Descending from the heights, Part the Third

(Are you really going to post about every academic source you can find that legitimates the use of pop culture in IR research? Yeah, probably. It's very exciting!) From Lene Hansen's Security as Practice: Discourse analysis and the Bosnian War:

Analysis investigates whether popular representations reproduce or contest those of official discourse and how representations travel between the spheres of entertainment and politics (Shapiro 1990, 1997). Studies of popular culture include film, fiction, television, computer games, photography, and comic books. It analyzes, for instance, how a particular region, country, or people is cinematically represented (Iordanova, 2001) or how espionage is treated within popular fiction (Der Derian 1992) ... Poststructuralist analysis has often focused on popular culture, but analyses of 'high culture' might be equally valid (and the definition of 'popular' should be extensive and historically situated) in showing, for example, how music, poetry, painting, architecture, and literature have been employed in constructing national and civilizational identities. Travel writing in particular has been an important genre for communicating the construction of 'foreign places and people' to the Western public since the eighteenth century and has been employed by a large variety of professions: by merchants or emissaries; pirates and buccaneers; missionaries; explorers; warriors and Spanish Conquistadores; ambassadors; scientists (botanists and geologists) and engineers; and not least, tourists ... (62-63)

Indeed. Having begun to expand our reading list into the realm of secondary source pirate-related material, Catherine and I have observed that Alexander Exquemelin's 1678 Buccaneers of America (check out this interactive version on the Library of Congress's website) fulfills precisely the role that Hansen talks about. Essentially a very early piece of first-hand travel writing, Exquemelin's book (along with Charles Johnson's A General History of the Pyrates) has -- often explicitly -- informed many, many works on pirates that came after it, including contemporary sources like Benerson Little's The Buccaneer's Realm: Pirate Life on the Spanish Main 1674-1688 and Stephen Talty's Empire of Blue Water: Captain Morgan's Great Pirate Army, the Epic Battle for the Americas, and the Catastrophe That Ended the Outlaws' Bloody Reign.
We're not prepared to assert the direct sort of links Hansen talks about here:

Adopting these guidelines calls forth a variety of genres: from direct links to popular culture, as in the influence of Tom Clancy's novels on Vice President Quayle and Secretary of Defense Weinberger (Der Derian 1992: 195), to secondary sources creating stories of influence, as when John F. Kennedy was said to have been heavily influenced during the Cuban Missile Crisis by Barbara Tuchman's account of the outbreak of World War I in Guns of August (Der Derian 1992: 174), or popular academic works such as Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations, which was reported as being 'fashionable in America's foreign policy establishment' (Walker 1997c) (62).

Certainly, tracing the genealogy of modern conceptions of pirates requires a few more steps than the direct influence of Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts on Clinton's foreign policy in the Balkans, but we look forward to looking at how we got from Exquemelin's hair-raising eye-witness accounts of 17th century piracy to Vice Admiral William Gortney, Commander of the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet, naming his dog Captain Jack Sparrow. And with President Obama referencing Treasure Island in an (albeit light-hearted) discussion of Somali piracy, it's hard not to accept, on some level, Hansen's points about the mutually constitutive nature of identity and policy.

Descending from the heights

Conducting research on something as, well, popular as pirates makes you somewhat inclined to go on the defensive as to the seriousness of your research and its importance to the study of "actual" international relations. So this concluding passage from Jutta Weldes' fascinating Constructing National Interests:The United States and the Cuban Missile Crisis provided some welcome theoretical validation for what we're up to this summer:

Recognizing the constitutive character of common sense, in turn, opens up a variety of other possible domains of inquiry that have often been overlooked in our attempts better to understand world politics. One such domain, I would argue, is popular culture. Students of international relations have rarely descended from the heights of interstate interaction to analyze the everyday cultural conditions that make particular state actions possible and that render them sensible to wider publics. But as I have suggested, these mundane cultural conditions are integral to rather than irrelevant for state action. It matters deeply that U.S. state actors are able to interpret and to define world politics in ways that at least significant portions of the U.S. population, and other audiences, find plausible and persuasive. The reproduction of common sense, and specifically of the grounds upon which particular representations are constructed and make sense, however, cannot be restricted to the representational practices of state actors. On the contrary, those representations are made sensible in no small part precisely because they fit with the constructions of the world and its workings into which diverse populations are hailed in their everyday lives. Representing world politics is not an unusual or extraordinary activity; rather, it is a relentlessly mundane and commonplace one. A key site at which that representation takes place, then, is in popular culture, in the everyday practices of meaning making that structure the quotidien. Perhaps it is time we devoted a little less attention to the doings of state actors and instead devoted a little more to the “silent” masses in whose name they claim to speak. (241-242)

In Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, P.W. Singer has a similar, though (necessarily?) somewhat less academic, justification for the importance of popular culture as a site of research:

[T]his is how people process information most efficiently. Humankind has long best understood and digested things that new by flavoring them with stories of personal experience ("There was this one time, in band camp, where we...") as well as by allusions to what is already culturally familiar, especially icons, symbols, and metaphors ("It's just like when..."). And, whether we like it or not, our twenty-first century folklore is that of the popular movies, TV shows, music, gadgets, and books that shaped us growing up. (15)