More Praise for Impure Acts

“There is no one writing in the U.S. today who can

bridge culture, politics, and pedagogy as brilliantly as
Henry Giroux does in Impure Acts. Once again with
this book Giroux remains unchallenged as the premiere
scholar of critical and cultural pedagogy.”

—Kostas Myrsiades, West Chester University

“This is a hardhitting work. Giroux refuses to yield

any ground to the right and its current attacks on
cultural studies and the politics of the left. Once again
Giroux advances the discourse in this field, outlining a
critical pedagogical project that locates resistance and
political insurgency at every level of daily cultural life.
This work requires careful study and close analysis.”

—Norman K.Denzin, University of Illinois

at Urbana-Champaign

“Henry Giroux deftly shows how corporate culture

functions as a cultural teaching machine that thwarts
democratic practice. By forging links between critical
educators and cultural studies scholars, he redefines the
crucial role both can play as public intellectuals attuned
to the economic, social, and ideological power relations
of multinational capitalism.”

—Lee Quinby, Rochester Institute of Technology

 impure
acts

T H E P R AC T I C A L
T H E P R AC T I C A L

POLITICS OF
POLITICS OF

C U LT U R A L
C U LT U R A L

STUDIES
STUDIES

Henry A.Giroux

Routledge
New York London
2000
Published in 2000 by

Routledge
29 West 35th Street
New York, NY 10001

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.

Published in Great Britain by

Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane
London EC4P 4EE

Copyright © 2000 by Routledge

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or

reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or
other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying
and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Giroux, Henry A.
Impure acts: the practical politics of cultural studies/
Henry A.Giroux.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-415-92655-6 (hb)—ISBN 0-415-92656-4 (pb)
1. Politics and culture—United States.
2. United States—Civilization—1970.
3. Culture—Study and teaching—United States.
4. Political culture—United States.
5. Multiculturalism—United States.
6. Popular culture—United States.
7. Mass media—Political aspects—United States.
8. Technological innovations—Social aspects—
United States. I. Title.

E169.12.G565 2000
973.92–dc21 99–054011
ISBN 0-203-90500-8 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-90593-8 (Adobe eReader Format)

ISBN 0-415-92656-4 (Print Edition)
For Susan
 contents

Acknowledgments ix

0 Revitalizing the Culture 1

of Politics
An Introduction

1 Rethinking Cultural Politics 16

Challenging Political Dogmatism from Right to Left

2 Schooling and the Politics of 39

Corporate Culture

3 The Limits of Academic 61

Multiculturalism

4 Teaching the Political 87

with Homi Bhabha
(Henry A.Giroux
and Susan Searls Giroux)

5 Teaching the Cultural 107

with Disney

6 Performing Cultural Studies 126

Notes 142
Index 161
 acknowledgments

In writing this book, I have drawn on the help and work of a number of
people. I owe an enormous theoretical debt to Lawrence Grossberg,
Stuart Hall, Stanley Aronowitz, Robin Kelley, and David Theo
Goldberg. I also want to thank Carol Becker for her unfailing support in
providing me with an opportunity to teach and think through some of
the ideas in this book while in Chicago during the summer of 1999. Paul
Youngquist, Imre Szeman, Ralph Rodriquez, and Donaldo Macedo
offered feedback and wonderful conversations about different sections of
the manuscript. Eric Weiner provided extraordinary research assistance
and Heidi Hendershott was always looking over my shoulder and
providing new material for me to read. Ken Saltman provided invaluable
criticism on a number of chapters. I am deeply indebted to Bill
Germano, my editor, for supporting this project from its inception and
pushing me hard to make a number of important revisions, and to Sue
Stewart for all of her great administrative help. I would also like to thank
my students and all the members of the Wednesday study group, who
are always a great source of hope and education for me. Thanks, Grizz.
Thanks to my three wonderful boys, Jack, Brett, and Chris, whose visits
always saved me from working too much. To my wonderful partner,
Susan Searls Giroux, who read, edited, and was engaged in every page of
this manuscript. This book is dedicated to her for her intelligence,
warmth, and comradeship in both good and hard times.

ix
x AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

Needless to say, the views represented in this book are my own, and I
make no pretense to speak for the field(s) of cultural studies. This book
has been in my head for over a decade and based on my ongoing
experiences in and outside of the academy, many conversations with
friends, and ongoing research in the areas of social theory, critical
pedagogy, and cultural politics. What emerges is a critical analysis that
hopefully will contribute to the ongoing debate about the purpose and
meaning of cultural studies, particularly one that links theory and
practice, knowledge and power, and economic justice and cultural
politics as part of a broader project of deepening and expanding the
principles of a radical democracy to all aspects of society.
Some of these chapters contain sections drawn from previously
published material, which appeared in the following: The Arizona Journal
of Hispanic Cultural Studies; Journal of Composition Theory; and Henry A.
Giroux, Corporate Culture and the Attack on Higher Education and Public
Schooling (Bloomington, Ind.: Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation,
1999); Henry A.Giroux, “The War Against Cultural Politics: Beyond
Conservative and Neo-Enlightenment Left ‘Oppositions’: A Critique,” in
Carlos J.Ovando and Peter McLaren, eds. The Politics of Multiculturalism
and Bilingual Education: Students and Teachers Caught in the Crossfire (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 2000) pp. 50–61.
 zero
0

Re v i t a l i z i n g
Rev i t a l i z i n g
the Culture
t h e C u l t u re
o f Po l i t i c s
o f Po l i t i c s

An Introduction

What does it mean to take seriously, in our present conjuncture, the thought that
cultural politics and questions of culture, of discourse, of metaphor are absolutely
deadly political questions?
—Stuart Hall, “Subjects in History: Making Diasporic Identities”

T H E C R I S I S O F P O L I T I C A L C U LT U R E

Within the current historical conjuncture, cultural issues appear to

dominate the American political landscape, but in a framework that
might best be described as schizophrenic. Viewed as a sphere of
impressive technological inventiveness, on the one hand, and a terrain
beset by the increasing contradictions of democracy on the other, culture
is both celebrated and scorned. In the first instance, there is the general
recognition that the new technologies of culture, obvious in all things
electronic and computer based, have radically altered the traditional
relationship between science and progress, on one hand, and the private

1
2 IMPURE AC T S

and public spheres on the other. Information has now become capital;
the circulation of texts, speech, and images are no longer impeded by
space. Moreover, the culture of print has been forever altered by the rise
of a powerful visual and digitally produced culture. For many, this
radical change within the cultural sphere represents a new revolution in
the marriage of technology and the applied sciences, refashioning how
we think of power, politics, and everyday life as part of a larger, wired
global reality. But the break-through in the computer-based information
revolution elicits more than awe; it also signals new configurations of
wealth, power, and leadership, partly mirrored in the control exercised
by media conglomerates such as Disney, Viacom, and Time Warner, and
in the endless media celebration of corporate leadership patterned after
the Bill Gates clones that sprout up daily in Silicon Valley.l
The electronic and technical innovations in the cultural sphere, such
as the Internet, cable television, and digitally based communication
systems, constitute new and powerful components in shaping how we
define, understand, and mediate all things social. Yet the largely positive
view of culture that accompanies such innovations appears almost
exclusively in technical and practical terms, which leads in the second
instance to the negative “other” of culture. Although the politics of
culture fashioned as a technological laboratory (what Herbert Marcuse
calls “the totality of instruments, devices and contrivances which
characterize”2 the cultural sphere) retains a glimmer of progress in the
popular imagination, the culture of politics—culture’s capacity to give rise
to and nourish those discursive resources and material relations of power
that shape democratic public life—appears to be in crisis, subject to
derision and scorn by forces that occupy a wide range of ideological
perspectives. Many educators, intellectuals, and policy makers view the
notion of culture as a dangerous or romantic form of practical politics,
with its proliferation of critical discourses designed to address major
social problems and remake institutional arrangements.3 According to
pundits across the ideological spectrum, the strategic and performative
nature of culture as a terrain of politics, having some purchase on
creating social change through the expansion of democratic identities,
relations, and institutional arrangements, is posed as either a threat to
 REVITALIZING THE CULTURE OF POLITICS 3

established configurations of power or as a cynical diversion from “real”

class-based, political struggles.
The evisceration of political culture is especially evident in a post-
Littleton, Colorado, and post-Monica Lewinsky climate in which
cynicism replaces hope as the vast majority of the nation’s people feel
removed from an electoral democratic system whose impact seems most
felt in the tabloid media, while largely absent from social life. Politics
signals its own exhaustion as it appears largely as a choice, as Russell
Jacoby sees it, “between the status quo or something worse. Other
alternatives do not seem to exist.”4 Coupled with the general public’s
increasing loss of faith in public government, public institutions, and the
democratic process, the only form of agency or civic participation offered
to the American people is consumerism as opposed to substantive forms
of citizenship.5 As Robert W.McChesney argues,

To be effective, democracy requires that people feel a connection to their

fellow citizens, and that this connection manifests itself through a variety
of nonmarket organizations and institutions. A vibrant political culture
needs community groups, libraries, public schools, neighborhood
organizations, cooperatives, public meeting places, voluntary
associations, and trade unions to provide ways for citizens to meet,
communicate, and interact with their fellow citizens. Neoliberal
democracy, with its notion of the market uber alles, takes dead aim at
this sector. Instead of citizens, it produces consumers. Instead of
communities, it produces shopping malls. The net result is an atomized
society of disengaged individuals who feel demoralized and socially
powerless.6

The erasure of democratic politics from the cultural arena can also be
seen in the suppression of dissent across a wide variety of public spheres,
including the media, universities, and public schools, which are
increasingly coming under the control of megacorporations or being
corporatized.7
As conglomerates such as Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, and
Bertelsmann gobble up tv networks, radio stations, music industries, and
a host of other media outlets, it becomes more difficult for stories critical
of these concentrated industries to see the light of day. When Viacom
4 IMPURE AC T S

recently acquired CBS most of the stories covering the event in the
dominant media focused on the personalities of the top CEOs involved
in the deal. With the exceptions of a few reports in the Boston Globe, the
New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune, the threat the deal posed to the
free flow of information and the implications it might have for
undermining a healthy democracy were largely ignored in the dominant
media. Concentrated corporate control does not welcome stories or
investigative reports that are critical of corporate culture and its policies
and practices. For example, soon after Disney bought ABC, Jim
Hightower, a popular radio talk show host, was fired for making critical
remarks about the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the Disney
corporation. Similarly, in 1998 Disney-owned ABC refused to air a 20/
20 segment by Brian Ross that was critical of Disney World and its
hiring practices, specifically its refusal to do adequate background checks
on its employees. Similar examples can be found in all of the major
networks. What is clear is that hard-hitting progressives such as Noam
Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Stanley Aronowitz, Angela Davis, and bell
hooks rarely appear on national television, national radio, or in the
dominant print media.
Similarly, as higher education is increasingly corporatized, it also
becomes subject to policies and practices that limit dissent and the free
flow of information. For example, progressive and leftist intellectuals find it
increasingly difficult to either protect their existing appointments or to get
hired. The attack on the democratic principles of academic freedom and
intellectual diversity are further exacerbated by the moral panics created in
the media by conservative politicians, academics, and policy makers such
as William Bennett, Pat Buchanan, Roger Kimball, Charles J.Sykes, Roger
Shattuck, and William Kristol. These conservatives benefit significantly
from an endless amount of financial backing from such right-wing sources
as the John M.Olin Foundation, the Harry Bradley Foundation, and the
Smith Richardson Foundation, to name only a few. These conservative
public intellectuals are far outside of the mainstream of popular opinion on
many issues. Yet they are regularly hosted in the dominant media as
celebrities unwaveringly dedicated to bashing left progressive academics
and offering instant sound bites about the decline of civility, the corruption
 REVITALIZING THE CULTURE OF POLITICS 5

of Western values, and the growing need to purge the universities of any
dissenting voices, especially if they come from the left. Clearly, left
progressive positions that might offer a challenge to such views are
conspicuously missing from the dominant media. Such an assault on the
culture of democratic politics is further strengthened as schools divorce
themselves from pedagogies and models of learning that address important
social issues, interrogate how power works in society, or engage crucial
considerations of social justice as constitutive of the interrelationship
between cultural practice and democratic politics.
Though most commentators would argue that political culture has been
on the decline since Watergate, there is little understanding of the
dialogical relationship between culture and democracy. Typically,
conservatives believe that American culture is in crisis and the problem is
democracy. In this discourse, democracy promotes unpatriotic dissent,
moral relativism, the dumbing down of schools, welfare, and the lowering
of standards, most of which can be traced to the upheavals of the 1960s.8
Such sentiments are echoed in the halls of Congress by majority whip Tom
Delay, who believes that the culture of politics has been corrupted by the
breakdown of religious values, moral relativism, and the bodies of welfare
recipients who drain the national treasury9 For Delay, moral righteousness
is the defining postulate of civic virtue and is considered far more
important than the democratic principles of liberty, freedom, and equality,
which more often than not give rise to forms of dissent that undermine the
true believer’s faith in “certainty and the absolute conviction [that] they are
right.”10 Such views can also be found in high-profile conservatives such as
presidential hopefuls Pat Buchanan and Gary Bauer.
For many neoliberals, in contrast, the crisis of political culture is
presented in somewhat different terms. In this perspective, democracy
is in crisis and the problem is culture. Yet culture is less a problem for
its lack of moral principles than it is for its proliferation of cultural
differences, its refusal to offer a unified homage to the dictates of the
market, and its spread of violence and incivility through popular
culture. In this model of liberalism, popular culture threatens the image
of the public sphere as white, undermines the liberal notion of
consensus, and challenges dominant values that celebrate instant
6 IMPURE AC T S

gratification and the endless pursuit of getting and spending. In this

view, the public sphere undermines the freedom associated with private
gain and resurrects a notion of the social marked by political
differences and the allegedly antagonistic calls for expanding
democratic rights. On the other hand, liberalism in its more
“compassionate” strains advocates a discourse of culture as gentility
and civility, one which dismisses the democratic impulses of mass
culture as barbaric, and the ethos and representations of an
electronically based popular culture as irredeemably violent, crude, and
in poor taste.11 What both positions share is a cynicism toward and a
condemnation of national political culture as impure, sullied, and
corrupted by the logic and discourse of difference. Both positions
condemn those democratic, nonmarket, noncommodified forces which
provide a critical vocabulary for challenging the self-serving notion that
the free market and corporate domination of society represent the only
feasible alternative to the status quo and that the neoliberal view of
society represents humanity at its best. Neither position offers any hope
that America’s future will be any different from its present.
Finally, there is the notion largely held by an orthodox materialist left
that culture as a potential sphere of political education and change
undermines the very notion of politics itself, which is often reduced to
struggles over material issues rather than struggles that accentuate
language, experience, pedagogy, and identity.12 This position appears stuck
in time, collapsing under the weight of its own intellectual weariness and
political exhaustion. Weighted down in a nine-teenth-century version of
Marxism, contemporary scholarship from the left often refuses to pluralize
the notion of antagonism by simply reducing it to class conflicts while
further undermining the force of political economy by limiting it to a
ghostly economism.13 In addition, orthodox leftist criticism mirrors the
increasing cynicism and despair exemplified in its endless invocation of
such terms as “reality politics” and its call for a return to materialism. In
the end, its rhetoric appears largely as high-minded puritanism (“the only
true members of the church”) matched only by an equally staunch
ideological rigidity that barely conceals its contempt for notions of
difference, cultural politics, and social movements.
 REVITALIZING THE CULTURE OF POLITICS 7

B E YO N D T H E C U LT U R E O F C Y N I C I S M

In contrast to these positions, I argue in this book that struggles over

culture are not a weak substitute for a “real” politics, but are central to any
struggle willing to forge relations among discursive and material relations
of power, theory, and practice, as well as pedagogy and social change. I
want to address the contemporary politics of cynicism by making a more
substantial case for both the politics of culture and the culture of politics—
as well as the primacy of the pedagogical as a constitutive element of a
democratic political culture that links struggles over identities and meaning
to broader struggles over material relations of power. In the chapters that
follow, I offer some examples of what it might mean to theorize cultural
studies as a form of practical politics in which the performative and the
strategic emerge out of a broader project informed by the shifting and
often contradictory contexts in which popular politics and power intersect
so as to extend the possibilities of democratic public life. Such examples,
and the implications they have for a practical version of cultural studies,
range from an analysis of the multicultural discourses of academia to the
popular representations and institutional formations of the Disney empire.
All of these examples point to the need for a new kind of cultural politics—
and a new kind of political culture—in which discourse, image, and desire
intersect with the operations of material relations of power to foreground
the ways in which power is deployed, experienced, and made productive
within and across multiple spheres of daily life.14 Such examples also speak
to the necessity of reinvigorating the intellectual life necessary to sustain a
vibrant political culture and, as Elizabeth Long sees it, “putting knowledge
in the service of a more realized democracy”15
The regulatory nature of culture and its power to circulate goods,
discipline discourses, and regulate bodies suggests that the nervous system
of daily life is no longer to be found in the simple workings and display of
raw industrial power—the old means of production—but in the wired
infrastructures that compute and transmit information at speeds that defy
the imagination. As it becomes increasingly clear that the politics of culture
is a substantive and not secondary force in shaping everyday and global
politics, the culture of politics provides the ideological markers for
8 IMPURE AC T S

asserting the ethical and public referents to think at the limits of this new
merging of technology and politics. No longer relegated simply to the
Olympian heights of high culture, or summarily dismissed simply as a
reflection of the economic base, culture has finally gained its rightful place
institutionally and productively as a crucial object of debate, a powerful
structure of meaning-making that cannot be abstracted from power, and a
site of intense struggle over how identities are to be shaped, democracy
defined, and social justice revived as a serious element of cultural politics.

C U LT U R E A N D P O L I T I C S

As the interface between global capital and new electronic technologies

refigure and reshape the face of culture, the importance of thinking
through the possibilities and limits of the political takes on a new
urgency. What constitutes both the subject and the object of the political
mutates and expands as the relationship between knowledge and power
becomes a powerful force in producing new forms of wealth, increasing
the gap between the rich and the poor, and radically influencing how
people think, act, and behave. Culture as a form of political capital
becomes a formidable force as the means of producing, circulating, and
distributing information transform all sectors of the global economy and
usher in a veritable revolution in the ways in which meaning is
produced, identities are shaped, and historical change unfolds within and
across national boundaries. For instance, on the global and national
levels, the foreshortening of time and space has radically altered how the
power and wealth of multinational corporations shape the cultures,
markets, and material infrastructures of all societies, albeit with unevenly
distributed results.16 As wealth accumulates in fewer hands, more service
jobs command the economies of both strong and weak nations.
Furthermore, Westernized cultural forms and products erode local
differences, producing increasingly homogenized cultural landscapes.
Finally, as state services bend to the forces of privatization, valuable
social services such as housing, schools, hospitals, and public
broadcasting are abandoned to the logic of the market. For many, the
 REVITALIZING THE CULTURE OF POLITICS 9

results are far-reaching: an increase in human poverty and suffering,

massive population shifts and migrations, and a crisis of politics
marked by the erosion and displacement of civic values and democratic
social space.
Increasingly within this new world order, the culture-producing
industries have occupied a unique and powerful place in shaping how
people around the globe live, make sense of their lives, and shape the
future, often under conditions not of their own making. Stuart Hall
succinctly captures the substantive nature of this “cultural revolution”
when he argues,

The domain constituted by the activities, institutions and practices we

call ‘cultural’ has expanded out of all recognition. At the same time,
culture has assumed a role of unparalleled significance in the structure
and organization of late-modern society, in the processes of development
of the global environment and in the disposition of its economic and
material resources. In particular, the means of producing, circulating and
exchanging culture have been dramatically expanded through the new
media technologies and the information revolution. Directly, a much
greater proportion of the world’s human, material and technical
resources than ever before go into these sectors. At the same time,
indirectly, the cultural industries have become the mediating element in
every other process.17

