Fugitive cultures: Race, violence, and youth

College Literature, Spring 1998 by Kumar, Amitava

Giroux, Henry A. 1996. Fugitive cultures: Race, violence, and youth. New York: Routledge. $16.95 sc. 247 pp.

On a train in the summer, in India, I begin reading Henry Giroux's latest book I'm on my way to Ayodhya where Hindu fundamentalists had only a few years ago demolished a Muslim mosque. The crude fact that my salary, paid in dollars, enabled me to undertake this journey in air-conditioned comfort to a place where identities are being fought over with drawn knives, media technology, as well as pages torn from history books, must be set side by side with another set of details, more immediate in this country. These have to do with the book I then held in my hands, its protest against the political naivete often encountered in cultural studies, and the savagery of cuts in education and social welfare imposed by the Republicans with more than a little help from the Democrats.

This cultural collage is not a product of the cosmopolitan critic's whimsy. It is the dominant condition under global capitalism. In Giroux's own engagement-indeed rightful insistence-on a mode of critical contextualization that is criss-crossed with multiple concerns, the most persistent presence is youth in the U.S. More specifically, it is the specter of violence against youth that haunts Giroux's text. The reason for this is not difficult to find, especially when we are thinking of black youth. Giroux's citing of George Lipsitz's suggestive quote-"Unwanted as workers, underfunded as students, and undermined as citizens, minority youth seem wanted only by the criminal justice system" (39)-provides ground to launch a critique that seeks to analyze the reasons why things are the way they are. Hence, an analysis in terms of unemployment rates, drugs, and poverty but also, quite resolutely, junk culture, social disenfranchisement, and the lack of educational opportunity.

Sitting in that train compartment in eastern India, I went through the reasons for advancing culture-based critique. The increasingly unemployed or under-employed English-reading youth in India are provided each week, in a popular newspaper column headlined "Objects of Desire," the details of the latest consumer offerings of the West. (My nine year-old nephew proudly writes to me in a letter that he has just bought a tee-shirt which has the American flag on it.) Structurally, all this is not different from the condition in this country often described by Giroux, and which serves as the raison d'etre for this book. "Against the scarcity of opportunity, youth face a world of infnite messages and images designed to sell products or peddle senseless violence," Giroux writes. "In the light of radically altered social and economic conditions, educators need to fashion alternative analyses about how youths are being constructed pedagogically, economically, and culturally within the changing nature of a postmodern culture of violence" (29).

In the opening pages of his book, Giroux reveals why he might be well-suited to this task. His own youth was shaped in a working-class culture in which he learned the primacy of the body: the body bent in labor, or engaging other sleek and stylized bodies on the floor of that public sphere called the basketball court, or overtaken, as in his mother's case, by repeated attacks of epilepsy. If Giroux's writing on the "racial coding of violence" carries the memory of the intense working-out of the contradictory histories of bodily exchanges in his youth, his repeated emphasis on the deployment of a political understanding in the institutions of higher education and the role of "public intellectuals" bears testimony to his later experience as an oppositional, leftist academic. He was denied tenure by John Silber, the notoriously reactionary President of Boston University, who asked Giroux why he wrote such "shit" (8). Today, as the Director of the Waterbury Forum for Education and Cultural Studies at Penn State University, and as a widely, even incessantly, published author, Giroux commands a different type of attention. Even if in the case of Giroux, the individual, this might mean respectful legitimization, clearly the same cannot be said about this brand of pedagogy which faces hostile reactions from those in power who feel threatened by it. The question that follows then is this: from his position of considerable importance, what kind of public pedagogy model does Giroux provide us?

The point of departure for Giroux is, I believe, a real and urgent one: "Few theorists within the field of cultural studies make pedagogy central to their work; nor do they read the politics and practice of cultural studies as fundamentally pedagogical" (18-19). We struggle under the regime of the peculiar division of labor, which means that questions of education get to be posed most commonly in composition and communication programs while radical issues of popular culture tend to be taken up in the new spaces of cultural studies departments. Giroux's scholarship problematizes this distinction; it makes both aspects of the equation dialectically necessary to any effort at progressive education.