Disturbing Pleasures: Learning Popular Culture. - book reviews

Criticism, Spring, 1997 by Jerry Herron

disciplinary structures that it often criticizes. . . . What it fails to do

is to critically address a major prop of disciplinarity, which is the

notion of pedagogy as a transparent vehicle for transmitting truth and

knowledge. . . . The haunting question here is, what is it about pedagogy

that allows cultural studies theorists to ignore it? One answer may lie in

the refusal of cultural studies theorists to either take schooling

seriously as a site of struggle or to probe how traditional pedagogy

produces particular identities, how it constructs students through a range

of social forms. (130)

To his credit, Henry Giroux has never shied away from such concerns; he would doubtless accept as honorable the designation of his project--like the focus of his career generally--as "pedagogical." And for those who have used that term to dismiss his work as mere pedagogy the present essays are sufficient to discredit such condescension, particularly among people who ought to know better, much better.

Like Giroux, Michael Eric Dyson is a scholar who has been subjected to criticism not so much because of the work he has done, which is admirable, but because of the label that has been attached to it, and him--through no particular wish of his own. Dyson is frequently grouped, these days, with a number of other African American academics who are taken to represent--whether for or against--the last best hope of public intellectual life in the United States. (The example of Giroux alone is sufficient to challenge the authority and exclusivity of such claims, but facts often have little meaning in the domain of publicity, where labels take the place of reasoned inquiry, and where prejudice too easily supplants truth.) Fortunately for us, Professor Dyson--like Professor Giroux--is quite capable of making his own case, if given the chance.

That is precisely what he does in his second book, Making Malcolm, no less so than in his first one, Reflecting Black: African-American Cultural Criticism (University of Minnesota, 1993), which is a collection of essays and call-and-response-like "Improvisations." (Professor Dyson is also an ordained Baptist minister, as well as adept at rap lyrics; his writing is lively, diverse, "engaged" as Henry Giroux might say.) The topics of the first book are various, ranging from Michael Jackson to Toni Morrison, political correctness to gospel music, and including discussions of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X; the latter becomes the sole subject of Dyson's second book. Making Malcolm is not in any extended sense a biography, however; nor is it a critical study of the man's "life and works," in the usual sense. Instead, it is the account of a personal and deeply felt encounter between Dyson and another African American whom he never met in life, but whom he comes to know by working through the various "myths" crated around Malcolm:

As I have matured, journeying from factory worker to professor, it is

the Malcolm who valued truth over habit who has appealed most to