According to Hall, culture has become the primary means through

which social practices are produced, circulated, and enacted, on one
hand, and given meaning and significance on the other. Culture becomes
political not only as it is mobilized through the media and other
institutional forms as they work to secure certain forms of authority and
legitimate specific social relations but also as a set of practices that
represents and deploys power thereby shaping particular identities,
mobilizing a range of passions, and legitimating precise forms of political
culture. Culture in this instance becomes productive, inextricably linked
to the related issues of power and agency. As Lawrence Grossberg points
out, the politics of culture is fore-grounded in “broader cultural terms [of
how] questions of agency involve the possibilities of action as
interventions into the processes by which reality is continually being
10 IMPURE AC T S

transformed and power enacted…. Agency involves relations of

participation and access, the possibilities of moving into particular sites of
activity and power, and of belonging to them in such a way as to be able
to enact their powers”18 What Grossberg is suggesting here regarding the
possibilities for critical agency has important implications for engaging
culture in both political and pedagogical terms.
As I have written elsewhere, culture has now become the pedagogical
force par excellence and its function as a broader educational condition
for learning is crucial in putting into place forms of literacy within
diverse social and institutional spheres through which people define
themselves and their relationship to the social world.19 The relationship
between culture and pedagogy in this instance cannot be abstracted from
the central dynamics of politics and power.
Culture from the broadest perspective is always entangled with power
and becomes political in a double sense. First, questions of ownership,
access, and governance are crucial to understanding how power is
deployed in regulating the images, meanings, and ideas that frame the
agendas that shape daily life. Second, culture deploys power in its
connections with the realm of subjectivity—that is, it offers up
identifications and subject positions through the forms of knowledge,
values, ideologies, and social practices it makes available within unequal
relations of power to different sectors of the national and global
communities. As a pedagogical force, culture makes a claim on certain
histories, memories, and narratives. As James Young has noted, it tells
“both the story of events and its unfolding as narrative” in order to
influence how individuals take up, modify, resist, and accommodate
themselves to particular forms of cultural citizenship, present material
relations of power, and specific notions of the future.20
I argue in this book that the current crisis of cultural politics and
political culture facing the United States is intimately connected to the
erasure of the social as a constitutive category for expanding democratic
identities, social practices, and public spheres. In this instance, memory is
not being erased as much as it is being reconstructed under
circumstances in which public forums for serious debate are being
eroded. The crisis of memory and the social is further amplified by the
 REVITALIZING THE CULTURE OF POLITICS 11

withdrawal of the state as a guardian of the public trust and its growing
lack of investment in those sectors of social life that promote the public
good. Moreover, the crisis of the social is further aggravated, in part, by
an unwillingness on the part of many liberals and conservatives to address
the importance of formal and informal education as a force for encouraging
critical participation in civic life, and pedagogy as a crucial cultural, political,
and moral practice for connecting politics, power, and social agency to the
broader formative processes of democratic public life. Such concerns not
only raise questions about the meaning and role of politics and its
relationship to culture, but also suggest the necessity to rethink the purpose
and function of pedagogy in light of the calls by diverse ideological interests
to corporatize all levels of schooling in the United States. The importance of
challenging the threat to public life and political culture posed by the
corporatizing of schools cannot be underestimated.
The demise of politics as a progressive force for change within the
cultural sphere is particularly evident in the recent attempts to corporatize
higher education, which, while offering one of the few sites for linking
learning with social change, is increasingly being redefined in market
terms as corporate culture subsumes democratic culture and critical
learning is replaced by an instrumentalist logic that celebrates the
imperatives of the bottom line, downsizing, and outsourcing. Obsessed
with grant writing, fund-raising, and capital improvements, higher
education increasingly devalues its role as a democratic public sphere
committed to the broader values of an engaged and critical citizenry.
Private gain now cancels out the public good, and knowledge that does not
immediately translate into jobs or profits is considered ornamental. In this
context, pedagogy is depoliticized and academic culture becomes the
medium for sorting students into an iniquitous social order that celebrates
commercial power at the expense of broader civil and public values.
Under attack by corporate interests, the political right, and neoliberal
doc-trines, pedagogical discourses that define themselves in political and
moral terms—particularly as they draw attention to the operations of
power and its relationship to the production of knowledge and sub-
jectivities—are either derided or ignored. Reduced to the status of
training, pedagogy in its conservative and neoliberal versions appears
12 IMPURE AC T S

completely at odds with those versions of critical teaching designed to

provide students with the skills and information necessary to think
critically about the knowledge they gain, and what it might mean for
them to challenge antidemocratic forms of power. All too often critical
pedagogy, within and outside of the academy, is either dismissed as
irrelevant to the educational process or is appropriated simply as a
technique. The conservative arguments are well-known in this regard,
particularly as they are used to reduce pedagogical practice either to the
transmission of beauty and truth or to management schemes designed to
teach civility, which generally means educating various social groups
about how to behave within the parameters of their respective racial,
class, and gender-specific positions. Missing from these discourses is any
reference to pedagogy as an ideology and social practice engaged in the
production and dissemination of knowledge, values, and identities within
concrete institutional formations and relations of power.
Similarly, those liberal and progressive discourses that do link
pedagogy to politics often do so largely within the logic of social
reproduction and refuse to recognize that the effects of pedagogy are
conditioned rather than determined and thus are open to a range of
outcomes and possibilities. Lost here is any recognition of a pedagogy
without guarantees, a pedagogy that because of its contingent and
contextual nature holds the promise of producing a language and set of
social relations through which the just impulses and practices of a
democratic society can be experienced and related to the power of self-
definition and social responsibility.21 On the other hand, neoliberalism
with its celebration of the logic of the market opts for pedagogies that
confirm the autonomous individual rather than empower social groups
and celebrates individual choice over plurality and participation.
Excellence for too many neoliberals and conservatives is often about
individual achievement and has little to do with equity or providing the
skills and knowledge that students might need to link learning with
social justice and motivation with social change.
The evisceration of democratic political culture from public life is also
evident in the current attempts of conservatives and liberals to hollow out
the state by withdrawing support from a number of sectors of social life
 REVITALIZING THE CULTURE OF POLITICS 13

whose deepest roots are moral rather than commercial and provide a
number of services for addressing dire social problems, particularly as they
affect the poor, excluded, and oppressed. The evisceration of politics is also
visible in the ongoing legislative attacks on immigrants and other people of
color, in the containment of political discourse by corporations that
increasingly control the flow of information in the public sphere, and in the
shrinking of noncommodified public spheres that provide opportunities for
dialogue, critical debate, and public education.

TOWA R D A P R AC T I C A L C U LT U R A L P O L I T I C S

Central to any practical politics of cultural studies is the need to reinvent

power as more than resistance and domination, as more than a marker
for identity politics, and as more than a methodological ploy for linking
discourse to material relations of power. All of these notions of power are
important, but none adequately signifies the need for cultural studies to
foreground the struggle over relations of power as a central principle that
views cultural politics as a civic and moral performance linking theory to
practice and knowledge to strategies of engagement and transformation.
The reinvigoration of political culture in this position becomes a strategic
and pedagogical intervention that has a purchase on people’s daily
struggles and defines itself partly through its (modest) attempts to keep
alive a notion of citizenship as a crucial performative principle for
activating democratic change. Toward this end, cultural studies must be
guided by the political insight that its own projects emerge out of social
formations in which power is not simply put on display but signifies
ongoing at tempts to expand and deepen the practice of democracy.
Cultural studies is more than simply an academic discourse; it offers a
critical vocabulary for shaping public life as a form of practical politics.
This book was written in response to the growing academicization of
cultural studies and the increasing cynicism and despair that has taken
over national political life in the United States. It grew out of my concern
with the deception of the discourse of democracy and ethics among
progressive cultural workers and educators. Cultural studies, like
14 IMPURE AC T S

education, no longer appears as a way of intervening in the production of

an active citizenry. Too much of what passes for analysis in these fields
represents the bad faith of careerism and the obscure discourse of
hermetic academics who no longer believe that it is necessary to either
speak with and to a larger public or address important social issues.
Where the vestiges of careerism are not in place, the cultural politics of
the left appears to be embroiled in what Michel Foucault once called
polemics.22 Lost here is any attempt to persuade or convince, to produce a
serious dialogue.23 All that remain are arguments buttressed by an air of
privileged insularity that appear beyond interrogation, coupled with
forms of rhetorical cleverness built upon the model of war and
unconditional surrender, designed primarily to eliminate one’s opponent
but having little to say about what it means to offer alternative discourses
to conservative and neoliberal efforts to prevent the democratic
principles of liberty, equality, and freedom from being put into practice
in our schools and other crucial spheres of society.24 As Chantal Mouffe
argues, this is the Jacobin model of scholarship (or as Herbert Marcuse
aptly put it, “scholarshit”) in which one attempts “to destroy the other in
order to establish [one’s] point of view and then not allow the other the
possibility of coming back democratically. That is the struggle among
enemies—the complete destruction of the other.”25 In short, the avoidance
principle at work in political culture often finds its counterpart in the
academy in forms of theorizing that do little more than instrumentalize,
polemicize, obscure, or insulate—and, of course, this is a discourse and
pedagogy that generally threatens no one. However, the best work in
cultural studies and cultural politics challenges the culture of political
avoidance while demonstrating how intellectuals might live up to the
historical responsibility they bear in bridging the relationship between
theoretical rigor and social relevance, social criticism and practical
politics, individual scholarship and public pedagogy, as part of a broader
commitment to defending democratic societies. Evidence of models can
be found in the work of Robin Kelley, Nancy Fraser, Chantal Mouffe,
Stanley Aronowitz, Cornel West, Michael Dyson, Joy James, Lawrence
Grossberg, Toni Morrison, Edward Said, Arif Dirlik, Stuart Hall,
Meachan Morris, Ellen Willis, Carol Becker, Key Chow, Susan Bordo,
 REVITALIZING THE CULTURE OF POLITICS 15

and others. It can also be found in the struggles of young people today,
many of them in the universities who are breaking down the boundaries
between academic life and public politics. Such activism was recently
visible in the actions of thousands of college students participating in the
campus anti-sweatshop movement as well as in the actions of those brave
students from the University of California-Berkeley who demonstrated
and went on hunger strikes to save the Ethnic Studies department.26 It
was also on display in the demonstrations in Seattle at the World Trade
Organization meeting. All of these academics and students appear to take
seriously Pierre Bourdieu’s admonition that “[t]here is no genuine
democracy without genuine opposing critical powers… [and it is the
obligation of such intellectuals to be able] to make their voices heard
directly in all the areas of public life in which they are competent.”27
Hopefully, this book makes a small contribution to such an effort.
 one
1

Re t h i n k i n g
Re t h i n k i n g
Cultural
C u l t u re
Po l i t i c s
Po l i t i c s

Challenging Political
Dogmatism from
Right to Left

…the multiculturalists, the hordes of camp-followers, afflicted by the French diseases,

the mock-feminists, the commissars, the gender-and-power freaks, the hosts of new
historicists and old materialists…[seem] to me a monumental representation of the
enemies of the aesthetic who are in the act of overwhelming us.
—Harold Bloom, “They Have the Numbers; We Have the Heights”

If we wish to do politics, let us organize groups, coalitions, demonstrations, lobbies,

whatever; let us do politics. Let us not think our academic work is already that.
— Todd Gitlin, “The Anti-Political Populism of Cultural Studies”

I N T RO D U C T I O N

Besieged by the powerful forces of vocationalism and neoconservative cultural

warriors, on one hand, and the growing presence of left orthodoxy on the
other, many academics are caught in an ideological crossfire regarding their

16
 RETHINKING CULTURAL POLITICS 17

civic and political responsibilities. Under pressure from conservatives,

educators are increasingly being influenced to define their roles within the
language of the corporate culture, buttressed by an appeal to a discourse of
objectivity and neutrality that separates political questions from cultural and
social issues. Within such a discourse, educators are being pressured to become
servants of corporate power, multinational operatives functioning primarily as
disengaged specialists wedded to the imperatives of academic professionalism.
Yet conservatives are not the only ones willing to attack the notion of a
progressive cultural politics—one that links knowledge and power to the
imperatives of social change—as a democratic, countervailing force to the
corporatizing of academic culture. A small but influential number of progressives
and educators on the left are urging professors to renounce, if not altogether flee,
the university in order to engage in “real” political struggles. Within this discourse,
it is ideologically damning to argue, as Andrew Ross does, that cultural politics
is “an inescapable part of any advocacy of social change.”1
What is surprising about the current attack on education, especially in
light of the growing corporatization and privatization at all levels of schooling,
is the refusal on the part of many theorists to rethink the role academics
might play in defending the university as a crucial democratic public sphere.
Lost in these debates is a view of the university that demands reinvigorated
notions of civic courage and action that address what it means to make
teaching and learning more socially conscious and politically responsive in a
time of growing conservatism, racism, and corporatism. Even more surprising
is the common ground shared by a growing number of conservatives and
progressives who attempt to reduce pedagogy to a reified methodology, on
one hand, or narrowly define politics and pedagogy within a dichotomy that
pits the alleged “real” material issues of class and labor against a fragmenting
and marginalizing politics of culture, textuality, and difference on the other.

C O N S E RVAT I V E A N D L I B E R A L AT TAC K S
O N C U LT U R A L P O L I T I C S

The right-wing attack on culture as a site of pedagogical and political

struggle is evident in the work of such traditionalists as Harold Bloom
and Lynn Cheney and such liberals as Richard Rorty, all of whom
18 IMPURE AC T S

bemoan the death of romance, inspiration, and hope as casualties of the

language of power, politics, and multiculturalism. For Bloom, literary
criticism has been replaced in the academy by cultural politics, and the
result is nothing less than the renunciation of the search for truth and
beauty that once defined universalistic and impartial scholarship.
Bloom cannot bear the politics of what he calls “identity clubs,”
arguing that “multiculturalism is a lie, a mask for mediocrity for the
thought-control academic police, the Gestapo of our campuses”2 Bloom
wishes to situate culture exclusively in the sphere of beauty and
aesthetic transcendence, unhampered and uncorrupted by politics, the
struggle over public memory, or the democratic imperative for self and
social criticism. For Bloom, cultural politics is an outgrowth of cultural
guilt, a holdover from the sixties that begets what he calls “the School
of Resentment.”3
Yet there is more at stake in delegitimating the investigation of the
relationship between culture and power for Bloom and his fellow
conservatives. Eager to speak for disenfranchised groups, conservatives
claim that cultural politics demeans the oppressed and has nothing to
do with their problems. It neither liberates nor informs, they maintain,
but rather contributes to an ongoing decline in standards and civility
by prioritizing visual culture over print culture, and popular culture
over high culture. For Bloom, replacing Julius Caesar with The Color
Purple is indicative of the lowering of such standards and the “danger of
cultural collapse.”4 As a custodian of the good old days, Bloom holds
no punches in equating literature that has been traditionally
marginalized in the university with degrading forms of popular culture.
He writes that

the Resenters prate of power, as they do of race and gender: they are
careerist stratagems and have nothing to do with the insulted and
injured, whose lives will not be improved by our reading the bad verses
of those who assert that they are the oppressed. Our schools as much as
our universities are given away to these absurdities; replacing Julius
Caesar by The Color Purple is hardly a royal road to enlightenment. A
country where television, movies, computers, and Stephen King have
replaced reading is already in acute danger of cultural collapse. That
 RETHINKING CULTURAL POLITICS 19

danger is dreadfully augmented by our yielding education to the

ideologues whose deepest resentment is of poetry itself.5

By conflating minority literature with popular culture and the decline of

academic standards, Bloom conveniently and unabashedly reveals the
contempt he harbors for minorities of race, class, and gender and their
“uncivil” demands for inclusion in the curricula of higher education and
the history and political life of the nation. Bloom’s tirade is all the more
disingenuous given his appeal to excellence and objectivism. Bloom’s
conservative stance would be more interesting if his disdain of the
ideological could be read as simply ironic, but he appears, unfortunately,
dead serious when he maps out his retrograde view of the canon,
academics, and the purpose of the university as a position free from the
tainted discourse of politics and ideology.
There is no room in Bloom’s discourse for theorizing the dialectical
connections between culture and politics. There is little regard for the
ways in which cultural processes are inextricably part of the power
relations that structure the symbols, identities, and meanings that shape
dominant institutions such as education, the arts, and the media. Nor is
there the slightest attempt to theorize how the political character of
culture might make possible a healthy and ongoing engagement with all
forms of pedagogical practice and the institutionally sanctioned authority
that gives them legitimacy. Bloom has nothing but contempt for
educators who attempt to understand how cultural politics can be
appropriated in order to teach students to be suspicious, if not critical of
dominant forms of authority—both within and outside the schools—that
sanction what counts as theory, that legitimate knowledge, that put
particular subject positions in place, and that make specific claims on
public memory. Rather, Bloom echoes other right-wing spokespersons
such as George Will, Dinesh D’Souza, Hilton Kramer, and Richard
Bernstein who deride multiculturalists, feminists, and others for
propagating “oppression studies,” “victim studies,” “therapeutic history,”
and forms of “ethnic cheer-leading.” In this discourse, oppositional
voices within the academy are dismissed as “barbarians” because they
threaten what are alleged to be transcendent notions of “civilization,”
“truth,” “beauty,” and “common culture.”
20 IMPURE AC T S

Pedagogy for Bloom is both depoliticized and unproblematic.

Dismissing the contribution that radical educators have made to
theorizing pedagogical practice, Bloom is utterly dismissive toward any
critical attempts within the university to expand the political possibilities
of the pedagogical. Lost in Bloom’s discourse is any serious attempt to
grapple with the implications of treating pedagogy as a form of moral
and political regulation rather than as a technique or fixed method.
Similarly, Bloom’s arguments do not offer any theory of pedagogy.
Hence, he is unable to engage pedagogical practice as the outcome of
social struggles between different groups over how citizens are to be
defined, the role pedagogy plays in mediating what forms of knowledge
are to be considered worthy of serious inquiry, or how pedagogy
provides the conditions for students to recognize antidemocratic forms of
power. But this is clearly beyond Bloom’s theoretical and ideological
reach, because to suggest that such issues are worthy of serious debate
would mean that Bloom would have to recognize his own pedagogy as a
political activity, and his criticism of cultural politics as participating in
the very ideological processes he so vehemently dismisses.
Lynn Cheney, on the other hand, embraces the political as part of a
more activist critique of leftist cultural politics both within and outside
the university. As the former head of the National Endowment for the
Humanities (NEH) and the current director of the activist National
Alumni Forum, Cheney argues that progressive trends in the academy
are undermining what she terms the national cultural heritage. Claiming
that “activist” faculty are abusing the principle of academic freedom,
Cheney has sought to demonize progressive scholars by defining them as
a threat to both the university and to the most valued traditions of
Western civilization. Cheney has spelled this out in a speech to the
American Council of Learned Societies. She writes,

When I become most concerned about the state of the humanities in our
colleges and universities is not when I see theories and ideas fiercely
competing, but when I see them neatly converging, when I see feminist
criticism, Marxism, various forms of poststructuralism, and other
approaches all coming to bear on one concept and threatening to
displace it. I think specifically of the concept of Western civilization,
 RETHINKING CULTURAL POLITICS 21

which has come under pressure on many fronts, political as well as

theoretical. Attacked for being elitist, sexist, racist, Eurocentric, this
central and sustaining idea of our educational system and our intellectual
heritage is being declared unworthy of study.6

Cheney’s attack on cultural politics in the university redefines the

relationships among culture, power, and knowledge by shifting the
political emphasis away from struggles over curricula to struggles over
policy that would shape the institutional conditions under which
knowledge is produced, faculty are hired and evaluated, and credentials
awarded. As Ellen Messer-Davidow has brilliantly documented, this is
evident in the efforts of conservatives such as William Bennett, and
Irving Kristol, among others, along with the backing of conservative
groups such as the Olin and Bradley foundations, to attack extra-
academic institutions and resources in order to restructure higher
education along retrograde ideological lines.7 Examples abound, and
include conservative attempts to defund both the National Endowment
for the Arts and the NEH, to dismantle affirmative action policies in
universities and state agencies, and to encourage “alumni and trustees to
censure and/or defund ‘inappropriate’ courses and curricula”8 Under the
charge of political correctness, conservatives such as Cheney deride the
politicization of culture, the rise of “advocacy” programs such as those in
African-American studies, cultural studies, and women’s studies. John
Silber, the former president of Boston University, reveals in a 1993
report to its board of trustees the blatant disregard for academic freedom
that parades under the rubric of fighting political correctness in the
university. Silber writes, without irony, that

this University has remained unapologetically dedicated to the search for

truth and highly resistant to political correctness…we have resisted the
fad toward critical legal studies…. In the English Department and the
departments of literature, we have not allowed the structuralists or the
deconstructionists to take over. We have refused to take on dance
therapy…. We have resisted revisionist history…. In the Philosophy
Department we have resisted the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory….
We have resisted the official dogmas of radical feminism. We have done
22 IMPURE AC T S

the same thing with regard to gay and lesbian liberation, and animal
liberation…We have resisted the fad of Afro-centrism. We have not fallen
into the clutch of multi-culturalists.9

If conservatives are to be believed, they are not engaging in a form of

cultural and institutional politics, at least the ideological version, but
simply purging the university of feminists, multiculturalists, and other
progressive groups in order to promote excellence, raise academic
standards, and create an objective scholarly climate that facilitates the
intellectual pursuit of truth and beauty. Such actions, underwritten with
resources and power provided by conservative forces such as the
Madison Center for Educational Affairs, the Intercollegiate Studies
Institute, the Olin Foundation, and the National Association of Scholars
reveals a dangerous ideological orthodoxy. In this instance, the threat to
academic freedom comes less from left-wing professors than it does from
administrative demagogues and right-wing organizations willing to police
and censor knowledge that does not silence itself before the legitimating
imperatives of the traditional academic canon.

