Pedagogy/Power

In recent years, professional intellectuals and politicians have exhibited a rare shared interest in the significance and content of popular culture in the United States. During the 1996 political campaign, Bob Dole jockeyed for position in the Republican nomination race with his widely covered attack on the “nightmares of depravity” in popular culture, taking a broad swipe at violence and crudity in popular music and films in an effort to define values and morality as campaign issues. Dole’s position was widely criticized in various media as inconsistent, even vacuous. But Bill Clinton’s responses - his own criticism of violence in popular culture, a morally-tinged offensive on “the crime issue,” the endorsement of uniforms for public school students, his promotion of the so-called “V-chip — sought to elbow Dole aside rather than develop an alternative stance.

The narrowness of discourse on cultural politics during the 1996 campaign was striking. Particularly absent were liberatory stances toward cultural expressions that viewed popular culture as a possible means for vitalizing civil society rather than as the origins of threats or a source of political whipping boys. Henry A. Giroux’s Fugitive Cultures: race, violence, and youth attempts to bring an institutional focus (of sorts) to the politics of culture, and in some ways to offer alternatives to the politics of the presidential campaign. The election was unconsummated when his book was published, but Dole’s position, staked out most prominently in 1995, is a touchstone of Giroux’s discussion. “Dole’s moral indignation,” he writes, “is not merely fueled by political opportunism but also by the imperatives of a political project that engages the cultural public sphere in order to control rather than democratize it.” (98) Clinton’s maneuvers on the cultural front took place after Giroux’s book had gone to press, but they too, while less sweeping than Dole’s, have been opportunistic and sought to use political institutions to control the public sphere rather than to invigorate it. Giroux seeks a more “democratic” approach aimed at “altering the sites of learning that youth inhabit. (22)” Yet early in the book, Giroux signals that he may have ceded too much ground to the prevailing terms of the discussion of youth and culture. Referring to representations of youth both in popular culture and in the interpretations of “conservative policy initiatives,” Giroux writes: “The political and pedagogical implications of such representations pose serious challenges to progressives and other cultural workers who can no longer sit back and allow popular teaching machines to go unchecked in their attempts to peddle violence for profit (23).” Understood as such, these challenges position Giroux uncomfortably between struggling to undermine one set of institutionally-situated cultural authorities and seeking to mediate cultural meanings, albeit more openly, through a similar set of institutions.

The institutional locus Giroux focuses upon is school, though he also argues that progressives and cultural workers should expand their pedagogy outside of traditional teaching institutions. He advocates a “critical pedagogy” that would infuse education with the methods and results of cultural studies, and pursues two dimensions of this project in the book. First, he attempts to indicate the theoretical substance of a critical pedagogy incorporating cultural studies. Giroux argues that cultural studies have underlined the centrality of popular cultural forms as sites of politically relevant discourse and agency. Understanding of these forms and their content is therefore central to teaching practices, particularly since youth often occupy the “fugitive cultures” of the book’s title. The term refers to “a conflicting and dynamic set of experiences rooted in a working-class youth culture marked by flows and uncertain interventions into daily life (8).” Giroux argues in his opening chapter that teaching within the dynamics and discourses of these cultures provides the opportunity to recast the relationship between teachers and students, as well as to facilitate students’ abilities to engage cultural contexts more critically. The methods and interpretations ostensibly provided by cultural studies enable teachers, and subsequently their students, to address the complex interplay of domination and resistance among the elements of popular culture. To demonstrate the usefulness...