This draws on a hitherto unpublished piece of mid-seventeenth-century life writing: the Triennial Travels of the Gaelic/English bilingual northern Scot James Fraser, who made a long journey through Europe from 1657 to 1659. Unlike élite travellers, he gives the clearest account of how the great aesthetic and religious sites of Florence were shown to the ordinary traveller, thus offering a unique source documenting the arrangement and display of celebrated collections. These experiences are processed by an intensely peripheral mind: highly educated at Aberdeen, but the Stuart-loyalist speaker of a minority British language, moving within his own Scottish networks on the Continent, untroubled and cosmopolitan.

After the execution of Mary Queen of Scots in 1587, her waiting gentlewoman, Barbara Mowbray Curle, and her family went into exile in Antwerp. There, they joined forces with the Anglo-Flemish Catholic propagandist Richard Verstegan, and together contributed to the section on Mary Queen of Scots in Verstegan’s book of Protestant atrocities, Theatrum Crudelitatem Haereticorum. The Curles also preserved such relics as they had been able to smuggle away and commissioned a memorial portrait and cenotaph for their dead queen. Eventually, Hugh Curle SJ seems to have been instrumental in the assembly of the composite reliquary surrounding a miniature of the queen known as the Blairs Jewel.

In the twenty-first century, the comedy of bunker emergence became a critical tool for calling out the dominance and abuses of a white male hegemony rooted in Cold War geopolitics and readily imagined ensconced underground. Whether as comedy, as tragedy, or balancing both, critical survivalist fictions and bunker emergence comedies use the bunker as space and as imaginary to evaluate the balance and tension between the bunker fantasy – the impetus that drives the survivalist and has created the protagonists of emergence comedies – and the factors dismissive of that same fantasy. The chapter begins with mainstream novels and movies that burrow inside survivalism as a means for identifying and diagnosing broad crises in masculinity. The following section studies primarily comic narratives of bunker survivors emerging from a Cold War past into a post–Cold War present. More recent texts from Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Room to Get Out and The Shape of Water adapt bunker captivity narratives as critiques of white masculine power, both military and cultural. The chapter concludes with Gerald Vizenor’s concept of ‘survivance,’ which misplaces and repurposes the affordances of survivalism for a transnational twenty-first century.

This chapter studies the global circulation of the bunker since the end of the Second World War and the ways its spaces and imaginaries continue to be adapted as global responses to various legacies of the Cold War today. What remained consistent were the spaces afforded for mobilizing national political imaginaries against outside forces and for either debate or attempts to limit debate over the identity of those imaginaries. Confined to the figurative lineaments of the nation-state, the bunker fantasy as geopolitical imaginary remains restrictive in its capacity to account for difference within national identity. The first section brings out the broad stakes of the global bunker fantasy through a survey of bunkering and civil defense in Europe, Russia, and Asia. The following sections deepen this survey through case studies of two small nation-states: Albania, where the totalitarian leader Enver Hoxha had 700,000 concrete bunkers constructed during the 1970s, and democratic, capitalist Switzerland, which regularly votes to continue mandating shelter facilities in every building constructed in the country. The apparent eccentricities of these smaller-scale extremes of civil defense illuminate the bunker fantasy in ways less openly visible within the dominant American Cold War imaginary. They show us, differently than the speculative visions from within the American model in the 1960s and 1980s from which the survivalism studied in Chapters 1 and 2 emerged, what could go wrong and what might plausibly go right in the bunker fantasy, and how the latter always existed inseparably from the former.

Twenty-first-century postapocalyptic fictions find in the legacy of the nuclear condition a way of thinking out of the rigid present, of questioning the fixed categories of that present, and of using the foreclosed future to imagine an alternate space and time from within the ontological bunker. Like dark tourism, these fictions require the staged authenticity of cataclysmic horror to validate the momentary glimpse of something unimaginably better. The dominant early twenty-first-century postapocalyptic genres of zombie fiction and future noir adapted the stark verities of Cold War nuclear fiction to reveal the horrors of life within the ontological bunker and to attempt at the same time to rei its pleasures. In contrast, Afrofuturist, Indigenous, and global South fictions from the 1970s through to the present misplace the epistemological bunker to open up dissident spacetimes within a centuries-old postapocalyptic ontology. The distant-future visions of both science and fiction deploy the same fantasy to imagine radically different worlds enclaved however tenuously in the concerns of the present, preserved in the bunker that links divergent temporalities. Misplaced from their spatiotemporal home, these appropriations provide us with new tools for reading this same bunker fantasy at work within what looked like stark verities in the discourse of American Cold War culture.