L I B E R A L I S M A N D T H E P OW E R O F
POSITIVE THINKING

Although Richard Rorty does not reject the political as a meaningful

category of public life, he does abstract it from culture and in so doing
legitimates a sharp conceptual division between politics and culture as
well as an ideologically narrow reading of aesthetics, pedagogy, and
politics. According to Rorty, you cannot “find inspirational value in a
text at the same time as you are viewing it as a…mechanism of cultural
production.”10 Rorty steadfastly believes in the rigid division between
understanding and hope, mind and heart, thought and action. He rejects
implicitly the work of such critical theorists as Stuart Hall, Larry
Grossberg, Paulo Freire, and others who believe that hope is a practice of
witnessing, an act of moral imagination and political passion that helps
educators and other cultural workers to think otherwise in order to act
otherwise. Moreover, Rorty shares with Bloom—though for different
 RETHINKING CULTURAL POLITICS 23

reasons—the fall-from-grace narrative that seems to be the lament of so

many well-established white male academics. Rorty wants progressives to
be more upbeat, to give up their whining cultural politics and provide
positive images of America. He wants feminists to stop indulging in
victim politics by linking the political and the personal so that they can
get on with a politics that addresses the “real thing.” Moreover, as
Lindsay Waters points out, “Rorty wants to hear good stories. He is not,
however, interested in popular culture, even though it sometimes
presents positive images of America, because popular culture, in his view,
is a source of chauvinistic, right-wing, simpleminded images of America.
It’s ‘high culture’ that concerns him.”11
Given Rorty’s distaste for popular culture, it should not come as a
surprise that he is equally dismissive of educators who situate texts
within the broader politics of representation and engage pedagogy as a
political practice. Yet the brunt of his criticism is reserved for a cultural
left that refuses to “talk about money,” legislation, or welfare reform and
squanders its intellectual and critical resources on “such academic
disciplines as women’s history, black history, gay studies, Hispanic-
American studies, and migrant studies.”12 Rorty disdains progressive
academics for elevating cultural politics over real politics, and, as Waters
points out, “accuses the aging New Leftists who populate the academy of
something worse than a failure of nerve. They are quislings, he says,
collaborators: in permitting cultural matters to supplant ‘real politics,’
they have collaborated with the Right in making cultural issues central to
the political debate.”13
For Rorty, the cultural left needs to transform itself into a reformed
economic left that addresses “concrete” political issues such as changing
campaign finance laws, abolishing the local financing of public
education, and fighting for universal health insurance. These are
laudable goals for any left, but for Rorty they cannot be addressed by
means of a cultural politics that complicates and burdens political
resistance through a language that speaks to how power works within
popular culture or engages politics through the connected registers of
race, gender, and sexuality. Nor, for Rorty, can such goals be addressed
by expanding the political field to include various social movements
24 IMPURE AC T S

organized around issues such as AIDS, sexuality, environmentalism,

feminism, and antiracist struggles. He seems to forget, as Homi Bhabha
points out, that his call for a reconstructed politics of the left comes
perilously close to reproducing the legacy of an orthodox Marxism.
Constitutive of such a legacy are: “the reduction of the cultural public
sphere to the realm of economic determinism; the support of trade
unions at the expense of raced and gendered workers whose ‘differences’
and discriminations become subordinated to class interest; the
homophobia and xenophobia that so easily perverts patriotism.”14
Rorty, along with conservative ideologues like Harold Bloom, believes
that the university and public schools are not a viable public arena in
which to wage nondoctrinaire political struggles. For Rorty, the political
does not include cultural spheres that trade in pedagogy, knowledge, and
the production of identities that mediate the relationship between the self
and the larger society. Culture is not a sphere in which political struggles
can be effectively conducted over broad visions of social justice. Within
the narrow confines of this language, cultural politics is dismissed either
as a self-serving and narrow politics of difference or as victim politics.
If Rorty is to be believed, the left can get itself out of its alleged political
impasse only by giving up on theory (which has produced a few good
books, but has done nothing to change the country) and by shedding its
“semi-conscious anti-Americanism, which it carried over from the rage of
the late’60s.”15 Criticism that focuses on race, gender, sexuality, popular
culture, schooling, or any other “merely” cultural issue represents not only
a bad form of identity politics but contains an unwarranted (unpatriotic?)
“doubt about our country and our culture” and should be replaced with
“proposals for legislative change.”16 Rorty wants a progressive politics that
is color-blind and concrete, a politics for which the question of difference is
largely irrelevant to a resurgent materialism that defines itself as the
antithesis of the cultural. In Rorty’s version of politics, the pedagogical is
reduced to old-time labor organizing, which primarily benefited white men
and failed to question the exclusions so central to its self-definition. In the
end, Rorty provides a caricature of the cultural left, mis-represents how
social movements have worked to expand the arena of democratic
struggle,17 and ignores the centrality of culture as a pedagogical force for
 RETHINKING CULTURAL POLITICS 25

making politics meaningful as both an object of critique and

transformation. Moreover, liberals such as Rorty conveniently forget the
specific historical conditions and forms of oppression that gave rise to the
New Left and new social movements that British cultural theorist Stuart
Hall makes central to his arguments against a facile return to the totalizing
politics of class struggle—that is, a politics that defines itself as so all-
encompassing in its view of the world that it dismisses any other
explanation. Hall insightfully reminds us that in order to think politics in
the sixties, progressives had to confront the legacy of Stalinism, the
bureaucracy of the Cold War, and the stiflingly racist and sexist
hierarchies within traditional leftist organizations.18 Class was not the only
form of domination, and it was to their credit that some New Left theorists
made visible the diverse and often interconnected forms of oppression
organized against women, racial minorities, gay men and lesbians, the
aged, the disabled, and others.

L E F T O RT H O D OX Y A N D T H E S C O U RG E O F
C U LT U R A L P O L I T I C S

The attack on culture as a terrain of politics is not only evident in the

works of such conservatives as Harold Bloom and Lynn Cheney, and
such liberals as Richard Rorty, but it also is gaining ground in the
writings of a number of renegades from the New Left, the most notable
of whom are Todd Gitlin, Michael Tomasky, and Jim Sleeper.19 Unlike
Bloom and Rorty, Gitlin and his ideological cohorts speak from the
vantage point of leftist politics but display a similar contempt for cultural
politics, popular culture, cultural pedagogy, and differences based on
race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. In what follows, I
highlight some of the recurrent arguments made by this group, focusing
on the work of Todd Gitlin, who has extensively criticized many leftists’
and progressive academics’ current preoccupation with cultural politics.20
For Gitlin, contemporary cultural struggles—especially those taken up
by social movements organized around sexuality, gender, race, the
politics of representation, and, more broadly, multiculturalism—are
26 IMPURE AC T S

nothing more than a weak substitute for a “real world” politics, notably
one that underscores class, labor, and economic inequality. According to
Gitlin, social movements that reject the primacy of class give politics a
bad name; they serve primarily to splinter the left into identity sects,
and, as Judith Butler has noted, fail “to address questions of economic
equity and redistribution,”21 and offer no unifying vision of the common
good capable of challenging corporate power and right-wing ideologues.
Gitlin’s critique of social movements rests on a number of omissions
and evasions. First, in presupposing that class is a transcendent and
universal category that can unite the left, Gitlin fails to acknowledge a
history in which class politics was used to demean and domesticate
issues raised by those groups oppressed under the signs of race, gender,
and sexual orientation. Marked by the assumption that race and gender
considerations could not contribute to a general notion of emancipation,
the legacy of class-based politics is distinguished by a history of
subordination and exclusion toward marginalized social movements.
Moreover, it was precisely because of the subordination and smothering
of difference that social groups organized to articulate their respective
goals, histories, and interests outside of the orthodoxy of class politics.
Judith Butler is right in arguing, “How quickly we forget that new social
movements based on democratic principles became articulated against a
hegemonic Left as well as a complicitous liberal center and a truly
threatening right wing.”22 Moreover, not only does Gitlin limit social
agency to the pristine category of class, but he can imagine class only as
a unified, pregiven subject position rather than as a shifting, negotiated
space marked by historical, symbolic, and social mediations that include
the complex negotiations of race and gender.23 Within this discourse, the
history of class-based sectarianism is forgotten, the category of class is
essentialized, and politics is so narrowly defined as to freeze the open-
ended and shifting relationship between culture and power.24
Second, in reducing all social movements to the most essentialistic and
rigid forms of identity politics, Gitlin fails to understand how class is
actually lived through the everyday relations of race and gender. In
Gitlin’s discourse, social movements are defined as narrowly
particularistic; hence, historian Robin Kelley notes that it is impossible
 RETHINKING CULTURAL POLITICS 27

for him to “conceive of social movements as essential to a class-based

politics”25 Kelley insightfully points out the failure of Gitlin and others to
recognize how the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP)—a
movement that brought attention to AIDS and fought discrimination
against gays and lesbians—through its varied demonstrations and media-
blitz campaigns made AIDS visible as a deadly disease that is now taking
its greatest toll among poor black women.26 Nor is there any recognition
of how the feminist movement made visible the radical political character
of everyday experience in order to expose how particular forms of male
oppression operated unchallenged in spheres traditionally regarded as
distinctly unpolitical. For example, by linking the personal and the
political, feminists exposed the dynamics of sexual abuse, particularly as
it raged through the communities of poor households. Nor is there any
understanding of how a whole generation of young people might be
educated to recognize the racist, sexist, colonialist, and class-specific
representations that permeate advertising, films, and other aspects of
media culture that flood daily life. There is little mention of how young
people have actively engaged in forms of cultural politics through radical
community and youth work, struggles against sweatshop labor policies
supported by university investments, gay and lesbian civil rights drives,
Rock against Racism, or other forms of political protest. In each case,
such movements on the cultural front have registered important forms of
resistance designed to reclaim the political struggle over challenging
dominant modes of “common sense” as a precondition for building
larger social movements and changing institutional power.
Third, Gitlin’s appeal to majority principles slips easily into the
reactionary tactic of blaming minorities for the current white backlash,
going so far as to argue that because the followers of identity politics
(struggles organized around the specific interests of gender, race, age,
and sexuality) abandoned a concern for materialist issues they opened
the door for an all-out attack by right-wing conservatives on labor and
the poor. At the same time, identity politics bears the burden in Gitlin’s
discourse for allowing, as Iris Young has noted, the Right to attack
“racialized rhetoric as a way of diverting attention from the economic
restructuring that has been hurting most Americans.”27 Thoughtlessly
28 IMPURE AC T S

aligning himself with the right, Gitlin seems unwilling to acknowledge

how the historical legacies of slavery, imperialism, urban ghettoization,
segregation, the extermination of Native Americans, the war against
immigrants, and the discrimination against Jews as they have been
rewritten into the discourse of American history may upset a majority
population that finds it more convenient to blame subordinate groups for
their problems than to acknowledge their own complicity.
Against this form of historical amnesia, the call to patriotism, majority
values, and unity shares an ignoble relationship to a past in which such
principles were rooted in the ideology of white supremacy, the
presumption that the public sphere was exclusively white, and the
prioritizing of, according to Judith Butler, a “racially cleansed notion of
class.”28 If identity politics poses a threat to the endearing (because
transcendent and universal) category that class represents to some critics,
as Robin Kelley argues, it may be because such critics fail to understand
how class is actually lived through race, sexual orientation, and gender,
or it may be that the return to a form of class warfare against corporate
power represents simply another form of identity politics—an identity-
based campaign that stems from the anxiety and revulsion of white
males who cannot imagine participating in movements led by African
Americans, women, Latinos, or gays and lesbians speaking for the
whole, or even embracing radical humanism.29
Finally, Gitlin’s materialism finds its antithesis in a version of cultural
studies that is pure caricature. According to Gitlin, cultural studies is a
form of populism intent on finding resistance in the most mundane of
cultural practices, ignoring the ever-deepening economic inequities, and
dispensing entirely with material relations of power. Banal in its refusal
to discriminate between a culture of excellence and the political and
economic order, on one hand, and the trivial pursuits of consumer
culture on the other, cultural studies becomes a symbol of bad faith and
political irresponsibility. According to Gitlin, “popular culture is the
consolation prize” seized upon by progressives who refuse to “dwell on
unpleasant realities” associated with the worsening conditions of the
poor and the deepening of class inequalities.30 For theorists in cultural
studies, Gitlin argues, it is irrelevant that African Americans suffer gross
 RETHINKING CULTURAL POLITICS 29

material injustice because what really matters is that “they have rap.”31 It
seems that for Gitlin, cultural studies should “free itself of the burden of
imagining itself to be a political practice,”32 since the locus of much of its
work is the university—a bankrupt site for intellectuals addressing the most
pressing questions of our age. Rather than take responsibility for what
Stuart Hall calls “translating knowledge into the practice of culture,”33
academics, according to Gitlin, should put “real politics” ahead of cultural
matters, “not mistake the academy for the larger world,” and put their
efforts into organizing “groups, coalitions, and movements.”34
Gitlin’s model of politics is characteristic of a resurgent economism
rooted in a notion of class struggle in which it is argued that “we can do
class or culture, but not both.”35 Within this view, social movements are
dismissed as merely cultural, and the cultural is no longer acknowledged
as a serious terrain of political struggle. Unfortunately, this critique not
only fails to recognize how issues of race, gender, age, sexual orientation,
and class are intertwined; it also refuses to acknowledge the pedagogical
function of culture in constructing identities, mobilizing desires, and
shaping moral values. Gitlin dismisses as “false consciousness” the attempt
on the part of many theorists to acknowledge that cultural studies is, in
part, a pedagogical project concerned with how knowledge is constructed
and disseminated in relation to the materiality of power, conflict, and
oppression. He is utterly indifferent to the political project of analyzing
how the educational force of the culture (high and low) has relevance for
enabling adults, students, workers, and others to become attentive to the
different dynamics of power through ongoing critical analyses of how
knowledge, meaning, and values operate in the production, reception, and
transformation of social identities, diverse forms of ethical address, and a
range of claims on historical memory. Gitlin has no understanding of the
importance of cultural pedagogy in illuminating how identities are shaped
in a vast array of pedagogical sites outside of the schools. Nor is he
sensitive to the pedagogical task of teaching people how to challenge
authority, resist, “unlearn privilege,” and strategically deploy theory and
knowledge in order to make learning fundamental to social change itself.
What is surprising about Gitlin’s attack on cultural studies and his
contemptuous dismissal of cultural politics is that the pedagogical and
30 IMPURE AC T S

political relevance of such work is part of a long theoretical history that is

indebted to critical Marxism. For instance, the crucial importance of
linking the political and pedagogical is evident in Antonio Gramsci’s
insight that “[e]very relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily an
educational relationship.” 36 It is also clear in Raymond Williams’s
perceptive argument that a critical cultural politics must acknowledge “the
educational force of our whole social and cultural experience [as an
apparatus of institutions and relationships that] actively and profoundly
teaches.”37 In addition, one could add the insistence of Theodor Adorno
and Max Horkheimer that questions about culture cannot be abstracted
from questions regarding economics and politics, nor can they be
dismissed as merely superstructural.38 Unfortunately, Gitlin’s critique of
cultural studies as a retrograde form of populism ignores the relevance of
cultural politics and pedagogy as a historical project as well as its current
political importance for engaging the interrelated issues of culture, agency,
resistance, and power. By separating politics from culture, Janet Batsleev
and colleagues note that critics such as Gitlin end up “not only
depoliticizing culture but also, with equally impoverishing results, of
‘deculturalizing’ politics.”39 Ironically, the consequences of such an act
undermine the very viability of politics and political struggle, especially
among those for whom making the political more pedagogical is crucial to
their political awakening and potential involvement against various forms
of oppression. As Batsleer and her colleagues point out, “Removing
politics from the semiotic domain of signs, images and meanings, it
segregates it from the lives and interest of ‘ordinary people’, who are in
turn induced to accept the representation of themselves as incapable of,
and bored by, political reflection and action.”40 By arguing that cultural
politics diverts our attention from real concerns, predominantly economic
in this case, Gitlin constructs a dichotomy between culture and economics
that is, as Andrew Ross points out, both “disabling and divisive.”41 In
opposition to such a claim, Ross insightfully argues that cultural and
economic forces are mutually interdependent and central to any radical
theory of cultural politics. As he explains,

The vast economic forces that take their daily toll on our labor,
communities, and natural habitats are the most powerful elements in our
 RETHINKING CULTURAL POLITICS 31

social lives. The power with which they work on our world is exercised
through cultural forms: legal, educational, political, and religious
institutions; valued artifacts and documents; social identities; codes of
moral sanctity; prevailing ideas about the good life; and fears of
ruination, among many others. Without these forms, economic activity
remains a lifeless abstraction in the ledgers and databases of financial
record. Without an understanding of them, we impoverish our chances
of building on those rights, aspirations, and collective affinities that
promise alternatives to the status quo.42

By furthering a false dichotomy between cultural politics and “real”

economically based politics, Gitlin substitutes a rigorous engagement
with the interrelated and complex modalities of meaning, culture,
institutional power, and the material context of everyday life with a
dogmatic and narrow view of politics. Moreover, Gitlin’s economism
comes dangerously close to promoting an anti-intellectual and
antitheoretical claim to politics that largely registers as an incitement to
organizing and pamphleteering.
This discourse is troubling because it separates culture from politics
and leaves little room for capturing the contradictions within dominant
institutions that open up political and social possibilities for contesting
domination, doing critical work within the schools and other public
spheres, or furthering the capacity of students and others to question
oppressive forms of authority and the operations of power.

U N D E RTA K I N G C U LT U R A L P O L I T I C S

Unfortunately, the current onslaught on cultural politics by conservatives

and the orthodox left tends to disregard the substantive and critical role of
culture, particularly popular culture, in pedagogy and learning, especially
for young people. There is no sense in this position of the enormous
influence Hollywood films, television, comics, magazines, video games,
and Internet culture exert in teaching young people about themselves and
their relationship to the larger society. Moreover, neither group addresses
the role that academics and public school teachers might assume as public
32 IMPURE AC T S

intellectuals mindful of the part that culture plays in shaping public

memory, moral awareness, and political agency; similarly, neither group
addresses the significance of higher and public education as important
cultural sites that function as spheres essential to sustaining a vibrant
democracy.
In its best moments, the debate over the politics of culture has
reinvigorated the dialogue about the role that public and higher education
might play in creating a pluralized public culture essential for animating
basic precepts of democratic public life—that is, educating students to be
critical and active citizens. At the same time, the right and left-wing
orthodox versions of the debate have failed to consider more fundamental
issues about the importance of culture as a teaching force that goes far
beyond institutionalized schooling. With the rise of new media
technologies and the global reach of the highly concentrated culture
industries, the scope and impact of the educational force of culture in
shaping and refiguring all aspects of daily life appear unprecedented. Yet
the current debates have generally ignored the powerful pedagogical
influence of popular culture, along with the implications it has for shaping
curricula, questioning notions of high-status knowledge, and redefining
the relationship between the culture of schooling and the cultures of
everyday life. Consequently, the political, ethical, and social significance
of the role that popular culture plays as the primary pedagogical medium
for young people remains largely unexamined. For instance, there is little
recognition by either conservatives or progressives of the importance of
using Hollywood films such as Schindler’s List to examine important
historical events, or incorporating Disney’s animated cartoons in the
curriculum to examine how gender roles are constructed within these
films and what they suggest about the subject positions that young people
should take up, question, or resist in a patriarchal society. Nor do
conservatives or liberals who disavow cultural politics and pedagogy
exhibit any understanding of the importance of expanding literacy in the
schools beyond the culture of the book to teach students how to use the
new electronic technologies that characterize the digital age.
Informal learning for many young people is directly linked to their
viewing videos, films, television, and such computer technology as
 RETHINKING CULTURAL POLITICS 33

