Disturbing Pleasures: Learning Popular Culture. - book reviews

Criticism, Spring, 1997 by Jerry Herron

So, what to do? Both authors offer useful and insightful--sometimes inspired--suggestions that might be summed up using a term of the sociologist Richard Sennett, who wrote about the "hidden injuries of class." The injuries inflicted by class, together with race and gender as these have been variously constructed, are perhaps not so "hidden" now as they were more than thirty years ago, when Sennett devised his term.

That this is so is surely to the good, and due in no small measure to the work of authors such as Dyson and Giroux, who act and write as public intellectuals without troubling unnecessarily about whether or not they may be operating without a license. Their commitment and honesty are license enough (although it is possible to wish that Giroux could write sometimes with more of Dyson's straightforwardness, and Dyson would occasionally allow himself more of Giroux's extended scope of argument). Now that the cat is out of the bag culturally, with respect to the injuries we have done to each other, victims and victimizers alike, it's anybody's guess whether the academy will be up to the public challenge that its own over-eager rhetoric invites, or whether the professors will turn this moment of opportunity into one more internecine squabble the relevance of which remains purely "academic." If the latter happens, it will be against the strong counter examples offered by Michael Dyson and Henry Giroux.