The Fourth Reich: Ishmael's Reed's The Terrible Twos and the Triumph of Celebrity Culture

Abstract

AbstractDonald Trump's rise to the U.S. presidency was foretold in many 20th century works of dystopian fiction as well as Western Marxist scholarship written during and after the Nazi era. The most prescient modern dystopian novel, Ishmael Reed's The Terrible Twos (1982), has much in common thematically with earlier American dystopian fiction while also sharing the bleak vision of U.S. mass (media) culture postulated by Frankfurt School theorists such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). But Reed's novel diverges dramatically from these earlier writings, whether fictive or scholarly, through its farcical and absurdist postmodernist depiction of a future neo‐fascist America in which popular (media) culture reigns triumphant even as spaces of resistance take shape amid the seemingly overdetermined ideological and cultural landscape.