CD-ROMs and the Internet. Students need to learn how to read these
new cultural texts critically, but they should also learn how to create
their own cultural texts by mastering the technical skills needed to
compose television scripts, use video cameras, write programs for
computers, and produce and direct documentaries. This is not to
suggest that young people are unaware of how to use these
technologies. On the contrary, many young people, as Jon Katz points
out, “are at the center of the information revolution, ground zero of the
digital world [because] they helped build it, [and] they understand it as
well, or better than anyone else”43 The problem is that the schools,
primarily from the elementary grades to high school, are too big and out
of touch with the new technologies and the new literacies that they have
produced, though some schools at the secondary level have begun to take
note of the importance of the new technologies while higher education is
moving more quickly to catch up with the digital revolution. For instance,
a growing number of alternative school programs and universities have
developed very successful media literacy programs and mass
communications programs, which, unlike computer technology programs,
do not reduce digital literacy simply to learning new skills. These
programs combine literacy aimed at reading and writing with literacy
classes aimed at learning the basics of video production and television
programming. These programs allow kids to tell their own stories, learn to
write scripts, and get involved in community action programs.44 They also
challenge the assumption that popular cultural texts cannot be as
profoundly important as traditional sources of learning in teaching about
important issues framed through, for example, the social lenses of poverty,
racial conflict, and gender discrimination. Within these approaches, hands-
on learning, basic literacy skills, and more advanced classroom studies are
combined with the skills and knowledge needed to both produce and
critically examine the new media technologies. This is not so much a
matter of pitting popular culture against traditional curricula sources as it
is of using both in a mutually informative way.
As culture, especially popular culture, becomes the most powerful
educational force in shaping the perceptions of young people about
themselves and their relationships to others, educators must ask new
34 IMPURE AC T S

kinds of questions. How might teachers address education anew, given

the new forms of cultural pedagogy that have arisen outside of
traditional schooling? In light of such changes, how do educators
respond to value-based questions regarding the purposes that schools
should serve, what types of knowledge are of the most worth, and what it
means to claim authority in a world where borders are constantly shifting?
How might pedagogy be understood as a political and moral practice
rather than a technical strategy? And what relation should public and
higher education have to young people as they develop a sense of agency,
particularly with respect to the obligations of critical citizenship and public
life in a radically transformed cultural and global landscape?
As citizenship becomes more privatized and public and higher
education more vocationalized, youth are increasingly educated to
become consumers rather than critical social subjects. Under such
circumstances, it becomes all the more imperative for educators to
rethink how the educational force of the culture works to both secure
and exclude particular identities and values, and how such a recognition
can be used to redefine what it means to link knowledge and power,
expand the meaning and role of public intellectuals, and take seriously
the assumption that pedagogy is always contextual and must be
understood as the outcome of particular struggles over identity,
citizenship, politics, and power. In opposition to Harold Bloom, Richard
Rorty, and Todd Gitlin, educators need to foreground their role as public
intellectuals and affirm the importance of such critical work in expanding
the possibilities for democratic public life, especially as it addresses the
education of youth within rather than outside of the relations of politics
and culture. What exactly does this suggest?
Assuming the role of public intellectuals, educators might begin by
establishing the pedagogical conditions for students to be able to develop
a sense of perspective and hope in order to recognize that the way things
are is not the way they have always been or must necessarily be in the
future. More specifically, it suggests that educators develop educational
practices that are informed by both a language of critique and possibility.
Within such a discourse, hope becomes anticipatory rather than
compensatory and employs the language of critical imagination to enable
 RETHINKING CULTURAL POLITICS 35

educators and students to consider the structure, movement, and

opportunities in the contemporary order of things and how they might
act to resist forms of oppression and domination while developing those
aspects of public life that point to its best and as yet unrealized
possibilities. At the current historical moment, such hope rejects a
fatalism that suggests that the only direction in which education can
move is toward adopting the overriding goals of the corporate culture—to
prepare students at all levels of schooling in order to simply take their
places in the new corporate order. Hope in this context is not simply
about lost possibilities, or a negative prescription to resist, but an ethical
ideal rooted in the daily lives of educators, adults, students, and others
who deny the machinery of corporate authoritarianism along with other
forms of domination by embracing what Anson Rabinach calls the
“spark that reaches out beyond the surrounding emptiness.”45
This is a language of educated hope and democratic possibilities,
which asserts that schools play a vital role in developing the political and
moral consciousness of its citizens. It is a language grounded in a notion
of educational struggle and leadership that does not begin with the
question of raising test scores or educating students to be experts, but
with a moral and political vision of what it means to educate to govern,
lead a humane life, and address the social welfare of those less fortunate
than themselves. Educated hope points beyond the given by salvaging
those dreams that call for educators to develop ethical projects out of the
specificity of the contexts and social formations in which they undertake
efforts to combat various forms of oppression.46
Educators who take on the roles of public intellectuals can also teach
students what might be called a language of social criticism and
responsibility; a language that refuses to treat knowledge as something to
be consumed passively, taken up merely to be tested, or legitimated
outside of an engaged normative discourse. Central to such a language is
the goal of creating those pedagogical conditions that enable students to
develop the discipline, ability, and opportunity to think in oppositional
terms, to critically analyze the assumptions and interests that authorize
the very questions asked within the authoritative language of the school
or classroom. Such criticism cuts across disciplinary boundaries and calls
36 IMPURE AC T S

for educators, students, and cultural workers to take on the roles of

public critics who can function as historians, archivists, pundits, social
critics, bricoleurs, and activists. Maurice Berger suggests that such forms
of criticism create new forms of expression and practice. He writes, “The
strongest criticism today—the kind that offers the greatest hope for the
vitality and future of the discipline—is capable of engaging, guiding,
directing, and influencing culture, even stimulating new forms of practice
and expression. The strongest criticism serves as a dynamic, critical
force, rather than as an act of boosterism. The strongest criticism uses
language and rhetoric not merely for descriptive evaluative purposes but
as a means of inspiration, provocation, emotional connection, and
experimentation.” 47 Berger’s notion of criticism affirms a notion of
literacy that reveals the bankruptcy of the vocabulary of literacy
associated with the discourse of corporate culture and traditional
pedagogy. Refusing both a market pragmatism and a literacy rooted in
the exclusive confines of the modernist culture of print, “the strongest
forms of criticism” emerge out of a pluralized notion of literacy that
values both print and visual culture. Moreover, literacy as a critical
discourse also provides a more complex accounting of power, identity
formation, and the materiality of power while stressing that while literacy
itself guarantees nothing, it is an essential precondition for agency, self-
representation, and a substantive notion of democratic public life. This
suggests a discourse of criticism and literacy that unsettles common sense
and engages a variety of cultural texts and public conversations. It is a
language that learns how to address social injustices in order to break the
tyranny of the present.
Another possible requirement for teachers who assume the position of
public intellectuals demands developing new ways to engage history in
order to develop a critical watch over the relationship between historical
events and the ways in which those events are produced and recalled
through the narratives in which they unfold. This suggests that
educators reaffirm the pedagogical importance of educating students to
be skilled in the language of public memory. Public memory rejects the
notion of knowledge as merely an inheritance with transmission as its
only form of practice. In its critical form, public memory suggests that
 RETHINKING CULTURAL POLITICS 37

history be read not merely as an act of recovery but as a dilemma of

uncertainty, a form of address and re-membering that links the narratives
of the past with the circumstances of its unfolding and how such an
unfolding or retelling is connected to “the present relations of power”
and the experience of those engaged in the rewriting of historical
narratives.48 Public memory sees knowledge as a social and historical
construction that is always the object of struggle. Rather than be
preoccupied with the ordinary, public memory is concerned with what is
distinctive and extraordinary; it is concerned not with societies that are
quiet, that reduce learning to reverence, procedure, and whispers, but
with forms of public life that are noisy, engaged in dialogue and
vociferous speech.
In addition, educators as public intellectuals need to expand and
apply the principles of diversity, dialogue, compassion, and tolerance in
their classrooms to strengthen rather than weaken the relationships
between learning and empowerment on one hand and democracy and
schooling on the other. Bigotry, not difference, is the enemy of
democracy, and it is difficult, if not impossible, for students to believe in
democracy without recognizing cultural and political diversity as a
primary condition for learning multiple literacies, experiencing the
vitality of diverse public cultures, and refusing the comfort of monolithic
cultures defined by racist exclusions. Differences in this instance become
important not as simply rigid identity markers, but as differences marked
by unequal relations of power, sites of contestation, and changing
histories, experiences, and possibilities. Difference calls into question the
central dynamic of power and in doing so opens up both a space of
translation and the conditions for struggling to renegotiate and challenge
the ideologies and machineries of power that put some subjects in place
while simultaneously denying social agency to others.49
In a world marked by increasing poverty, unemployment, and
diminished social opportunities, educators must vindicate the crucial
connection between culture and politics in defending public and higher
education as sites of democratic learning and struggle. Essential to such
a task is providing students with the knowledge, skills, and values they
will need to address some of the most urgent questions of our time.
38 IMPURE AC T S

Educating for critical citizenship and civic courage, in part, means

redefining the role of academics as engaged public intellectuals and
border crossers who can come together to explore the crucial role that
culture plays in revising and strengthening the fabric of public life.
Culture is a strategic pedagogical and political terrain whose force as a
“crucial site and weapon of power in the modern world” can be extended
to broader public discourses and practices about the meaning of
democracy, citizenship, and social justice.50 One of the most important
functions of a vibrant democratic culture is to provide the institutional
and symbolic resources necessary for young people and adults to
develop their capacity to think critically, to participate in power relations
and policy decisions that affect their lives, and to transform those racial,
social, and economic inequities that impede democratic social relations.
 two
2
Schooling
Schooling
and the
and the
Po l i t i c s o f
Po l i t i c s o f
Corprate
C o r p ra t e
Culture
C u l t u re

Corporate Ascendancy is emerging as the universal order of the post-communist

world…. Our social landscape is now dominated by corporations that are bigger and
more powerful than most countries…. Our end of the century and the next century
loom as the triumphal age of corporations.
—Charles Derber, Corporation Nation

C A P I TA L I S M ’ S F I N A L C O N Q U E S T ?

A recent full-page advertisement for Forbes magazine proclaims, in bold

red letters, “Capitalists of the World Unite.”1 Beneath the slogan covering
the bottom half of the page is a mass of individuals, representing various
countries throughout the world, their arms raised in victory. Instead of
workers in the traditional sense, the Forbes professionals (three women in
all) are distinctly middle class, dressed in sport jackets and ties, and
carrying briefcases or cellular phones. A sea of red flags with their
respective national currencies emblazoned on the front of each waves
above their heads. At the bottom of the picture is a text that reads, “All

39
40 IMPURE AC T S

hail the final victory of capitalism.” At first glance, the ad appears to be a

simple mockery of one of Marxism’s most powerful ideals. But as self-
conscious as the ad is in parodying the dream of a workers’ revolution, it
also reflects another ideology made famous in 1989 by Francis Fukuyama,
who proclaimed “the end of history,” a reference to the end of authoritarian
communism in East Central Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the
Baltic countries.2 According to Fukuyama, “the end of history” means that
liberal democracy has achieved its ultimate victory and that the twin
ideologies of the market and representative democracy now constitute, with
a few exceptions, the universal values of the new global village.
The Forbes ad does more than signal the alleged “death” of
communism. It also cancels out the tension between market values and
those values representative of civil society that cannot be measured in
strictly commercial terms but are critical to democracy. I am referring
specifically to such values as justice, freedom, equality, health and respect
for children, the rights of citizens as equal and free human beings, as well
as certain others, including, as Seyla Benhabib lists them, “respect for the
rule of law, for individual rights for value pluralism, for constitutional
guarantees…and democratic politics.”3
Who are the cheering men (and three women) portrayed in this ad?
Certainly not the forty-three million Americans who have lost their jobs in
the last fifteen years. Certainly not “the people.” The Forbes ad celebrates
freedom, but only in the discourse of the unbridled power of the market.
There is no recognition here (how could there be?) of either the limits that
democracies must place on such power or how corporate culture and its
narrow redefinition of freedom as a private good may actually present a
threat to democracy equal to if not greater than that imagined under
communism or any other total-itarian ideology. Fukuyama, of course,
proved to be right about the fall of communism, but quite wrong about
“the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of
government.”4 Before the ink dried on his triumphant proclamation,
ethnic genocide erupted in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Moslem fundamentalism
swept Algeria, the Russians launched a bloodbath in Chechnya, Serbs
launched genocidal attacks against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, and parts
of Africa erupted in a bloody civil war accompanied by the horror of tribal
 SCHOOLING AND THE POLITICS OF CORPRATE CULTURE 41

genocide. Even in the United States, with the Cold War at an end, the
language of democracy seemed to lose its vitality and purpose as an
organizing principle for society. As corporations have gained more and
more power in the United States, democratic culture becomes corporate
culture, the rightful ideological heir to the victory over socialism.5
I use the term corporate culture to refer to an ensemble of ideological
and institutional forces that functions politically and pedagogically to both
govern organizational life through senior managerial control and to
produce compliant workers, depoliticized consumers, and passive
citizens.6 Within the language and images of corporate culture, citizenship
is portrayed as an utterly privatized affair whose aim is to produce
competitive self-interested individuals vying for their own material and
ideological gains. Reformulating social issues as strictly individual or
economic issues, corporate culture functions largely to cancel out the
democratic impulses and practices of civil society by either devaluing
them or absorbing such impulses within a market logic. No longer a space
for political struggle, culture in the corporate model becomes an all-
encompassing horizon for producing market identities, values, and
practices. The good life, in this discourse, “is construed in terms of our
identities as consumers—we are what we buy.”7 Public spheres are replaced
by commercial spheres as the substance of critical democracy is emptied
out and replaced by a democracy of goods, consumer lifestyles, shopping
malls, and the increasing expansion of the cultural and political power of
corporations throughout the world.
The broader knowledge, social values and skills necessary for creating
substantive democratic participation increasingly seem at odds with and
detrimental to such corporate moguls as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and
Paul Allen—the new cultural heroes of social mobility, wealth, and success.
Uncritically celebrated as models of leadership and celebrity icons,
billionaires such as Gates personify the emptiness of a corporate culture in
which the discourse of profit and moral indifference displace either the
discursive possibilities for talking about public life outside of the logic of
the market or a discourse capable of defending vital social institutions as
public goods. As noncommodified social spaces and institutions are shut
down, Gates is envied in the media for accumulating personal wealth
42 IMPURE AC T S

worth ninety billion dollars8—“more than the combined bottom 40 percent

of the U.S. population, or 100 million Americans”9—while little is said
about a society that allows such wealth to be accumulated at the same
time that over forty million Americans, including twenty million children,
live below the poverty line.10 Within the world of national politics,
conservative policy institutions, along with a Republican Congress,
incessantly argue that how we think about education, work, and social
welfare means substituting the language of the private good for the
discourse and values of the public good (note, for example, the central
arguments used by conservatives to defeat legislation aimed at curbing the
power of the tobacco and gun-producing industries). At the economic
level, the ascendancy of corporate culture has become evident in the
growing power of megaconglomerates such as Disney, General Electric,
Time Warner, Viacom, and Westinghouse to control both the content and
distribution of much of what the American public sees.11
Accountable only to the bottom line of profitability, corporate culture
and its growing influence in American life has signaled a radical shift in
both the notion of public culture and what constitutes the meaning of
citizenship and the defense of public goods. For example, the rapid
resurgence of corporate power in the last twenty years and the attendant
reorientation of culture to the demands of commerce and regulation have
substituted the language of personal responsibility and private initiative
for the discourses of social responsibility and public service. This can be
seen in government policies designed to dismantle state protections for
the poor, the environment, working people, and people of color.12 For
example, the 1996 welfare law signed by President Bill Clinton reduces
food stamp assistance for millions of children in working families, and a
study enacted by the Urban Institute showed that the bill would “move
2.6 million people, including 1.1 million children, into poverty.”13 other
examples include the dismantling of race-based programs such as the
California Civil Rights Initiative and the landmark affirmative-action
case, Hopwood v.texas, both designed to eliminate affirmative action in
higher education; the reduction of federal monies for urban
development, such as the Department of Housing and Urban
Development’s housing program; the weakening of federal legislation to
 SCHOOLING AND THE POLITICS OF CORPRATE CULTURE 43

protect the environment; and a massive increase in state funds for

building prisons at the expense of funding for public higher education.14
As a result of the corporate takeover of public life, the maintenance of
democratic public spheres from which to organize the energies of a moral
vision loses all relevance. As the power of civil society is reduced in its
ability to impose or make corporate power accountable, politics as an
expression of democratic struggle is deflated, and it becomes more
difficult within the logic of self-help and the bottom line to address
pressing social and moral issues in systemic and political terms. This
suggests a dangerous turn in American society, one that threatens both
the understanding of democracy as fundamental to our freedom and the
ways in which we address the meaning and purpose of education.

T H E L I M I T S O F C O R P O R AT E C U LT U R E

Politics is the performative register of moral action. It is the mark of a

civilized society to prevent justice and compassion from becoming
extinguished in each of us, while it is also a call to acknowledge the
claims of humanity to eliminate needless suffering while affirming
freedom, equality, and hope. Markets don’t reward moral behavior, and
as corporate culture begins to dominate public life it becomes more
difficult for citizens to think critically and act morally. For instance, what
opportunities exist, within the logic of privatization and excessive
individualism, for citizens to protest the willingness of the United States
Congress to serve the needs of corporate interests over pressing social
demands? I am not referring simply to the power of individuals and
groups to limit government subsidies and bailouts that benefit corporate
interests, but to curtail those forms of institutional insanity that have
severe consequences for the most vulnerable of our citizens—the young,
the aged, and the poor. For instance, with no countervailing powers,
norms, or values in place in civil society to challenge corporate power,
how can the average citizen protest and stop the willingness of Congress
to fund B2 “stealth” bombers at a cost of $2 billion each, while refusing
to allocate $100 million to expand child-nutrition programs? This is a
44 IMPURE AC T S

political and moral default that appears all the more shameful given the
fact that 26 per cent of children in the United States live in poverty.15 In
a society increasingly governed by profit considerations and the logic of
the market, where is the critical language to be developed, nourished,
and applied for prioritizing public over private democracy, the social
good over those market forces that benefit a very small group of
investors, or social justice over rampant greed and individualism?
As the rise of corporate culture reasserts the primacy of privatization and
individualism, there is an increasing call for people to surrender or narrow
their capacities for engaged politics in exchange for a market-based notion of
identity, one that suggests relinquishing our roles as social subjects for the
limited role of consuming subjects. Similarly, as corporate culture extends
ever deeper into the basic institutions of civil and political society, there is a
simultaneous diminishing of noncommodified public spheres—those
institutions engaged in dialogue, education, and learning—that address the
relationship of the self to public life on one hand, and social responsibility on
the other. Without these critical public spheres corporate power goes
unchecked, and politics becomes dull, cynical, and oppressive.
As I have mentioned elsewhere, history has been clear about the
dangers of unbridled corporate power.16 The brutal practices of slavery, the
exploitation of child labor, the sanctioning of the cruelest working
conditions in the factories, mines, and sweatshops of America and abroad,
and the destruction of the environment have all been fueled by the law of
maximizing profits while minimizing costs, especially when there has been
no countervailing power from civil society to hold such powers in check.
This is not to suggest that capitalism is the enemy of democracy, but that
in the absence of a strong civil society and the imperatives of a/strong
democracy, the power of corporate culture when left on its own appears to
respect few boundaries based on self-restraint and those noncommodified,
broader human values that are central to a democratic civic culture. John
Dewey was right in arguing that democracy requires work, but that work
is not synonymous with democracy.17
Struggling for democracy is both a political and educational task.
Fundamental to the rise of a vibrant democratic culture is the recognition
that education must be treated as a civil asset and not merely as a site for
 SCHOOLING AND THE POLITICS OF CORPRATE CULTURE 45

commercial investment or for affirming a notion of the private good based

exclusively on the fulfillment of individual needs. Reducing higher
education to the handmaiden of corporate culture works against the critical
social imperative of educating citizens who can sustain and develop
inclusive democratic public spheres. There is a long tradition extending
from Thomas Jefferson to C.Wright Mills that ex-tols the importance of
education as essential for a democratic public life. This legacy of public
discourse appears to have faded as educational consultants all over America
from Robert Zemsky of Stanford University to Chester Finn of the Hudson
Institute call for educational institutions to “advise their clients in the name
of efficiency to act like corporations selling products and seek ‘market
niches’ to save themselves” and meet the challenges of the new world
order.18 Within this corporatized discourse, management models of decision
making align human initiative and learning with business interests,
relegating issues of social responsibility and public accountability irrelevant
as the goals of higher education are increasingly fashioned in the language
of debits and credits, cost analyses, and the bottom line.19
In what follows, I want to address the fundamental shift in society
regarding how we think about the relationship between corporate culture
and democracy.20 Specifically, I want to argue that one of the most
important indications of such a change can be seen in the ways in which
we are currently being asked to rethink the role of higher education.
Underlying this analysis is the assumption that the struggle to reclaim
higher education must be seen as part of a broader battle over the
defense of democratic public spheres, and that at the heart of such a
struggle is the need to challenge the ever-growing discourse and
influence of corporate culture, power, and politics. I will conclude by
offering some suggestions as to what educators can do to reassert the
primacy of higher education as an essential sphere for expanding and
deepening the processes of democracy and civil society.

