Post-Apocalypse Now Globalism, Posthumanism, and the 'Imagination of Disaster'

The paper examines post-apocalyptic representations in American film productions from a perspective informed by global and hypermodern cultural theory. It is an enquiry into aspects of dystopian sensibility in global cinema seen as manifest in several prominent genres of the post-apocalyptic strand. It is premised on the assumption that global society is endemically one marred by a catastrophic horizon of expectation, whose most congenial form of expression is dystopia, a genre on the rise worldwide, especially productive in Anglo-American cinematic practice. The chief scope of the investigation is to identify the articulations between `posthumanism'-construed as both ideology and sensibility-and the global anxieties as reflected in the post-9/11 cinematic imaginary. Drawing on Paul Virilio's hypermodern and Arjun Appadurai's and Thomas Turino's global cultural theories, I seek to bring these dominants to bear on what I construe as globality's post-apocalyptic imagination.