Affiliation:
1. University of California Santa Barbara—Religious Studies, Santa Barbara, California, United States
2. Canisius College—Political Science, Buffalo, New York, United States
Abstract
Through a neoteric methodology (speculative ethnography), we analyze the transmedia worldbuilding of the Mad Max franchise as a form of “Ozploitation.” This post-apocalyptic rural sci-fi series exploits culturally specific fears generated from Australia’s colonial past. Mad Max is a popular imagining of the Australian eschaton and its aftermath, a collective national nightmare where near-future Australia—“Maxtralia”—plummets into the savagery invented by generations of colonialist discourse. “Maximum madness,” the retrogressive technological, religious, and socioeconomic wasteland culture for which the series is known, signifies a Western reproach to indigeneity and locative culture, perpetuating attitudes of voyeuristic excitement towards primitivism.
Publisher
University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress)
Subject
Religious studies,Cultural Studies
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