C O R P O R AT E M A N AG E R S I N H I G H E R E D U C AT I O N

In a recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Katherine S.Mangan

reported that there are a growing number of presidential searches
46 IMPURE AC T S

“looking for leaders who can bridge business and academe.”21 According
to Mangan, this has resulted in a large number of businessschool deans
being offered jobs as college or university presidents. The rationale for
such actions appears to be that business deans “are often in a strong
position to cultivate corporate contacts [and are] better at translating the
academic environment to the outside world”22 Mangan’s article makes
clear that what was once part of the hidden curriculum of higher
education—the increasing vocationalization and subordination of learning
to the dictates of the market—has become an open and defining principle
of education at all levels of learning.
According to Stanley Aronowitz, many colleges and universities are
experiencing financial hardship brought on by the end of the Cold War
and the dwindling of government-financed defense projects coupled with a
sharp reduction of state aid to higher education. As a result, they are all
too happy to allow corporate leaders to run their institutions, form
business partnerships, establish cushy relationships with business-oriented
legislators, and develop curricula programs tailored to the needs of
corporate interests.23 Stories predominate in the national press about the
changing face of leadership in higher education as more and more schools
turn away from hiring scholars to fill administrative positions, relying
instead on business leaders who can assume the roles of innovative budget
cutters. One recent example is the hiring of John A.Fry, a former business
consultant who never worked for a university, as an executive vice
president at the University of Pennsylvania. According to one report, Fry
“embodies the new, corporatized Penn: tactical, innovative, not tied to
tradition, and with an ever-sharp pencil.”24 Fry has instituted reviews of all
services at the university in order to determine which can be outsourced
to the private sector. Thus far he has saved the school over $ 50 million
while eliminating over five hundred jobs, many of them from employees
who had been with the university for decades. Fry’s response to the plight
of such workers is instructive. He claims that under his corporatized
model, with its threat to traditional forms of job security, employees are
now more efficient. He claims, “They are taking less for granted in terms
of their employment status…. I feel we do the institution a disservice if we
all allow inefficiency to perpetuate because we don’t want to rock the boat,
 SCHOOLING AND THE POLITICS OF CORPRATE CULTURE 47

or we don’t want to deprive these poor people who have been working
here for five decades from their jobs. I don’t consider it cold hearted, I
consider it an absolute responsibility.” 25 Fry frames the issue of
responsibility exclusively within the logic of the market and, as one
University of Pennsylvania faculty member puts it, he seems entirely
indifferent to the traditional role of higher education as a “humanizing
force in society, where the value of people is always a priority.”26 The
effect of the new leadership at the university is disheartening. Elsa
R.Ramsden, the chairman of the school’s chapter of the American
Association of University Professors, reports that many faculty are
demoralized by the new leadership, and they have retreated to their
classrooms, unwilling to get involved in the political process because they
fear losing their jobs, not getting tenure, or having their salaries frozen.
Fry’s singleminded devotion to management-driven efficiency appears to
legitimate such fears. According to Fry, “I tend to be very impatient.
Sometimes that serves us well, sometimes not. I have a foot-on-thegas
mentality. I don’t always want to listen to reason. I just want to get results.”27
Fry’s vocabulary reveals the low priority placed on critical thought and
ethical responsibility as defining features of corporate culture, especially as it
becomes entangled with institutions that serve a broader conception of
public service and citizenship. The notion that higher education should be
defended as centers of critical scholarship, social responsibility, and
enlightened teaching in order to expand the scope of freedom and
democracy appears irrelevant if not dangerous in this discourse.
The vocationalizing of the university has many consequences. In
some cases, it has meant that universities like the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT) and the University of California at Irvine have cut
deals with corporations by offering to do product research and cede to
their corporate backers the patents for such inventions and discoveries in
return for ample research money.
Further evidence of the vocationalization of higher education can be
found in the increasing willingness on the part of legislators, government
representatives, and school officials to rely on corporate leaders to
establish the terms of the debate in the media regarding the meaning and
purpose of higher education. One typical example can be found in the
48 IMPURE AC T S

highly publicized pronouncements of Louis Gerstner Jr., who is the

chairman and CEO of IBM. In an editorial in USA Today, Gerstner
argues that schools should be treated like businesses because “U.S.
businesses were faced with a stark choice: change or close. They
changed. They began to invest in substantial transformation, new
methods of production, new kinds of worker training. Most importantly,
they continually benchmarked performance against one another and
against international competition…. And it worked.”28 For Gerstner and
many other CEOs, the current success of the capitalist economy is the
direct result of the leadership exercised by corporate America. The
lesson to be drawn is simple: “Schools are oddly insulated from
marketplace forces and the discipline that drives constant adaptation,
self-renewal and a relentless push for excellence.”29 Gerstner’s argument
is instructive because it is so typical, primarily about issues of efficiency,
accountability, and restructuring. Corporate organizations such as the
Committee for Economic Development, an organization of executives
from approximately 250 corporations, have been more blunt about their
interest in education. Not only has the group argued that social goals and
services get in the way of learning basic skills, but that many employers
in the business community feel dissatisfied because “a large majority of
their new hires lack adequate writing and problem-solving skills.”30
Given the narrow nature of corporate concerns, it is not surprising that
when matters of accountability become part of the language of school
reform, they are divorced from broader considerations of ethics, equity,
and justice. This type of corporate discourse not only lacks a vision
beyond its own pragmatic interests, it also lacks a self-critical inventory
about its own ideology and its effects on society. But, of course, one would
not expect such concerns to emerge within corporations, where questions
of consequence begin and end with the bottom line. Questions about the
effects of downsizing, deindustrialization, and, as the New York Times has
noted, the “trend toward more low-paid, temporary, benefit-free, blue and
white-collar jobs and fewer decent permanent factory and office jobs”
caused by the reforms implemented by companies such as IBM must
come from those democratic arenas that business seeks to restructure.31
Megacorporations will say nothing about their profound role in
 SCHOOLING AND THE POLITICS OF CORPRATE CULTURE 49

promoting the flight of capital abroad, the widening gap among

intellectual, technical, and manual labor and the growing class of
permanently underemployed in a mass of “deskilled” jobs, the growing
inequality between the rich and the poor, or the scandalous use of child
labor in third world countries. The onus of responsibility is placed on
educated citizens to recognize that corporate principles of efficiency,
accountability, and profit maximization have not created new jobs but in
most cases have eliminated them.32 My point, of course, is that such
absences in public discourse constitute a defining principle of corporate
ideology, which refuses to address—and must be made to address—the
scarcity of moral vision that inspires such calls for school reform modeled
after corporate reforms implemented in the last decade.
But the modeling of higher education after corporate principles and
the partnerships they create with the business community do more than
reorient the purpose and meaning of higher education. Such reforms also
instrumentalize the curricula and narrow what it means to extend
knowledge to broader social concerns. Business/university partnerships
provide just one concrete example of the willingness of both educators
and corporate executives to acknowledge the effects such mergers have
on the production and dissemination of knowledge in the interest of the
public good. Lost in the willingness of schools such as MIT to sell part
of their curricula to the corporations is the ethical consequence of
ignoring basic science research that benefits humanity as a whole
because such research offers little as a profit-maximizing venture. In a
recent speech broadcast on C-Span, Ralph Nader indicated that one
result of such transactions is that the universities are doing far too little
to develop malaria and tuberculosis vaccines at a time when these
diseases are once again killing large numbers of people in third world
countries; such interventions are viewed as nonprofitable investments.33
Research guided only by the controlling yardstick of profit undermines
the role of the university as a public sphere dedicated to addressing the
most serious social problems a society faces. Moreover, the corporate
model of research instrumentalizes knowledge and undermines forms of
theorizing, pedagogy, and meaning that define higher education as a
social asset rather than private good.
50 IMPURE AC T S

Missing from much of the corporate discourse on schooling is any

analysis of how power works in shaping knowledge, how the teaching of
broader social values provide safeguards against turning citizen skills into
simply training skills for the workplace, or how schooling can help
students reconcile the seemingly opposing needs of freedom and solidarity
in order to forge a new conception of civic courage and democratic public
life. Knowledge as capital in the corporate model is privileged as a form of
investment in the economy, but appears to have little value when linked to
the power of self-definition, social responsibility, or the capacities of
individuals to expand the scope of freedom, justice, and the operations of
democracy.34 Knowledge stripped of ethical and political considerations
offers limited, if any, insights into how schools should educate students to
push against the oppressive boundaries of gender, class, race, and age
domination. Nor does such a language provide the pedagogical conditions
for students to critically engage knowledge as an ideology deeply
implicated in issues and struggles concerning the production of identities,
culture, power, and history. Education is a moral and political practice and
always presupposes an introduction to and preparation for specific forms
of social life, a particular rendering of the notion of community, and what
the future might hold.
If pedagogy is, in part, about the production of identities, then
curricula modeled after corporate culture have been enormously
successful in preparing students for low-skilled service work in a society
that has little to offer in the way of meaningful employment for the vast
majority of its graduates. If CEOs are going to provide some insight into
how education should be reformed, they will have to reverse their
tendency to collapse the boundaries between corporate culture and civic
culture, between a society that defines itself through the interests of
corporate power and one that defines itself through more democratic
considerations regarding what constitutes substantive citizenship and
social responsibility. Moreover, they will have to recognize that the
problems in American schools cannot be reduced to matters of
accountability or cost-effectiveness. Nor can the solution to such
problems be reduced to the spheres of management and economics. The
problems of higher education and public schooling must be addressed in
 SCHOOLING AND THE POLITICS OF CORPRATE CULTURE 51

the realms of values and politics, while engaging critically the most
fundamental beliefs Americans have as a nation regarding the meaning
and purpose of education and its relationship to democracy.

C O R P O R AT E C U LT U R E A N D T H E P O L I T I C S
OF SCHOOLING

As universities increasingly model themselves after corporations, it

becomes crucial to understand how the principles of corporate culture
intersect with the meaning and purpose of the university, the role of
knowledge production for the twenty-first century, and the social
practices inscribed within teacher-student relationships. The signs are not
encouraging.
In many ways, the cost accounting principles of efficiency, calculability,
predictability, and control of the corporate order have restructured the
meaning and purpose of education. As I have mentioned previously, many
deans are now given the title of CEO, academic programs are streamlined
to cut costs, and in many colleges new presidents are actively pursuing
ways to establish closer ties between their respective colleges and the
business community. For example, the New York Times reports, in what has
become a typical story, that at George Mason University, a business-
oriented president has emphasized technology training in order to “boost
the university’s financing (by the state legislature) by as much as $25-
million a year, provided that George Mason cultivates stronger ties with
northern Virginia’s booming technology industry.”35 In other quarters of
higher education, the results of the emergence of the corporate university
appear even more ominous. One such example comes from James Carlin,
a multi-millionaire and successful insurance executive who until recently
served as the chairman of the Massachusetts State Board of Education. In
a speech given before the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, he
outlined what the structure of the corporate university would look like in
the next century. Carlin argued that colleges need to be down-sized, just as
businesses have in the past decade; that tenure should be eliminated; and
that faculty have too much power in shaping decisions in the university.
52 IMPURE AC T S

Carlin’s conclusion: “At least 50 percent of all non-hard sciences research

on American campuses is a lot of foolishness” and should be banned.36
Pointing to the rising costs of higher education, he further predicted that
“there’s going to be a revolution in higher education. Whether you like it
or not, it’s going to be broken apart and put back together differently. It
won’t be the same. Why should it be? Why should everything change
except for higher education?”37 Carlin’s version of the “revolution“ was
recently spelled out in more detail in a “Point of View” piece for the
Chronicle of Higher Education.38 Carlin contends that higher education
requires a model of management and leadership that places more power
and authority in the hands of university presidents. Astonishingly,
Carlin’s ideal is John Silber, the former president of Boston University,
who he claims represents “one of the few presidents who had real control
over a college or university.”39 What Carlin conveniently ignores, though
it has become a matter of public record, is both Silber’s demonstrated
contempt for faculty and student governance, especially those structures
that challenged his power and his disdain for the principles of academic
freedom so fundamental to higher education in America. The subject of
endless controversy, Silber’s three-decade rule at Boston University was
punctuated by his ongoing attacks on scholarship produced by feminists,
Marxists, multiculturalists, and others who did not pass his ideological
litmus test. Moreover, as Silber’s critics have pointed out, he did more
than belittle such scholarship. He actually refused to grant tenure to many
faculty who did not share his conservative views. Silber’s presidency
became synonymous in the popular imagination with a rigid, top-to-
bottom management style that undermined the university as a democratic
public sphere characterized by a range of scholarship, diverse forms of
teaching, and vigorous debate and deliberation. In using Silber as his
model of university leadership, the ex-CEO predictably celebrates the
imperatives of the bottom line and tight management while selling out
academic freedom and intellectual diversity.
Carlin believes that higher education, like the corporations, should be
subject to reorganization and accountability schemes, a strategy that
quickly translates into a series of flawed policies designed to cripple the
intellectual and economic freedom of faculty. Shared governance is not
 SCHOOLING AND THE POLITICS OF CORPRATE CULTURE 53

on Carlin’s reform agenda. Nor does Carlin exhibit anything but scorn
for reforms that would improve opportunities for faculty to teach smaller
classes, work within a time frame that allows for creative research, and
improve classroom teaching as a result of reduced workloads. Carlin
actually opposes all of these reforms. In his eagerness to rebuild
universities in the mirror image of the megacorporation, with faculty as
hostile workers and students as consumers, Carlin argues for scrapping
remediation programs for students, expanding the workload of
professors to four three-credit courses a semester, increasing student-
teacher ratios, abolishing tenure, eliminating “public service” projects,
and eradicating teacher unions. In this discourse, the university becomes
an adjunct of the corporation, and its historic function as an autonomous
sphere for the development of a critical and productive democratic
citizenry is vanquished.
It would be reassuring to view Carlin’s approach to higher education
as either an isolated or idiosyncratic example of an administrator who is
outspoken but largely ignorant of the problems and possibilities of higher
education. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The current attacks against
tenure, models of shared governance, critical scholarship, and equity-
related issues in higher education are more than an outgrowth of the one-
dimensional conception of democracy and civil society that corporate
culture supports. Carlin’s position ex-emplifies the ever-expanding
influence of corporate ideology on institutions of higher learning as well
as the concerted effort on the part of conservative ideologues to
dismantle the gains of the welfare state, eliminate public entitlements,
and abolish all those public spheres that subordinate civic considerations
and noncommercial values to the dictates of an allegedly “free” market.
There is more at stake in university reform than the realities and harsh
principles of cost cutting. Corporate culture in its reincarnation in the
1980s and 1990s appears to have little patience with noncommodified
knowledge, or with the more lofty ideals that have defined higher
education as a public service. Carlin’s anti-intellectualism and animosity
toward educators and students alike signal that as higher education comes
under the influence of corporate ideologies, universities will be largely
refashioned in the image of the new multiconglomerate landscape. As
54 IMPURE AC T S

Carlin suggests, one consequence will be an attempt on the part of

universities to curtail academic freedom and tenure. As one business-
oriented administrator admitted in a conversation about tenure with Bill
Tierney, “We have to focus on the priorities of the…school and not the
individual. We must industrialize the school, and tenure—academic
freedom—isn’t part of that model.”40 Missing from this model of leadership
is the recognition that academic freedom implies that knowledge has a
critical function, that intellectual inquiry that is unpopular and critical
should be safe-guarded and treated as an important social asset, and that
public intellectuals are more than merely functionaries of the corporate
order. Such ideals are at odds with the vocational function that corporate
culture wants to assign to higher education.
While the appeal to downsizing higher education appears to have
caught the public’s imagination at the moment, it belies the fact that such
“reorganization” has been going on for some time. In fact, more professors
are working part-time and at two-year community colleges than at any
other time in the country’s recent history. Alison Schneider recently
pointed out in the Chronicle of Higher Education that “in 1970, only 22 per
cent of the professorate worked part-time. By 1995, that proportion had
nearly doubled to 41 percent.”41 Creating a permanent underclass of part-
time professional workers in higher education is not only demoralizing
and exploitative for many faculty who inhabit such jobs, but such policies
increasingly deskill both partial and full-time faculty by increasing the
amount of work they have to do while simultaneously shifting power
away from the faculty to the managerial sectors of the university. But the
corporatizing of the university, along with its refusal to recognize higher
education as a vital public good, has also had a detrimental effect on
graduate students. Increasingly as the forces of downsizing, outsourcing,
and part-timing bear down on academic labor, teaching assistants are
given larger workloads, are deprived of health benefits, and are paid a
slave wage while taking on the responsibility of teaching greater numbers
of undergraduates. With little or no control over the conditions of their
labor, graduate students have become the new underclass of higher
education. At the same time, corporate culture has invested heavily in
leadership from the top as evidenced by the huge salaries many CEOs get
 SCHOOLING AND THE POLITICS OF CORPRATE CULTURE 55

in this country Stanford Weill, CEO for Citigroup, was paid $ 141.6
million in 1998, while L. Dennis Kozlowski, the CEO of Tyco
International, received an annual salary of $74.4 million the same year.42
Michael Eisner, the CEO of Walt Disney Inc., is estimated to have
received over $ 1 billion since he arrived at Disney fourteen years ago.43
Yet the price paid for such a model of leadership appears not only to
widen the gap between management and workers in the private sector, but
also to undermine the image of the university as a public space for
creating democratic values, critical teaching communities, and equitable
work relations. This is especially true since more and more leadership
positions in academia draw from the world and values of big business.
Held up to the profit standard, universities and colleges will
increasingly calibrate supply to fit demand, and the results look ominous
with regard to what forms of knowledge and research will be rewarded
and legitimated. In addition, it appears that populations marked by class
and racial subordination will have less access to higher education. As
globalization and corporate mergers increase, technologies develop, and
cost-effective practices expand, there will be fewer jobs for certain
professionals, resulting in the inevitable elevation of admission standards,
the restriction of student loans, and the reduction of student access to
higher education. Stanley Aronowitz argues that the changing nature of
intellectual labor, knowledge production, and the emerging glut of
professionals on a global scale undermine mass education as the answer to
the growing underemployment of the professional classes. He writes,

Although the media hypes that millions of new jobs require specialized,
advanced knowledge and credentials, the bare truth is that technological
change, globalization, and relatively slow growth have reduced the
demand for certain professionals…. And despite the boom of the middle
1990s, chronic shortages of physicians, accountants and attorneys have all
but disappeared. In fact, the globalization of intellectual labor is beginning
to effect knowledge industries, with Indian and Chinese engineers and
computer designers performing work that was once almost exclusively
done in North America and western Europe. And do nonscientists really
need credentials signifying they have completed a prescribed program to
perform most intellectual labor? If jobs are the intended outcome of a
credential, there are few arguments for mass higher education.44
56 IMPURE AC T S

Fewer jobs in higher education means fewer students will be enrolled or

have access, but it also means that the processes of vocationalization—fueled
by corporate values that mimic “flexibility,” “competition,” or “lean
production” and rationalized through the application of accounting
principles—pose the threat of gutting many academic departments and
programs that cannot translate their subject matter into commercial gains.
Programs and courses that focus on areas such as critical theory, literature,
feminism, ethics, environmentalism, postcolonialism, philosophy, and
sociology suggest an intellectual cosmopolitanism or a concern with social
issues that will be either eliminated or technicized because their role in the
market will be judged as ornamental. Similarly, those working conditions
that allow professors and graduate assistants to comment extensively on
student work, provide small seminars for classes, spend time advising
students, conduct independent studies, and do collaborative research with
both faculty colleagues and students do not appear consistent with the
imperatives of downsizing, efficiency, and cost accounting.45

