The Second World War made the US a superpower. As the international situation deteriorated, Roosevelt began supporting the Allies via Lend-Lease and rearming the US, particularly via navy bills, and made the US the “arsenal of democracy.” Hitler’s Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and Tojo’s Japan formed the Tripartite Axis alliance. Roosevelt and Britain’s Winston Churchill agreed they would seek the defeat of the Axis, pursuing a “Germany First” offensive strategy while fighting defensively in the Pacific. The Allies argued over when and where to launch a Second Front and struggled to prepare the troops and material needed for this. The US and Great Britain defeated Germany’s U-boat campaign and launched a combined bomber offensive against Germany. The US and Britain fought in North Africa, then forced Italy from the war, and invaded Normandy, France, in Operation OVERLORD in June 1944. Germany surrendered in May 1945. In June 1942, the US won the pivotal Battle of Midway against Japan. The US then went on the offensive at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. The US launched history’s most successful submarine guerre de course against Japan, while mounting a two-pronged Pacific offensive and seeking to destroy the Japanese Navy. The offensives met at the Philippines, and then leapt to Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The dropping of the atomic bombs pushed Japan to surrender. The “Big Three” settled the postwar situation at Yalta and Potsdam.

This chapter considers how Australian children’s and young adult literature published from the late twentieth century complicates early depictions of Anglo-Australian young people as uniquely connected with rural adventures and larrikinism through the exploration of urban Australian lives and multiculturalism. It pairs six novels as exemplars of three key moments of transition in Australian children’s literature in the past half century. First, it discusses Ivan Southall’s Josh (1971) as indicative of the abandonment of the bush as a central concern in the genre, situating it in relation to John Marsden’s Tomorrow, When the War Began (1993), which depicts rural Australia as under threat, rather than as a threat to children, as was typical in depictions of the bush in colonial children’s literature. Second, it examines the turn towards representations of ethnic diversity in Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi (1992), a narrative of European assimilation, and Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Does My Head Look Big in This? (2005), which responded to post-9/11 anti-Islamic sentiment. Finally, it considers two novels published in 1998 that signal the long road to the depiction of fully realised Indigenous characters: Phillip Gwynne’s Deadly, Unna? (1998) and Melissa Lucashenko’s Killing Darcy (1998).

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, phrenology as folk science featured prominently in two contrasting sites: the city, with its nooks of seamy thrills; and the bush, the stomping ground of itinerant male labourers. While phrenologists had long taken rooms in city markets and arcades, their work transformed by century’s end into a mystical hybrid of bumps, clairvoyance, palmistry and even tea-leaf reading. Urban diviners emerged concurrently with another archetype: the bush phrenologist of the new, masculinist ‘radical nationalist’ literary tradition. Bush phrenologists – real and imagined – echoed the resourcefulness of city diviners, switching between occupations and combining heads with palmistry and even water divining. But while urban divination was feminised and stigmatised, the male bush phrenologist often escaped the mark of perceived irrationality and exemplified a muscular identity. When pitted in court against working-class women or girls reporting assault, even the most disreputable bush phrenologist benefited from legalistic misogyny.

Chapter 2 demonstrates how the 2001 Patriot Act is necropolitical. As legislation, the Patriot Act takes on the authorizing, legitimizing resonances of the state. Debated and passed through Congress and the Senate, the Act emerges from processes of domestic legislation to enact this law’s global reach, in part through UN Security Council Resolutions. Additionally, the opening lines of the Patriot Act legislate necropolitical law’s planetary jurisdiction: the Act’s purpose is “[t]o deter and punish terrorist acts in the United States and around the world.” Necropolitical law’s dynamics of deception are immediately apparent in the naming of the Patriot Act, a naming that imports spectacle, the closures of meanings for “patriot” in war contexts, as well as the compound meanings of patriot as a peculiarly American keyword. The Patriot Act shows how legal illegibility is part of necropolitical law’s deception, operating through law as publicity to undo law as public thing. In 2022, we find ourselves in legal landscapes still conditioned by the Act. Chapter 2 traces the Patriot Act’s role in normalizing and consolidating necropolitical law’s planetary jurisdiction for the discounting of life in the unending long War on Terror.

Chapter 6 analyzes the April 2017 deployment in Afghanistan of the US military’s most powerful nonnuclear weapon, the Massive Air Ordinance Blast (MOAB). The bombing, the secrecy surrounding it, and the shock-and-awe media celebrations in the aftermath are all part of the cultivation of global audiences as spectator-consumers fascinated with the annihilatory killing technologies unleased by contemporary US militarized imperialism, which fuel necropolitical law’s discounting of life. Necropolitically, the MOAB strike illustrates “innovations in the technology of murder … [that] aim at disposing of a large number of victims in a relatively short span of time” (Mbembe 2003: 19).

Chapter 13 evaluates Israeli foreign policy amid the rise of the second Sharon government, the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq and the launch of the Road Map for Peace. It traces the rise of Ariel Sharon, as the primary decision-maker, and the strengthening grip of his informal circle of confidants on Israeli foreign policy. The chapter contributes to the literature by demonstrating that the Road Map was not, as stated by the Bush administration, a peace plan. Rather, it was a blueprint plan for regime change within the Palestinian Authority, designed to shift the power base from the then president, Yasser Arafat, to the newly created role of prime minister, which was taken up by Mahmoud Abbas. The chapter critically reviews the flaws of the Road Map, how Israel used it to pursue its own interests rather than advance the peace process, and why Abbas failed to perform his role as prime minister.