean War has never had a notable place in American culture. A crop of recent scholarship by Korean American scholars queries the reasons for this absence of the Korean War's cultural presence, going against the critical commonplace that the war was insignificant and calling for a reckoning with the cultural legacies of the Korean War. Christine Hong's A Violent Peace, Daniel Y. Kim's The Intimacies of Conflict, and Crystal Mun-hye Baik's Reencounters illustrate new directions and new possibilities in the scholarship on the Korean War, which is dominated by historical studies often guided by traditional approaches to international relations or foreign policy. Informed by approaches in ethnic studies – and particularly the field's interest in racialization as transnational and cross-border phenomenon – these books show that it is not only productive to revisit the “forgotten war” but imperative to do so. Through a wide range of cultural texts and with an exclusive focus on the perspectives and experiences of people of color, these studies probe the underexamined role the conflict has played in shaping liberal ideas on freedom and justice, attend to the contradictions of the cultural forms that clothed these ideas in post-World War II US culture, and point to new cultural interventions that challenge and dislodge long-standing Cold War orthodoxies.

This article examines how Martin Luther King Jr. and the movement with which he is often synonymous are taught in UK schools, as well as the consequences of that teaching for twenty-first-century understandings of Britain's racial past and present. The UK's King-centric approach to teaching the civil rights movement has much in common with that in the US, including an inattention to its transnational coordinates. However, these shared (mis)representations have different histories, are deployed to different ends, and have different consequences. In the UK, study of the African American freedom struggle often happens in the absence of, and almost as a surrogate for, engagement with the histories of Britain's own racial minorities and imperial past. In short, emphasis on the apparent singularity of US race relations and the achievements of the mid-twentieth-century African American freedom struggle facilitates cultural amnesia regarding the historic and continuing significance of race and racism in the UK. In light of the Windrush scandal and the damning 2018 Royal Historical Society report on “Race, Ethnicity and Equality in UK History,” this article argues both for better, more nuanced and more relevant teaching of King and the freedom struggle in British schools, and for much greater attention to black British history in its own right.

Exploring some of the key tenets of neoliberal American culture, this article examines the historical forces behind the meteoric rise of interactive “Choose Your Own Adventure” (CYOA) children's books in the 1980s. Despite selling over 250 million copies worldwide and becoming the fourth most popular children's series of all time, the CYOA phenomenon has yet to be placed in its larger social, economic, historical or cultural context. When explaining the rise of interactive narratives, previous literature has mostly focussed on technological change – namely the invention of video games, computer consoles and hypertext narratives. Moving away from such claims, this article demonstrates how the incredible success of solely text-based CYOA books stemmed largely from the cultural ascent of individual market choice to the heart of American notions of agency, liberty, subjectivity and selfhood in the 1970s and 1980s.

While the abstract equality of citizens before the law is imagined as protection from arbitrary, subjective legal judgments of an individual's character, I argue that judgments of character play a pivotal yet unexamined role regulating access to citizenship in American law. Through a comparative analysis of President Trump and President Theodore Roosevelt, I show how their seemingly personal obsession with libel law reveals a deeper interest in consolidating the state's power as sole arbiter of character in order to weaponize the “good moral character” requirement in immigration and naturalization law as an instrument of racial and ethnic exclusion.