S C H O O L I N G A N D D E M O C R AC Y

I want to return to an issue I raised in the beginning of this chapter in

which I argued that corporations have been given too much power in
this society, and hence the need for educators and others to address the
threat this poses to all facets of public life organized around the
noncommodified principles of justice, freedom, and equality.
Challenging the encroachment of corporate power is essential if
democracy is to remain a defining principle of education and everyday
life. Part of such a challenge necessitates that educators and others create
organizations capable of mobilizing civic dialogue, provide an alternative
conception of the meaning and purpose of higher education, and develop
political organizations that can influence legislation to challenge
corporate power’s ascendancy over the institutions and mechanisms of
civil society. This project requires that educators, students, and others
provide the rationale and mobilize the possibility for creating enclaves of
resistance, new public cultures for collective development, and
 SCHOOLING AND THE POLITICS OF CORPRATE CULTURE 57

institutional spaces that highlight, nourish, and evaluate the tension be-
tween civil society and corporate power while simultaneously struggling
to prioritize citizen rights over consumer rights.
In strategic terms, revitalizing public dialogue suggests that educators
need to take seriously the importance of defending higher education as an
institution of civic culture whose purpose is to educate students for active
and critical citizenship.46 Situated within a broader context of issues
concerned with social responsibility, politics, and the dignity of human life,
schooling should be defended as a site that offers students the opportunity
to involve themselves in the deepest problems of society, to acquire the
knowledge, skills, and ethical vocabulary necessary for learning how to
both participate in and shape public life.47 Educators, parents, legislators,
students, and social movements need to come together to defend higher
education institutions as public goods, rather than simply as training
centers, because they are among the few public spaces left where students
can learn the power of and engage in the experience of democracy. In the
face of corporate takeovers, the ongoing commodification of the curriculum,
and the transformation of students into consumers, such a project requires
educators to mount a collective struggle to reassert the crucial importance of
higher education in offering students the skills they need for learning how to
govern and take risks, while developing the knowledge necessary for
deliberation, reasoned arguments, and social action. At issue here is
providing students with an education that allows them to recognize the
dream and promise of a substantive democracy, particularly the idea that as
citizens they are, as Robin Kelley points out, “entitled to public services,
decent housing, safety, security, support during hard times, and most
importantly [sic], some power over decision making.”48
But more is needed than defending higher education as a vital space
in which to develop and nourish the proper balance between democratic
public spheres and commercial power, between identities founded on
democratic principles and identities steeped in forms of competitive, self-
interested individualism that celebrate their own material and ideological
advantages. Given the current assault on educators at all levels of
schooling, it is politically crucial that educators at all levels of
involvement in the academy be defended as oppositional public
58 IMPURE AC T S

intellectuals who provide an indispensable service to the nation. Such an

appeal cannot be made merely in the name of professionalism but in
terms of the civic duty such intellectuals provide. Intellectuals who
inhabit our nation’s universities represent the conscience of a society not
only because they shape the conditions under which future generations
learn about themselves and their relations to others and the world, but
also because they engage pedagogical practices that are by their very
nature moral and political, rather than simply technical. And at their
best, such pedagogical practices bear witness to the ethical and political
dilemmas that animate the broader social landscape. The appeal here is
not merely ethical; it is also an appeal that addresses the materiality of
power, resources, access, and politics. As oppositional public intellectuals,
educators would take as the object of their pedagogical work the need to
link learning to the possibilities of social transformation and political
change. This means educators would both demonstrate and provide the
opportunities and resources for students to engage in a public
conversation about the conditions, sites, and struggles that define
important political, economic, and cultural issues. This suggests teaching
students how to undertake critique and participate in and shape public
conversations across a variety of sites that range from academic journals
and public media, on one hand, to town hall meetings and the Internet
on the other. Being an oppositional public intellectual means that one
works out of a political project, speaks to multiple audiences, links
institutional reform to issues of access, and learns a language of critique
and possibility that is broadly conceived and capable of addressing a
variety of related social and cultural issues.
Organizing against the corporate takeover of schools also suggests—
especially within higher education—fighting to protect the jobs of full-time
faculty, turning adjunct jobs into full-time positions, expanding benefits to
part-time workers, and putting power into the hands of faculty and
students. Moreover, such a struggle must address the exploitative
conditions many graduate students work under, constituting a de facto
army of service workers who are underpaid, over-worked, and shorn of
any real power or benefits.48 Similarly, programs in many universities that
offer remedial programs, affirmative action, and other crucial pedagogical
 SCHOOLING AND THE POLITICS OF CORPRATE CULTURE 59

resources are under massive assault, often by conservative trustees who

want to eliminate from the university any attempt to address the deep
inequities in the society while simultaneously denying a decent education
to minorities of color and class. Hence, both teachers and students
increasingly bear the burden of overcrowded classes, limited resources,
and hostile legislators. Such educators and students need to join with
community people and social movements around a common platform that
resists the corporatizing of schools, the rollback in basic services, and the
exploitation of teaching assistants and adjunct faculty.
In the face of the growing corporatization of schools, progressive
educators at all levels of education should also organize to establish a bill of
rights identifying and outlining the range of noncommercial relations that
can be used as mediation between higher education and the business world.
If the forces of corporate culture are to be challenged, progressive educators
must also enlist the help of diverse communities, local and federal
governments, and other political forces to ensure that public institutions of
higher learning are adequately funded so that they will not have to rely on
corporate sponsorship and advertising revenues. How our colleges and
universities educate youth for the future will determine the meaning and
substance of democracy itself; such a responsibility necessitates prioritizing
democratic community, citizen rights, and the public good over market
relations, narrow consumer demands, and corporate interests.
The corporatizing of higher education in the U.S. reflects a crisis of
vision regarding the meaning and purpose of democracy at a time when,
as Cornel West has said, “market cultures, market moralities, market
mentalities [are] shattering community, eroding civic society, [and]
undermining the nurturing system for children.”50 Yet such a crisis also
represents a unique opportunity for progressive educators to expand and
deepen the meaning of democracy—radically defined as a struggle to
combine the distribution of wealth, income, and knowledge with a
recognition and positive valorizing of cultural diversity—by reasserting
the primacy of politics, power, and struggle as a pedagogical task.51 At
stake is not simply the future of higher education, but the nature of
critical democracy itself. Democracy is not synonymous with capitalism,
and critical citizenship is not limited to being a literate consumer.
60 IMPURE AC T S

Educators need to confront the march of corporate power by resurrecting

a noble tradition, extending from the acts of Horace Mann to those of
Martin Luther King Jr., in which education is affirmed as a political
project that encourages people to expand the range of their capacities in
order to assert the primacy of the public good over corporate interests
and to reclaim democracy as more than a spectacle of market culture.
 three
3

The Limits
The Limits
of Academic
of Ac a d e m i c
Multiculturalism
M u l t i c u l t u ra l i s m

There are people who will not be disturbed about the existence of evil because they
have a theory that accounts for it. Here, I am also thinking of some…who, in the face
of wretchedness, quickly proceed to show why it exists. Even comprehension can be
too quick.
—Max Horkheimer, Dawn and Decline: Notes:1926–1931 and 1950–1969

I N T RO D U C T I O N

For more than a decade, critical multiculturalists have made a strong case
for rethinking the political and pedagogical possibilities of
multiculturalism within higher education. 1 Signaling a new
understanding of how the mechanisms of domination and exclusion
work to reproduce and legitimate the entrenched nature of class, race,
gender, and sexual hierarchies in higher education, critical
multiculturalists often combine the study of symbolic forms and
signifying practices with a reinvigorated and necessary study of the
relations between culture and politics. 2 For many critical
multiculturalists, the process of schooling becomes a terrain of struggle

61
62 IMPURE AC T S

over the meaning and purpose of the humanities, the value of

disciplinarity, the regulatory function of culture, the relationship between
knowledge and authority, and the related issue of who has ownership
over the conditions for the production of knowledge. 3 Critical
multiculturalists have also called into question the foundational
categories that establish the canons of great works, the “high” and “low”
culture divide, and the allegedly “objective” scholarship that mark the
exclusions within and between various disciplines.4 Similarly, they have
fought bitter battles to establish academic programs that address the
interests of various groups, including women’s studies, Latino studies,
and gay and lesbian programs.5 In addition to challenging the content of
curricula, they have successfully confronted the institutional distribution
of power in higher education, in part by expanding, through affirmative
action and other programs, the opportunities for minority students to
gain access to colleges and universities.
Critical multiculturalism has scored some of its greatest successes by
significantly adding to the sum of public discourses available within the
university that provide students with a range of pedagogical options in
which they can invest, act, and speak in order to expand their capacities
for creating a stronger democratic society. Within progressive notions of
multiculturalism, old disciplinary and cultural boundaries have given
way to new ones, and the grip of monoculturalism has been significantly
eased through a sustained emphasis on pluralized cultures in which
various groups can now lay claim to the particularized identities and
histories that inform and shape diverse cultural experiences.6
Arguing that cultural texts are inextricably related to broader social
processes, critical multiculturalists have enhanced our understanding of
how culture functions within higher education to construct knowledge,
produce different social identities, and legitimate particular maps of
meaning. Such insights have furthered our notion of cultural politics and
the opportunity to make the pedagogical more political by linking the
reading and writing of cultural texts to the acquisition of those skills and
knowledges necessary to become critical readers and social actors.
Drawing upon various theories of deconstruction, poststructuralism, and
postmodernism, academic multiculturalists have appropriated the critical
 THE LIMITS OF ACADEMIC MULTICULTURALISM 63

turn toward language, particularly the emphasis on strategies of

indeterminacy, uncertainty, and poly vocal meanings, in order to
challenge Western logocentrism and reveal the racial codes that
discursively construct “whiteness” as a mode of oppression and
domination. Texts are now seen not only as objects of struggle in
challenging dominant modes of racial and colonial authority but also as
pedagogical resources for rewriting the possibilities for new narratives,
identities, and cultural spaces.7 Focusing on the politics of representation
to call attention to the ways in which texts mobilize meanings in order to
suppress, silence, and contain marginalized histories, voices, and
experiences, critical multiculturalists have re-asserted the power of the
symbolic as a pedagogical force in securing authority and as a
pedagogical strategy for producing particular forms of contestation and
resistance.
Subjectivity and representation constitute the core determinants in
shaping cultural politics in the liberal and radical discourses of academic
multiculturalism, and serve to foreground pedagogical strategies that
privilege the reading of texts and the related struggle over the control
and production of identities. 8 Although critical and radical
multiculturalists have been attentive to the relationship between culture
and systemic relations of power within the university, they have largely
focused their efforts pedagogically on matters of language, negotiation,
and cultural identity. Within such approaches, the political as a form of
ideology critique defines literacy largely as the pedagogical imperative to
read texts differently; to “draw attention to discursive ambivalence”;9 to
recognize different logics of signification; and to unsettle the consensus of
common sense that constitutes dominant public values, national identity,
and the meaning of citizenship. Academic multiculturalism in its more
radical manifestations has emphasized going beyond opening texts to a
multiplicity of interpretations, to the contruction of an in-between space
of translation where subaltern knowledge can be represented and heard.
It has also insisted on the need for dominant intellectuals to work against
the grain of their own embedded interests and privileges while, as John
Beverly sees it, “undoing the authority of the academy and knowledge
centers at the same time that [they] continue to participate fully in them
64 IMPURE AC T S

and to deploy their authority as teachers, researches, planners and

theorists.”10
At its best, critical multiculturalism has reinvigorated the debate over
the role the humanities and the university might play in creating a
pluralized public culture essential for animating the basic precepts of
democratic public life. It has also worked to provide an institutionalized
space for generating new bodies of knowledge, critical methods, and
social relationships alongside the old, traditional, and familiar.11 Critical
multiculturalism has provided new discourses for contesting oppressive
power within the university in order to produce the formation of new
publics of difference. In pluralizing literacy, multiculturalism has
redefined the pedagogical possibilities for teachers and students to
engage their own historical locations and hybridized identities as
formative rather than static, as part of a process of border crossing and a
mode of becoming in which the production of cultural differences is both
ongoing and an invaluable asset to democratic public life.12
Yet in spite of the contributions that critical multiculturalists have
made in terms of democratizing higher education, their work has
spawned serious debate and reprisal over the relationship between
culture and politics. In what follows, I want to engage a number of the
more vociferous charges that have surfaced against critical
multiculturalism. While many of these criticisms are important for the
construction of a viable notion of cultural politics, I want to go beyond
these to argue that critical multiculturalism must overcome its insularity
and reliance on textual strategies and address a cultural politics of
difference that takes seriously the relationship between culture and
power, and the implications the latter has for connecting work within the
university to broader struggles in the larger society.
Since the strengths and limitations of critical multiculturalism can only
be understood as part of the outcome of a broader struggle over issues of
culture, identity, and power, I begin by addressing the most pervasive
forms of multiculturalism in the academy, which consist of centrist models
of diversity management and liberal attempts to develop a politics of
recognition. I then focus on the emergence of one dominant strain of
critical multiculturalism, which has developed in opposition to these
 THE LIMITS OF ACADEMIC MULTICULTURALISM 65

forms of multiculturalism, and analyze the detour it has taken primarily

through literary studies, with its concerted focus on the politics and
pedagogy of textuality. I then address briefly the conservative attack on all
forms of academic multiculturalism and the role conservatives play in
opposing multiculturalism as a form of radical cultural politics in the
university. The paradoxical role that conservatives have played here
demands some elaboration. Not only have conservatives engaged in a
form of “cultural politics” that defines itself against politics even as it
increasingly sets the agenda for how culture and power regulate questions
of identity and difference within higher education; they have also
presented a serious challenge to their counterparts on the left who theorize
and strategize the relationship among culture, power, and politics by
focusing almost exclusively on questions of meaning and textuality.

M A N AG I N G D I V E R S I T Y A N D T H E P O L I T I C S
OF RECOGNITION

Academic multiculturalism in its corporate and liberal versions has come

under considerable attack recently, not only from a diverse number of
conservatives but increasingly from critics on the left. Refusing to link
cultural differences to relations of power, multi culturalists representing
multinational corporate interests and centrist views of the academy have
been rightly criticized for attempting to manage diversity through
policies designed to incorporate resistance by, as David Theo Goldberg
sees it, “paying lip service to the celebration of cultural distinctions.”13
Such strategies simultaneously undermine challenges waged by minority
students against the misdistribution of power and resources in higher
education. In this version of multiculturalism, race and difference are
neutralized within the inclusive but homogeneous logic of assimilation or
the power-insensitive discourse of pluralism. 14 Depoliticized and
domesticated, culture is now racially cleansed and immune from the
conflicts and exclusions that constitute its historical legacy.15
In fact, left critics have argued recently that within the mainstream
appropriation of multiculturalism, management has become the organizing
principle for regulating differences, often treating racism as simply a pathology
66 IMPURE AC T S

and prejudice rather than the systematic and historically informed legacy of
white supremacy16 For instance, Angela Davis has argued, “Diversity
management is precisely a means of preserving and fortifying power relations
based on class, gender, and race [and that] such disciplining of diversity is,
in fact, a strategy for more exhaustive control of the working-class”17 In
addition, radical critics such as David Bennett have also criticized liberal
versions of diversity management based on the call for group tolerance and
a politics of equal respect for the “other.”18 These approaches to academic
multiculturalism focus on racial difference “as a question of identity rather
than of history and politics.”19 According to Bennett, the diversitymanagement
model of multiculturalism is organized around a notion of pluralism that
actually refuses the politics of difference among culturally diverse groups
while focusing on “consensus, rather than any overarching structures of
power, privilege and inequality, that defines a group as a ‘community’ ”20
Avery Gordon and Christopher Newfield claim that there is no language in
liberal multiculturalism for either acknowledging the structural determinants
of inequality within the university or for challenging the “most lethal cultural
aspect of white rule—assimilation—which allows the mere presence of white
people to be a form of control.”21
Some progressives argue that cultural politics in this discourse becomes
ossified and wrongly celebrates political identities in their own right rather
than mobilizing social identities in the interests of a broader counterhegemonic
political project. Moreover, they charge that the politics of recognition and
diversity management is rooted in a form of essentialism that assumes that
individuals inhabit different but unsullied, preconstituted cultural memories,
locations, and experiences.22 Politics in this paradigm is about recognizing
diversity and forming consensus, rather than addressing inequality, the abuses
of power, and white supremacy.23 Homi Bhabha sums up the importance of
this critique by redefining cultural difference as a product of power and
politics, rather than preconstituted positions of difference as suggested in
liberal discourses such as Charles Taylor’s more celebrated politics of respect.
Bhabha writes,

The notion that cultural diversity is a problem because there are already
many different cultures is not the reason why you have cultural difference.
 THE LIMITS OF ACADEMIC MULTICULTURALISM 67

Cultural difference is a particular constructed discourse at a time when

something is being challenged about power or authority…. Cultural
difference is not difficult, if you like, because there are many diverse
cultures; it is because there is some particular issue about the redistribution
of goods between cultures, or the funding of cultures, or the emergence of
minorities or immigrants in a situation of re-sources—where resource
allocation has to go—or the construction of schools and the decision about
whether the school should be bilingual or trilingual or whatever. It is at that
point that the problem of cultural difference is produced. So, it’s really an
argument against the naturalization of the notion of culture.24

As important as the politics of recognition might be in criticizing forms of

racial privilege or calling for educators to make their own authority
problematic and democratic, it generally has little to say about what it is in
opposition to or what broader political project informs its own discourse of
critique.25 In light of such absences, critics such as Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, Chandra Mohanty, Ella Shohat, and Robert Stam have argued
that academic multiculturalists of the diversity-management variety have
not only failed to link difference to issues of power, parity, and equality,
they have also failed to challenge the Eurocentric biases that figure in their
notions of history, marginality, modernity, gender, and transformation.26

P RO F E S S I O N A L I Z E D T H E O RY A N D T H E P O L I T I C S
O F T E X T UA L I T Y

The legacies of corporate and colonial ideology can also be found in

critical multiculturalism’s obsession with a Western-oriented formalist
criticism that often abstracts theory from concrete problems and the
dynamics of power. Theory in this sense is reduced to a form of
theoreticism, an indulgence in which the production of theoretical
discourse becomes an end in itself, an expression of language largely
removed from the possibility of challenging strategies of domination.
Rather than performing the bridging work between public and
intellectual debates or implementing a political project that merges
strategies of understanding and social engagement, theory becomes less a
means for social amelioration than an end for professional advancement.
68 IMPURE AC T S

Cut off from concrete struggles and broader public debates, theory
assumes an enervating role in privileging rhetorical mastery, playfulness,
and cleverness over the politically responsible task of challenging the
inertia of commonsense understandings of the world, opening up
possibilities for new approaches to social reform, or addressing the most
pressing social problems transforming the emergence of a transnational,
multicultural democracy27
At the core of the critical debate surrounding the political viability of
critical multiculturalism is the emphasis on the politics of representation
and textuality It is widely recognized that critical multiculturalism’s
emphasis on textuality has provided an important theoretical service. Such
work has opened up institutional spaces that enable teachers and students
to interrogate different readings of cultural texts and address critically the
signifying power of such texts to create and affirm particular social
identities. Yet, this work has often resulted in reductive pedagogical and
political practices. Removed from broader public discourses and analyzed
outside of an assemblage of other cultural formations, texts become either
the reified markers of a narrow version of identity politics or pedagogical
resources for uncovering the attributes of specific identities.
Critical multiculturalists, especially those that inhabit literary theory
programs, often focus inordinate attention on texts, signs, and disciplinary
turfs. Herman Gray, in response to the textualization of politics within the
academy, argues that “by privileging cultural texts over practice as the site of
the social and political, the social and historical contexts that shape, situate,
and structure cultural texts/products are largely ignored.”28 David Theo
Goldberg reinforces Gray’s criticism by arguing that cultural politics is not
simply a signifying scheme through which identities are produced, but also
a “mobilization around material resources regarding education, employment
conditions, and political power.”29 Both of these theorists are correct in
assuming that the textualization of multiculturalism, with its emphasis on
expanding the curricula, its uncritical endorsement of multiple readings, and
its use of texts to recover and affirm maginalized identities offers a narrow
version of cultural politics. The politics of textuality has little to say about
the underlying political and economic forces that keep various social groups
marginalized; nor does it know how to address the often subtle ways in
 THE LIMITS OF ACADEMIC MULTICULTURALISM 69

which cultural practices both deploy power and are deployed in material
relations of power.30 Within many liberal and critical approaches to
multiculturalism, the politics of meaning becomes relevant only to the
degree that it is separated from a broader politics of engagement. Reading
texts becomes a hermetic process removed from larger social and political
contexts, and questions of power are engaged exclusively within a politics of
representation. Such readings largely function to celebrate a textuality that
has been diminished to a bloodless formalism and the nonthreatening, if not
accommodating, affirmation of indeterminacy as a transgressive aesthetic.
Lost here is any semblance of a radical political project that, as George
Lipsitz sees it, “grounds itself in the study of concrete cultural practices
and…understands that struggles over meaning are inevitably struggles over
resources.”31 By failing to connect the study of texts, identity politics, and the
politics of difference to specific social contexts, many academic multiculturalists
conceive of politics as largely representational and abstractly theoretical.32 In
doing so, they erroneously believe that the politics of difference and the
broader culture of politics can only be imagined or talked about as a form of
discourse rather than understood as a set of effects marked by specific social
relations, spatial practices, and institutional conditions produced within
unequal relations of power. By addressing discourse in terms of both usage
and effects, it becomes possible for educators to connect the discursive
nature of their work to political and historical analyses that extend into
wider public conversations and social issues. Such connections offer
multicultural academics ample opportunities to connect their institutional
subcultures within the university to broader struggles and social movements
that build upon radical projects such as expanding the goals of the civil
rights movement, campaigns designed to end attacks against the poor and
immigrants, organized efforts to eliminate child poverty, and ongoing
struggles to end sexism, racism, and environmental abuse.

