Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- The Contributors
- Introduction: Still Crazy After All These Years? The ‘Special Relationship’ in Popular Culture
- Part One ‘[Not] Just a Girl, Standing in Front of a Boy . . . ’: Feminism, Women and Transatlantic Romance
- 1 Atlantic Liners, It Girls and Old Europe in Elinor Glyn’s Romantic Adventures
- 2 ‘World Turned Upside Down’: The Role of Revolutions in Maya Rodale’s Regency-set Romances
- 3 Bridget Jones’s Special Relationship: No Filth, Please, We’re Brexiteers
- 4 Sharon Horgan, Postfeminism and the Transatlantic Psycho-politics of ‘Woemantic’ Comedy
- Part Two Love Beyond Borders: The Global City, Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Space
- 5 ‘British People Are Awful’: Gentrification, Queerness and Race in the US–UK Romances of Looking and You’re the Worst
- 6 Catastrophe: Transatlantic Love in East London
- 7 On the Fragility of Love Across the Atlantic: Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Romance in Drake Doremus’s Like Crazy (2011)
- 8 The Mise-en-scène of Romance and Transatlantic Desire: Genre, Space and Place in Nancy Meyers’s The Parent Trap and Holiday
- Part Three Two Lovers Divided by a Common Language: ‘Britishness’, ‘Americanness’ and Identity
- 9 ‘American, a Slut and Out of Your League’: Working Title’s Equivocal Relationship with Americanness
- 10 ‘It’s the American Dream’: British Audiences and the Contemporary Hollywood Romcom
- 11 Business-like Lords and Gentlemanly Businessmen: The Romance Hero in Lisa Kleypas’s Wallflowers Series
- 12 Imagine: The Beatles, John Lennon and Love Across Borders
- Part Four Political Coupledom: Flirting with the Special Relationship
- 13 ‘Political Soulmates’: The ‘Special Relationship’ of Reagan and Thatcher and the Powerful Chemistry of Celebrity Coupledom
- 14 ‘I Will Be with You, Whatever’: Bush and Blair’s Baghdadi Bromance
- 15 Holding Hands as the Ship Sinks: Trump and May’s Special Relationship
- 16 ‘Prince Harry has gone over to the dark side’: Race, Royalty and US–UK Romance in Brexit Britain
- Index
14 - ‘I Will Be with You, Whatever’: Bush and Blair’s Baghdadi Bromance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- The Contributors
- Introduction: Still Crazy After All These Years? The ‘Special Relationship’ in Popular Culture
- Part One ‘[Not] Just a Girl, Standing in Front of a Boy . . . ’: Feminism, Women and Transatlantic Romance
- 1 Atlantic Liners, It Girls and Old Europe in Elinor Glyn’s Romantic Adventures
- 2 ‘World Turned Upside Down’: The Role of Revolutions in Maya Rodale’s Regency-set Romances
- 3 Bridget Jones’s Special Relationship: No Filth, Please, We’re Brexiteers
- 4 Sharon Horgan, Postfeminism and the Transatlantic Psycho-politics of ‘Woemantic’ Comedy
- Part Two Love Beyond Borders: The Global City, Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Space
- 5 ‘British People Are Awful’: Gentrification, Queerness and Race in the US–UK Romances of Looking and You’re the Worst
- 6 Catastrophe: Transatlantic Love in East London
- 7 On the Fragility of Love Across the Atlantic: Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Romance in Drake Doremus’s Like Crazy (2011)
- 8 The Mise-en-scène of Romance and Transatlantic Desire: Genre, Space and Place in Nancy Meyers’s The Parent Trap and Holiday
- Part Three Two Lovers Divided by a Common Language: ‘Britishness’, ‘Americanness’ and Identity
- 9 ‘American, a Slut and Out of Your League’: Working Title’s Equivocal Relationship with Americanness
- 10 ‘It’s the American Dream’: British Audiences and the Contemporary Hollywood Romcom
- 11 Business-like Lords and Gentlemanly Businessmen: The Romance Hero in Lisa Kleypas’s Wallflowers Series
- 12 Imagine: The Beatles, John Lennon and Love Across Borders
- Part Four Political Coupledom: Flirting with the Special Relationship
- 13 ‘Political Soulmates’: The ‘Special Relationship’ of Reagan and Thatcher and the Powerful Chemistry of Celebrity Coupledom
- 14 ‘I Will Be with You, Whatever’: Bush and Blair’s Baghdadi Bromance
- 15 Holding Hands as the Ship Sinks: Trump and May’s Special Relationship
- 16 ‘Prince Harry has gone over to the dark side’: Race, Royalty and US–UK Romance in Brexit Britain
- Index
Summary
Introduction
In August 2006, British film and television actor Riz Ahmed, performing as his rap persona Riz MC, released ‘The Post 9/11 Blues’. The song arises in the context of the illegal warfare waged by powerful Western Anglophone nations on the beleaguered peoples of countries of the global South, already subjected to the tyranny of brutal dictators and regimes. In a noteworthy discursive juxtaposition of innocent childhood romance with bloody mass murder, the song features the politically charged lyrics: ‘Bush and Blair in a tree, K-I-L-L-I-N-G’. In this way, it adapts the chant familiar to countless schoolchildren in playgrounds across the UK and the US that singles out for mockery pairs of children who are believed to be engaged in some manner of childhood flirtation. Here, however, the replacement by Ahmed of the double S in ‘kissing’ with a double L transforms the romantic connotations of this word to the bloody and murderous meaning of the newly formed replacement word ‘killing’. Intimations of love are thereby substituted with suggestions of slaughter. Ahmed is, of course, referring to the deaths caused by the political and military alliance between UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George W. Bush as they waged war in Afghanistan and Iraq in the years following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.
Through his adoption of this particular mode of irreverence, Ahmed also appositely invokes the discourse of what would very soon thereafter be dubbed a ‘bromance’ in popular discursive parlance. Furthermore, as indicated by the lyrics excerpted above, and as argued elsewhere by popular music scholar Amy McDowell, he does this in order to mount a popular cultural critique of millennial right-wing politics, particularly the aforementioned military interventions in the Middle East (McDowell 2017). The term ‘bromance’ refers to the relational dynamics that pertain to homosocial relationships between male friends in which, as film scholar Nick Davis has argued, concerning the emergence of bromantic discourses of masculinity in popular cinema of the 2000s and 2010s, ‘the intimate bond between two men, while ostensibly platonic, carries … emotional … [and] perhaps even romantic or erotic weight’ (Davis 2014: 109).
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- Love Across the AtlanticUS-UK Romance in Popular Culture, pp. 243 - 257Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020