C O N S E RVAT I V E AT TAC K S O N M U LT I C U LT U R A L I S M

A much different mode of critical analyses of multiculturalism and

cultural politics has emerged from a number of conservatives who argue
70 IMPURE AC T S

that racism no longer undermines the ability of marginal groups to get

ahead and that identity concerns over race, gender, and sexual orientation
represent in large part the rantings of specialinterest groups whose
primary purpose is to undermine the traditions of Western culture and the
basic principles of excellence that shape university life. The conservative
attack is too well known to be repeated in detail, but includes a range of
positions extending from the liberal assimilationist arguments of Arthur
Schlesinger Jr., to the centrist conservative arguments of such authors as
Shelby Steele and Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom, to the ideological
extremism of Richard J.Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Dinesh D’Souza,
and Robert Bork.33 But in spite of their differences, all of these authors
argue that racism no longer exists as a major problem for American society
and that “blacks now have an unfair advantage in almost everything—jobs,
education, housing, and incomes.”34 In its more mean-spirited version, this
argument is often used to legitimate the more popular assumption that the
black underclass and the poor are responsible for their own suffering and
plight. In this strangely twisted argument it is no longer racism that poses
a problem, but those who experience its effects.35
The resurgence of such arguments and bitter racial attacks have
become widespread and gained a new urgency since the Reagan and Bush
era. In part this has happened because of a growing and organized
campaign against racial justice and equality that is largely funded by right-
wing institutes like the John M.Olin Foundation, the Manhattan Institute,
and the Smith Richardson Foundation. All of the previously mentioned
best-selling authors have been sponsored in one way or another by right-
wing think tanks and foundations, and all of them exhibit a pronounced
belief that immigrants, multiculturalism in the schools, affirmative action,
civil rights legislation, and the black underclass represent a growing threat
to national identity, unity, and what it means to be an American.36 Stanley
Fish argues that in spite of their differences, conservative critics all share
elements of a demagogic monoculturalism and “generally tell the same
story about the formation of American character, the necessity of
preserving it, and the threat it faces from ethnic upsurges: a story that
continues in every respect, from words and phrases to large arguments, a
tradition of jingoism, racism and cultural imperialism.” 37 While
 THE LIMITS OF ACADEMIC MULTICULTURALISM 71

conservatives respond to multiculturalism by privileging American history

as a public sphere inhabited largely by whites while reproducing at all
levels of schooling the legacy and racially coded discourse of Anglo-Eu-
ropean colonialism, they have not limited their battles to struggles over
texts and meaning. In fact, they have utilized the enormous power of their
capital, both material and symbolic, to shape educational policy around
issues of access, knowledge production, and retention, promotion, and
tenure. Moreover, conservatives have not limited their struggles over
cultural politics to the schools; they have also developed alliances between
conservative academics and state legislators, prominent think tanks, and
other sources of conservative funding. In doing so, they have exercised a
powerful influence on private and governmental institutions that produce
legislation, influence the media, and distribute resources, especially as part of
a broader attempt to liquidate, as Pierre Bourdieu has noted, “the gains of
the welfare state…as the guardian of the public interest.”38 Conservatives
have made it clear through their discourse and actions that the politics of
culture is not limited to the politics of representation and that such struggles
are not confined within the isolated sphere of higher education.

C O N N E C T I N G C U LT U R E A N D P O L I T I C S

In light of the conservative offensive against multicultural education,

immigrants, civil rights legislation, and the welfare state, a number of
critical theorists have recently made a strong case for rethinking the
political and pedagogical possibilities of a radical multiculturalism within
higher education.39 In fact, many of these theorists share Wahneema
Lubiano’s argument that higher education should not be abandoned as a
site of political and cultural struggle.40 Lubiano and others are right in
suggesting that progressives should resist surrendering to the imperatives
of professionalism, or retreat under pressure from right-wing border
patrol groups such as the National Association of Scholars who routinely
police the Western canon against racial impurities and disciplinary
border crossings. Instead, such progressives ought to consider new
collective strategies for organizing engaged public intellectuals within
72 IMPURE AC T S

and outside of the university to challenge the state’s attempt to

appropriate multiculturalism as both a corporate strategy and a set of
empty slogans while limiting the intellectual and material resources
available to marginalized groups. At the same time, such intellectuals can
play an important role by not only challenging-state sanctioned uses of
culture to reproduce and regulate racial, class, and gender-based
hierarchies and inequalities, but also by producing new spaces in which
teachers and students can reimagine their senses of self and their
relationships to others within a more radical democratic social order where
racial injustices lose their determining force as the “fundamental category
for the distribution of power, material resources and privilege.”41
But if the academy is to assume a central role in contesting racial
injustice, class hierarchies, and the politics of exclusion, progressive
academics will have to challenge those poststructuralist and postmodern
versions of multicultural textualism that reduce culture to the logic of
signification. As Lawrence Grossberg points out, culture must not be
equated with the domain of meaning and representation, but rather
addressed as “both a form of discursive practice and an analysis of
institutional conditions.” 42 Equally important to politically viable
academic work is the recognition that the struggle over culture is not a
substitute for some kind of “real” or “concrete” form of politics. Rather,
as Grossberg sees it, culture is a crucial “site of the production and
struggle over power—where power is understood not necessarily in the
form of domination,” but as a productive and mediating force for the
making and remaking of diverse and interconnected social, political, and
economic contexts that make up daily life.43
As citizenship becomes more privatized and students are increasingly
educated to become consuming subjects rather than critical social subjects,
it becomes all the more imperative for educators to rethink how the
educational force of the culture works to both secure and resist particular
identities and values. This is especially important as the force of dominant
culture is defined through its submission to the values of the economy
with its emphasis on privatization and the gospel of self-help, all of which
works to both undermine notions of the public good and collective
responsibility and place the blame for injustice and oppression entirely on
 THE LIMITS OF ACADEMIC MULTICULTURALISM 73

the shoulders of those who are the victims of social misfortune. In

opposition to such critics as Harold Bloom, Alan Sokal, and Todd Gitlin,
progressive educators can foreground the importance of critical work in
higher education as part of a broader radical democratic project to recover
and rethink the ways in which culture is related to power and how and
where it functions both symbolically and institutionally as an educational,
political, and economic force that refuses to live with difference,
democracy, and social justice.
As more and more young people face a world of increasing poverty,
unemployment, and diminished social opportunities, those of us in
education can struggle to vindicate the crucial connection between culture
and politics in defending higher education as an essential democratic public
sphere dedicated to providing students with the knowledge, skills, and
values they will need to address some of the most urgent questions of our
time. Yet if addressing multiculturalism as a form of cultural politics within
the university is to become a meaningful pedagogical practice, academics
will have to reevaluate the relationship between culture and power as a
starting point for bearing witness to the ethical and political dilemmas that
connect the university to other spheres within the broader social landscape.
In doing so, progressive educators need to become more attentive to how
multicultural politics gets worked out in urban spaces and public spheres
currently experiencing the full force of the right-wing attack on culture and
racial difference. It is no longer possible for academics to make a claim for
a radical politics of multiculturalism by defining it merely as a set of
intellectual options and curriculum imperatives. Academic multiculturalism
must also examine actual struggles taking place in the name of cultural
difference within institutional sites and cultural formations that bear the
brunt of dominant machineries of power designed to exclude, contain, or
disadvantage the oppressed. The institutional and cultural spheres bearing
the brunt of the racialization of the social order are increasingly located in
the public schools, in the criminal justice system, in retrograde anti-
immigrant policy legislation, and in the state’s ongoing attempts to force
welfare recipients into workfare programs.44
I am not suggesting that we redefine multiculturalism by moving away
from issues of representation or that we shift our pedagogical efforts in the
74 IMPURE AC T S

interests of a democratic politics of difference away from the university. On

the contrary, as progressive educators we need to vitalize our efforts within
the university by connecting the intellectual work we do there with a
greater attentiveness to broader pressing public problems and social
responsibilities. A radical approach to multiculturalism must address how
material relations of power work to sustain structures of inequality and
exploitation in the current racialization of the social order. It must ask
specific questions about the forms racial domination and subordination
take within the broader public culture and how their organization,
operation, and effects both implicate and affect the meaning and purpose
of higher education. At stake here is the need for critical educators to give
meaning to the belief that academic work matters in its relationship to
broader public conversation practices, and policies; and that such work
holds the possibility for understanding not just how power operates in
particular contexts, but also how, according to Lawrence Grossberg, such
knowledge “will better enable people to change the context and hence the
relations of power”45 that inform the inequalities that undermine any
viable notion of multiculturalism within spheres as crucial to democracy as
the public schools and higher education.
In short, I want to insist that multiculturalism is not simply an
educational problem. At its roots it is about the relationship between
politics and power; it’s about a historical past and a living present in which
racist exclusions appear “calculated, brutally rational, and profitable”46
Embedded within a systemic history of black restriction, subjugation, and
white privilege, the politics of multiculturalism is still, as Supreme Court
justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg puts it, “evident in our workplaces, markets
and neighborhoods.”47 David Shipler argues powerfully that race and class
are the two most powerful determinants shaping American society. Based
on interviews with hundreds of people over a five-year period, Shipler’s
book A Country of Strangers bears witness to a racism that “is a bit subtler in
expression, more cleverly coded in public, but essentially unchanged as
one of the ‘deep abiding currents’ in everyday life, in both the simplest
and the most complex interactions of whites and blacks.”48
Although there can be little doubt that racial progress has been
achieved in many areas in the last fifty years,49 it is also true that such
 THE LIMITS OF ACADEMIC MULTICULTURALISM 75

progress has not been sustained. This is particularly evident in the

dramatic increase in black prisoners and the growth of the prison-
industrial complex; crumbling city infrastructures; segregated housing;
soaring black and Latino unemployment; exorbitant school dropout
rates among black and Latino youth, coupled with the more general
realities of failing schools; and deepening inequalities of incomes and
wealth between blacks and whites.50 Pushing against the grain of civil
rights reform and racial justice are reactionary and moderate positions
ranging from the extremism of right-wing skinheads and Jesse Helms
conservatives to the moderate “color-blind” positions of liberals like
Randall Kennedy.51
Crucial to the reemergence of this “new” racism is a cultural politics
that plays a determining role in how race shapes our popular
unconscious. This is evident in the widespread articles, reviews, and
commentaries in the dominant media that give inordinate amounts of
time and space to mainstream conservative authors, filmmakers, and
critics who rail against affirmative action, black welfare mothers, and the
alleged threats black youth and rap artists pose to middle-class existence.
Rather than dismiss such rampant conservatism as either indifferent to
the realities of racism or deconstruct its racialized codes to see where
such language falls in on itself, educators can engage these commentaries
more constructively by analyzing how they function as public discourses,
how their privileged meanings work intertextually to resonate with
ideologies produced in other sites, and how they serve largely to
construct and legitimate racially exclusive practices, policies, and social
relations. Central to such a project is the need to engage a multicultural
politics that offers students and teachers opportunities to critically
examine how certain racialized meanings carried in cultural texts gain
the force of common sense in light of how racialized discourses are
legitimated in other public spheres and institutionalized sites.
In order to deepen the cultural politics of multiculturalism, educators
can address questions of culture, power, identity, and representation as
part of a broader discourse about public pedagogy and social policy. In
this pedagogical approach, power becomes central to the study of
cultural texts and practices, and socially relevant problems can be
76 IMPURE AC T S

explored through theoretical engagements with wider institutional

contexts and public spaces in which multicultural discourses gain their
political and economic force. If teaching students to interrogate,
challenge, and transform those cultural practices that sustain racism is a
central objective of multicultural education, such a pedagogy must be
addressed in ways that link cultural texts to the major social problems
that animate public life. Texts in this instance would be analyzed as part
of a “social vocabulary of culture” that points to how power names,
shapes, defines, and constrains relationships between the self and the
other; constructs and disseminates what counts as knowledge; and
produces representations that provide the context for identity
formation.52 Within this type of pedagogical approach, multiculturalism
must find ways to acknowledge the political character of culture through
strategies of understanding and engagement that link an antiracist and
radically democratic rhetoric with strategies to transform racist
institutionalized structures within and outside of the university.
At its best, critical multiculturalism should forge a connection
between reading texts and reading public discourses in order to link the
struggle for inclusion with relations of power in the broader society It is
precisely within the realm of a cultural politics that teachers and students
develop pedagogical practices that close the gap between intellectual
debate and public life not simply as a matter of relevance, but as a
process through which students can learn the skills and knowledge to
develop informed opinions, make critical choices, and function as citizen
activists. Robin D.G.Kelley provides one direction such a project might
take. He insightfully argues,

[Multiculturalism cannot ignore] how segregation strips communities of

resources and reproduces inequality. The decline of decent-paying jobs
and city services, erosion of public space, deterioration of housing stock
and property values, and stark inequalities in education and health care
are manifestations of investment strategies under de facto segregation….
[Progressives must address] dismantling racism, bringing oppressed
populations into power and moving beyond a black/white binary that
renders invisible the struggles of Latino, Asian-Americans, Native
Americans and other survivors of racist exclusion and exploitation.53
 THE LIMITS OF ACADEMIC MULTICULTURALISM 77

Implicit in Kelley’s call for action is the recognition that any viable
pedagogy and politics of representation needs to address the realities of
historical processes, the actuality of economic power, and the range of
public spaces and institutions that constitute the embattled terrain of racial
difference and struggle. This suggests developing a critical vocabulary for
viewing texts not only in relation to other modes of discourse, but also, as
Randall Johnson notes, “in relationship to contemporaneous social
institutions and non-discursive practices.”54 Within this approach, cultural
texts cannot be isolated from the social and political conditions of their
production. Nor can the final explanation of such texts be found within the
texts themselves. On the contrary, such texts become meaningful when
viewed both in relation to other discursive practices and in terms of “the
objective social field from which [they] derive.”55 Pedagogically, this
suggests addressing how cultural texts in the classroom construct
themselves in response to broader institutional arrangements, contexts of
power, and the social relations that they both legitimate and help to sustain.
In what follows, I demonstrate the theoretical relevance for developing a
multicultural pedagogical practice in which issues of representation and
social transformation mutually inform each other. In doing so I want to
focus on a recent Hollywood blockbuster, 187, to illustrate how pedagogy
might be taken up as a public project designed to integrate representations
of cultural and racial difference with material relations of power that
animate racially exclusive practices and policies. Hollywood is one of many
sites that often appear too far removed from the privileged security of the
university to be included in the discourse of critical multiculturalism.

R AC I A L C O D I N G I N T H E H O L LY W O O D T E X T

During the last five years, a number of Hollywood films, such as

Dangerous Minds (1995), The Substitute (1996), and High School High (1996),
have cashed in on the prevailing racially coded popular “wisdom” that
public schools are out of control, largely inhabited by illiterate,
unmotivated, and violent urban youth who are economically and racially
marginalized. This increasingly familiar script suggests a correlation
78 IMPURE AC T S

between urban public space and rampant drug use, daily assaults, broken
teachers, and schools that do nothing more than contain deviants who
are a threat to themselves and everybody else. The film 187 is a recent
addition to this genre, but takes the pathologizing of poor, urban
students of color to extremes so far beyond existing cinematic
conventions that it stands out as a public testimony to broader social and
cultural formations within American society that make the very existence
of this blatantly racist film possible.
Directed by Kevin Reynolds and written by Scott Yagemann, a former
schoolteacher, 187 narrates the story of Trevor Garfield (Samuel
L.Jackson), a science teacher who rides to work on a bike in order to teach
at a high school in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. Garfield is
portrayed as an idealistic teacher who, against all odds, is trying to make
his classes interesting and do his best to battle daily against the ignorance,
chaos, and indifference that characterize the urban public school in the
Hollywood imagination. Yet the film quickly turns away from a call for
educational reform and a defense of those teachers who face a Sisyphean
task in trying to improve the lives of urban youth and rapidly degenerates
into a rationale for abandoning urban public schools and the black and
brown students who inhabit their hallways and classrooms.
In the film’s opening scenes, students move through metal detectors
under the watchful eyes of security guards—props that have become all too
familiar in urban high school settings. Clearly, the students in 187 are far
removed from the squeaky clean, high-tech classrooms of white suburbia:
the school looks more like a prison, and the students, with their rap music
blaring in the background, look more like inmates being herded into their
cells. The threat of violence is palpable in this school, and Garfield
confronts it as soon as he enters his classroom and picks up his textbook,
which has the figure 187 scrawled all over it. Recognizing that the number
is the police code for homicide, Garfield goes to the principal to report
what he believes is a threat on his life. The principal tells Garfield he is
overreacting, dismissing him with, “You know what your problem is? On
one hand, you think someone is going to kill you, and on the other hand,
you actually think kids are paying attention in your class.” Garfield hasn’t
yet left the office before the principal reveals that he has told a student in
 THE LIMITS OF ACADEMIC MULTICULTURALISM 79

Garfield’s class that he has flunked the course. Not only has the principal
violated Garfield’s student-teacher relationship, but the student who he
has flunked is on probation and as a result of the failing grade will now be
sent back to prison. The threat of violence and administrative ineptitude
set the stage for a hazardous series of confrontations between Garfield and
the public school system. Garfield leaves the principal’s office terrified and
walks back to his classroom. Each black male student he now sees appears
menacing and poised to attack; shot in slow motion, the scene is genuinely
disturbing. And before Garfield reaches his classroom, he is viciously and
repeatedly stabbed with a nine-inch nail in the hallway by the black male
student he has flunked.
Fifteen months later Garfield has relocated and finds a job as a
substitute teacher at John Quincy Adams High School in Los Angeles.
The students in this school are mostly Latino. They wear oversized pants
and torn shirts, carry boom boxes blaring rap music, and appear as
menacing as the African-American students Garfield taught in Brooklyn.
As the camera pans their bodies and expressions, it becomes clear that
what unites these inner-city students of color is a culture that is
dangerous, crime-ridden, and violent. Assigned to teach his class in a
bungalow, Garfield’s first day is a nightmare as students taunt him,
throw paper wads at him, and call him “bitch.” Garfield has moved from
New York to California only to find himself in a public high school
setting that has the look and feel of hell. Heat rising from the pavement,
pulsating rap music, graffiti, and oversized shadows of gang members
playing basketball filter through the classroom window to paint an
ominous picture of what Garfield can hope to experience.
But Garfield has to face more than dangerous students. His new principal
prides himself on never having been a teacher, refers to the students as
“clients,” and makes it clear that his primary concern is to avoid potential
lawsuits. Hollywood’s message in this case is clear: public schools are filled
with administrators who would rather cater to a liberal discourse about the
civil rights of students—who clearly don’t deserve any—than protect the
welfare of teachers who face the threat of daily violence.
Garfield’s fellow teachers are no better. The first teacher he meets,
Dave Childress (John Heard), is an alcoholic burnout who stashes a .357
80 IMPURE AC T S

Magnum in his desk drawer, thoroughly hates his students, and, we later
learn, has had sexual relations with a very young, emotionally shaken
Latina student. Hanging on for the paycheck, Childress serves as a reminder
of what such schools do to teachers. Robbed of his passion, he regards every
kid as a social menace or macho punk, waiting to kill or be killed.
Garfield eventually strikes up a friendship and romance with Ellen
Henry (Kelly Rowan), a perky, blond computer-science teacher, but it
soon turns sour as the bleak and dangerous environment in which they
find themselves eventually pushes Garfield over the edge. Ellen tries to
draw close to Garfield, but he is too battered and isolated, telling Ellen at
one point that when he was assaulted in New York, it robbed him of his
“passion, my spark, my unguarded self—I miss them.”
Garfield’s descent into madness begins when his bungalow is
completely trashed by the gang members in his class. He becomes edgy,
living in a shadow of fear heightened by his past. Ellen then tells Garfield
that Benny, a particularly vicious gang member in his class, has
threatened to hurt her, and that she doesn’t know what to do. Benny
soon disappears, but Ellen’s troubles are not over, as Benny’s sidekick
Cesar and his friends kill her dog. As a result, Cesar becomes the object
of vigilante justice. Roaming drunk near an L.A.freeway, he is stalked,
shot with a spiked arrow, and, while unconscious, has his finger cut off.
The tension mounts as Ellen finds Benny’s rosary beads in Garfield’s
apartment and confronts him with the evidence that he might be the
killer. Garfield is immune to her reproach, arguing that someone has to
take responsibility since the system will not protect “us” from “them.”
Ellen tells Garfield she doesn’t know him anymore, and Garfield replies,
“I am a teacher just like you.” As the word circulates that Garfield may
be the vigilante killer and assailant, the principal moves fast to protect
the school from a lawsuit and fires him. Garfield, now completely
broken, goes home and is soon visited by Cesar and his gang, who,
inspired by the film The Deer Hunter, force Garfield into a game of
Russian roulette. With little to lose, Garfield accuses Cesar of not being
a real man, and ups the stakes of the game by taking Cesar’s turn.
Garfield pulls the trigger and kills himself. Forced into questioning his
own manhood, Cesar decides to take his turn, puts the gun to his head,
 THE LIMITS OF ACADEMIC MULTICULTURALISM 81

and fatally shoots himself as well. In the final scene of the film, a student
is reading a graduation speech about how teachers rarely get any respect.
The shot switches to Ellen, who is in her classroom. Ellen takes her
framed teaching certificate off the wall, throws it into the wastebasket,
and walks out of the school.

AC C E S S I N G A P E DAG O G Y O F T H E
C U LT U R A L O B J E C T

Pedagogically, films like 187 can be interrogated by analyzing both the

commonsense assumptions that inform them as well as absences and
exclusions that limit the range of meanings and information available to
audiences. Analyzing such films as public discourses also provides
pedagogical opportunities to engage complex institutional frameworks
that create the conditions for the construction, legitimation, and meaning
of such cultural texts. As public discourses, these cultural texts can be
addressed in terms of how they are constituted as objects that gain their
relevance through their relationship to other social institutions,
resources, and nondiscursive practices. In this instance, 187 would be
taken up as a discursive practice whose effects might be addressed in
relation to issues of race in related contexts where struggles for meaning
and representation are connected to struggles for power, social agency,
and material resources. Some of these issues are illustrated below.
The film 187 provides ample representations of students of color as
the pathological other, and public schools as not only dysfunctional but
also as an imminent threat to the dominant society. Represented as a
criminalized underclass, black and brown students in 187 are viewed as
dangerous, and public schools as holding centers that contain such
students through the heavy-handed use of high-tech monitoring systems
and military-style authority. Reinforcing such stereotypes is a
decontextualized and depoliticized cinematic narrative that erases the
conditions that produce such denigrating images of inner-city public
schools—poverty, family turmoil, highly segregated neighborhoods,
unemployment, crumbling school buildings, lack of material resources,
82 IMPURE AC T S

or inequities within local and national tax structures. In this instance, 187
represents more than a text that portrays a particularly offensive image of
urban schools and minority students; it also participates as a public
pedagogy in enabling, legitimizing, and reinforcing discursive practices
whose effect is to condemn the children of the urban poor to public
schools increasingly subject to electronic surveillance, private police
forces, padlocks, and alarms suggestive of prisons or war zones.56
Clearly, if the dominant codes at work in such a film are to be
questioned, it is imperative for students to address how the absences in such
a film tie it to prevailing discourses about public education, multiculturalism,
and the ongoing assault on minorities of class and color in and outside
public schooling. Marking such absences is crucial to understanding such a
film—the refusal to point to the need for smaller class sizes, inspiring
teachers, visionary administrators, and ample learning resources—but such
absences become meaningful when understood within a broader struggle
over issues of racial identity, power, representation, and everyday life.
Films like 187 carry the logic of racial stereotyping to a new level and
represent one of the most egregious examples of how popular cultural
texts can be used to demonize black and Latino youth while reproducing
a consensus of common sense that legitimates racist policies of either
containment or abandonment in the inner cities. But such instances of
racial coding cannot reside merely within the boundaries of the text to be
fully understood as part of the broader landscape of racial injustice.
Depictions of urban youth as dangerous, pathological, and violent must
be located in terms of where different possibilities of uses and effects of
such representations may ultimately reside in contexts of everyday life
that are at the forefront of multicultural struggles. For example, the
depictions of youth in 187 resonate powerfully with the growth of a
highly visible criminal justice system whose get-tough policies fall
disproportionately on poor black and brown youth. What is the
pedagogical potential of a film such as 187 in addressing the political,
racial, and economic conditions that promote a specious (yet celebrated)
“war on drugs,” a war whose policies threaten to wipe out a whole
generation of young black men who are increasingly incarcerated in
prisons and jails? The figures are disturbing, as the number of black men
 THE LIMITS OF ACADEMIC MULTICULTURALISM 83

incarcerated is growing at the rate of about 7 percent a year, and annual

prison costs are now higher than $30 million?57
As statistics show, “between 1983 and 1998 the number of prisoners
in the U.S. increased from 650,000 to more than 1.7 million. About 60
percent of that number are African-Americans and Latinos. More than
one-third of all young black men in their 20s are currently in jail, on
probation or parole, or awaiting trial. We are now adding 1,200 new
inmates to U.S. jails and prisons each week, and adding about 260 new
prison beds each day.”58
This state of affairs is compounded by the disturbing fact that as a result
of serving time nearly half of the next generation of black men will forfeit
their right to vote in several states. How might a cultural text such as 187
be used to address the relationship between the increase in prison growth
and the plight caused by industrial downsizing and rising unemployment
among young black men across America’s inner cities in the 1990s? What
might it mean for students to address their own responses to the moral
panics concerning crime and race that have swept across the middle classes
in the last decade, made manifest in strong electoral support for harsh
crime laws and massive increases in prison growth?
At the very least, educators can address 187 not merely in terms of
what such a text might mean but how it functions within a set of
complex social relations that create the conditions of which it is a part
and from which it stems. Lawrence Grossberg insightfully argues that
such a pedagogy would “involve the broader exploration of the way in
which discursive practices construct and participate in the machinery by
which the way people live their lives are themselves produced and
controlled. Rather than looking for the ‘said’ or trying to derive the
saying from the said, rather than asking what texts mean or what people
do with texts, [a critical pedagogy] would be concerned with what
discursive practices do in the world.”59
Engaging the potential discursive effects of films like 187 might mean
discussing the implication of this Hollywood film’s appropriating the
name of the controversial California proposition to deny mostly
nonwhite students access to public schools. Or it might mean discussing
how the film contributes to a public discourse that rationalizes both the
84 IMPURE AC T S

demonization of minority youth and the defunding of public and higher

education at a time when, in states such as California, “approximately
22,555 African Americans attend a four-year public university…while
44,792 (almost twice as many) African Americans are in prison [and] this
figure does not include all the African Americans who are in county jails
or the California Youth Authority or those on probation or parole.”60
Hollywood films like 187 must be addressed and understood within a
broader set of policy debates about education and crime that often serve
to legitimate policies that disempower poor and racially marginalized
youth. For example, state spending for corrections has increased 95
percent over the last decade, while spending on higher education has
decreased 6 percent. Similarly, in the last ten years, the rate of increase in
the number of correctional officers is four times that of the increase in
public higher education faculty. Again, it is not surprising that the
chosen setting for 187 is primarily California, a state that now, the Justice
Policy Institute notes, “spends more on corrections (9.4 percent of the
General Fund) than on higher education.”61 While it would be absurd to
suggest to students that films like 187 are responsible for recent
government spending allocations, they do take part in a public pedagogy
and representational politics that cannot be separated from a growing
racial panic over and fear of minorities, the urban poor, and immigrants.
As public discourses, films like 187, The Substitute, Dangerous Minds, and
Belly fail to rupture the racial stereotypes that support harsh, discrimi-
natory crime policies and growing incidents of police brutality. (Recent
examples include the New York Police Department’s highly publicized
torture of Abner Louima, or its shooting of Amadou Diallo by four
patrolmen who riddled his body and an apartment building vestibule
with forty-one bullets in spite of the fact that the victim was unarmed.)
Such films also have little to say about police assaults on poor black
neighborhoods, such as those conducted by former police Chief Daryl
Gates in South Central Los Angeles. Exploiting the race-based moral
panics that fuel popular antagonism toward affirmative action,
immigrants, bilingual education, the inner city, and the un-married
“welfare queen,” films such as 187 capitalize on modes of ex-clusion
through what Jimmie Reeves and Richard Campbell call the “discourse
 THE LIMITS OF ACADEMIC MULTICULTURALISM 85

of discrimination” and the “spectacle of stigmatization.” Within this

discourse, the urban black or brown youth is depicted as “the
pathological Other—a delinquent beyond rehabilitation.”62
What is unique about 187 is that it explores cinematically what the
logical conclusion might be in dealing with urban youth for whom
reform is no longer on the national agenda, and for whom containment
or the militarization of school space seem both inadequate and too
compromising. Carried to the extreme, 187 flirts with the ultimate white
supremacist logic, that is, the extermination and genocide of those
“others” deemed beyond the pale of social reform, deemed inhuman and
despicable. The film capitalizes on the popular media conception that
public education is not safe for white, middle-class children, that racial
violence is rampant in the public schools, that minority students have
turned classroom discipline into a joke, that administrators are paralyzed
by insensitive bureaucracies, and that the only thing that teachers and
students share is the desire to survive the day. Yet repititious cultural
texts such as 187 become meaningful not just as strategies for
understanding and critical engagement that raise questions about related
discourses, texts, and social issues; they also become meaningful in
probing what it might mean to move beyond the sutured institutional
space of the classroom to address social issues in related spheres marked
by racial injustices and unequal relations of power.
The popularity of such films as 187 in the heyday of academic
multiculturalism points to the need, in light of such representations, for
educators to expand their understanding of politics as part of a broader
project designed to address major social issues in the name of a
multiracial democracy. This suggests getting beyond reducing
multiculturalism to the simple study of texts or discourse, and addressing
multicultural politics as part of the struggles for power and resources in
a variety of public spheres. This may mean endeavoring to change how,
as Michael Bérubé notes, the “economics of school funding and school
policy [work to] sustain segregation in American public education
[through] inhuman fiscal policies that have ensured the continuous
impoverishment of schools attended wholly by black or Hispanic
schoolchildren.”63 It may require students to engage in a politics of
86 IMPURE AC T S

multiculturalism aimed at reforming a criminal justice system that

disproportionately incarcerates and punishes minorities of class and color.
Issues of representation and identity in this case offer the opportunity for
multicultural educators to explore and challenge both the strengths and
limits of cultural texts. This suggests developing a pedagogy that promotes
a social vocabulary of cultural difference that links strategies of
understanding to strategies of engagement; that recognizes the limits of the
university as a site for social engagement; and that refuses to reduce
politics to matters of language and meaning, erasing broader issues of
systemic political power, institutional control, economic ownership, and
the distribution of cultural and intellectual resources in a wide range of
public spaces. I recognize that academics cannot become public
intellectuals by the mere force of will, given the professional and
institutional constraints under which they operate. But at the same time, if
multiculturalism is not going to abandon the world of public politics and
take seriously the link between culture and power, progressive educators
will have to rethink collectively what it means to link the struggle for
change within the university to struggles for change in the broader society.
Combining theoretical rigor with social relevance may be risky politically
and pedagogically, but the promise of a multicultural democracy far
outweighs the security and benefits that accompany a retreat into academic
irrelevance and color-blind professionalism.
 four
4

Te a c h i n g t h e
Te a c h i n g t h e
Po l i t i c a l w i t h
Po l i t i c a l w i t h
Homi Bhabha
Homi Bhabha

Henry A.Giroux and

Susan Searls Giroux

I N T RO D U C T I O N

As I have suggested throughout this book, the relationship among

culture, politics, and pedagogy is the subject of heated debate for social
theorists, political pundits, and educators, and the controversy cuts
across ideological lines. Much of the animus is unsurprising—the detritus
of the conservative recoil from difference—though it has taken on a new
urgency as part of the broader backlash against women, minorities of
color, youth, and the welfare state itself. The more familiar lines of attack
can be summarized as follows: cultural politics is repudiated in the
interests of a new—actually old—or-thodoxy of anachronistic materialism,
or it is simply dismissed as a corrupting influence on the universal values
of truth, beauty, and reason. Caught between the modalities of a timeless
universal aesthetic or a narrowly defined economism, factions on both
the right and left mark culture’s proliferation of differences as profoundly
dangerous. Removing culture from the play of power and politics,
educators and critics across the political spectrum thwart the possibility
for understanding how learning is linked to social change. Moreover,

87
88 IMPURE AC T S

such an erasure mystifies how the struggle over identities, meanings,

values, and desires that takes place across the whole field of social
practices is wielded to make it difficult for subaltern groups to participate
in such struggles in ways that carry any legitimacy. Yet some of the
criticism provides a welcome opportunity for rethinking the relationship
between cultural politics and politics in general, between cultural politics
and the politics of literacy, and between pedagogy and agency.
In what follows, we will continue an important theme of this book—
defending culture as an important site of political struggle, and pedagogy
as a crucial component of cultural politics. In doing so, we want to first
analyze some recent public conversations about university educators in
general and the nature of pedagogy in particular. Increasingly, pedagogy
has either been dismissed as an unviable element of education and
cultural politics or rendered politically obsolete by reducing it to a
method and set of instrumental prescriptions and teaching tips. We
spend some time on these examples, because they are characteristic of
how pedagogy is being depoliticized as part of a broader attack on higher
education and the culture of politics itself. In opposition to these attacks,
we attempt to make a case for the relationship between the politics of
culture and the culture of politics—and for the primacy of the pedagogical
as a constitutive force in the resuscitation of a democratically informed
political culture that links the struggle over identities and meaning to the
wider struggle over material relations of power.1 In doing so, we turn to
the work of Homi Bhabha as an example of critical pedagogical practice
concerned with the relationships among culture, power, and politics, on
one hand, and literacy, pedagogy, and social change on the other.
Bhabha’s work is important for rethinking pedagogy as a mode of
cultural inquiry that is essential for questioning the conditions under
which knowledge and identifications are produced and subject positions
are taken up or refused. Bhabha also raises important questions
regarding how we think about politics—that is, how we understand the
dynamics of culture within the shifting terrain of the discursive—and the
implications it has for theorizing the pedagogical conditions that make
social agency possible.
 TEACHING THE POLITICAL WITH HOMI BHABHA 89

E R A S I N G T H E P O L I T I C S O F P E DAG O G Y

Conservative theories of education generally begin with the premise that

knowledge is the fulfillment of (Western) tradition and that pedagogy is
a technical practice primarily concerned with the process of transmission.
Although it seems reasonable to assume that there is a relationship
between what we know and how we act, it does not follow (although it
often does in conservative educational discourse and theory) that what
we learn and how we learn can be measured solely by the content of an
established discipline. This is a fatally flawed argument with respect to its
refusal to engage the particular discursive and institutional conditions
under which we learn and act. Removed from such perspectives are
crucial questions regarding how knowledge relates to power and how
language shapes experience under specific conditions of learning. On one
hand, the ideological nature of knowledge production, legitimation, and
circulation is often sub-sumed by appeals for excellence and standards,
and on the other hand, the productive character of pedagogy as a moral
and political practice is either dismissed as the imposition of bias and an
obstacle to learning or is relegated to a grab bag of depoliticized methods
and defined almost exclusively in technical and instrumental terms. The
first position can be found in the work of Leon Botstein, the outspoken
president of Bard College, and the second is evident in the scholarship
on pedagogy undertaken by Elaine Showalter, the former president of
the Modern Language Association.2
Though occupying seemingly different positions on the role of
education and the value of pedagogy, both theorists represent examples
of so-called progressive educational reforms that deny the political nature
of education and the transformative possibilities of pedagogy itself. In a
recent editorial in the New York Times, Botstein suggests that the root
cause of the failure of education in the United States is largely due to the
inadequate preparation of teachers. Taking aim at education programs in
universities nationally, Botstein argues that prospective teachers are
taught pedagogy at the expense of formal training in their subject matter
and, consequently, are inadequately prepared to teach students even the
fundamentals of the basic subject disciplines, contributing both to the
90 IMPURE AC T S

lowering of academic standards and the failure of students to learn. The

solution, according to Botstein, is to “disband the education schools and
integrate teacher education into the core of the university”3 In short,
Botstein argues that schools of education do prospective teachers a great
disservice by focusing on the social, historical, and philosophical
trajectories of education’s own disciplinary traditions at the expense of
learning subject matter taught by professionals in the liberal arts.
For Botstein, the key to educational reform lies in raising academic
standards, particularly through the mastering of discipline-based subject
matter. Missing from Botstein’s short-sighted and simplistic appeal is any
attempt to engage broader questions of what public schools or higher
education should accomplish in a democracy, and why they fail. His facile
appeal to academic content cannot engage the relationship between
schools and democracy, because it has been depoliticized within the
discourse of disciplinary purity. Botstein does not have anything to say
about how knowledge is related to the power of self-definition and self-
determination. Rather, pedagogy is generally assumed to be about
processing received knowledge rather than actually transforming it in the
interest of the public good. Botstein appears to be utterly indifferent—if not
ignorant of—not only questions regarding the purpose and meaning of
schooling, which actually set the context for understanding the
relationship between knowledge and power, but also to the fact that the
real crisis in schools is not simply whether students are learning subject
matter but whether students are capable of meeting important educational
goals (i.e., learning to think critically about the knowledge they gain,
engaging larger social issues, and developing a sense of social
responsibility). Botstein’s appeal to standards ignores what it means to
educate prospective teachers about the roles they might play as public
intellectuals informed about how power works both within and outside
the classroom. What the role of education should be in a democratic
society, how the conditions of teaching affect how students learn, what it
might mean to educate students to discern between academic norms and
critical intellectual work, or what it might mean to educate students to use
knowledge critically in the service of shaping democratic identities and
institutional arrangements are questions entirely missing from Botstein’s
 TEACHING THE POLITICAL WITH HOMI BHABHA 91

analysis. Knowledge for Botstein is an end in itself as opposed to an

ongoing process of struggle and negotiation, and the conditions of its
production or the limits it embodies in its institutionalized and
disciplinary forms appear irrelevant to him.
Botstein’s inclusive emphasis on teaching disciplinary knowledge in
opposition to any serious engagement with pedagogical issues reveals a
fundamental incapacity to address what it might mean to create the
conditions to make knowledge meaningful in the first place before it can
become either critical or transformative. Botstein aside, knowledge
doesn’t speak for itself; and unless the pedagogical conditions exist to
connect forms of knowledge to the lived experiences, histories, and
cultures of the students we engage, such knowledge is not only reified,
but “deposited” in the Freirian sense through transmission models that
both ignore the living context in which knowledge is produced and
silence as much as they deaden student interest. Moreover, the emphasis
on teaching as knowledge production has little to say about teaching as
self-production. In this discourse, it becomes almost impossible to use
pedagogy as a way of making teachers attentive to their own
identifications, values, and ideologies as they work through and shape
what and how they teach. In other words, Botstein’s exclusive emphasis
on disciplinary knowledge offers no theoretical language for helping
prospective educators register and interrogate their own personal and
social complicities in what, how, and why they teach and learn within
particular institutional and cultural formations.
In short, Botstein’s emphasis on the virtues of disciplinary knowledge
as a way of discrediting both pedagogy and colleges of education ignores
the crucial importance of pedagogy for raising a number of serious
questions. Moreover, it denies the obvious fact that education has its own
disciplinary body of knowledge worthy of investigation, ironically
reinforcing the necessity of schools of education. There is a long tradition,
for instance, of educational knowledge extending from John Dewey and
Paulo Freire to Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis to Maxine Greene that
analyzes the relationships between democracy and schooling, theory and
practice, formal and hidden curricula as well as examining the ethical,
social, political, and historical foundations of schooling. Such knowledge
92 IMPURE AC T S

is crucial both for contextualizing and engaging the ways in which

academic knowledge has been mobilized to define the race-, gender-, and
class-specific purposes of public and higher education. Similarly, the
history of education provides a rich and expansive literature for analyzing
pedagogy as a moral and political practice through which knowledge,
values, and social relations are deployed within unequal relations of power
in order to produce particular notions of citizenship, subject positions, and
forms of national identity. Botstein depoliticizes knowledge and pedagogy
in his analysis, and in doing so renders mute the need to understand how
they mutually inform each other and what their complicated interaction
suggests for addressing both the teaching of prospective educators and
teaching itself as a deeply ethical and political issue. For Botstein, education
is about the management of knowledge divorced from questions of power,
place, ideology, self-management, and politics. In this context, Botstein
provides a model of education unaware of its own pedagogical assumptions
and deeply indebted to a theory of learning that is indifferent to either how
power works in education or how teachers and students alike might employ
education in the service of democratic struggles.
In opposition to Botstein, Elaine Showalter, in a recent commentary in
the Chronicle of Higher Education, recognizes the importance of sound
pedagogical practice, particularly the responsibility of faculty in preparing
their graduate students to teach undergraduate courses. Showalter rejects
the popular attitude among her professional colleagues that any “interest
in pedagogy [be seen] as the last refuge of a scoundrel.”4 For Showalter,
such derision is unfounded and simply perpetuates the general complaint
that teaching assistants don’t know how to teach and that faculty are
unwilling to do anything about it. Born out of a general impatience with
the lack of will and effort to address the problem of pedagogy, Showalter
brought together in 1998 a number of graduate students in a noncredit
course on teaching in order to take up the problem of pedagogy. The first
challenge for Showalter was to locate materials on teaching in order to
“find out what other people are doing behind their closed classroom
doors.”5 Conducting an intensive search on the Internet, Showalter
surprised herself and her students by how many books she was able to
find on teaching, and argues that most books on university teaching fall
 TEACHING THE POLITICAL WITH HOMI BHABHA 93

into four general categories: personal memoirs, spiritual and ethical

reflections, practical guidebooks, and reports on education research.
Unfortunately, Showalter’s search left her and her students unaware of a
long tradition of critical theoretical work on pedagogy, schooling, and
society. The result is that teaching ends up being reduced to a matter of
methods, exclusively and reductively concerned with practical and
technical issues; hence her enthusiasm for books that “provide lots of
pointers on subjects as varied as choosing textbooks and getting feedback
from students and colleagues” or books that help “instructors make the
most effective use of the lecture/discussion mode”6 Even those books that
Showalter claims deal with ethical and spiritual issues become significant
to the degree that they “can offer both inspiration and some surprisingly
concrete advice”7 In the end, Showalter recommends a number of books,
such as Wilbert J.McKeachie’s McKeachie s Teaching Tips and Joseph
Lowman’s Mastering the Techniques of Teaching because they “offer practical,
concrete advice about learning to ask students good questions and
encouraging them to participate.”8
Showalter ignores an entire generation of scholarship in critical pedagogy
that addresses teaching as a moral and political practice, as a deliberate
attempt to influence how and what knowledge and identities are produced
within particular relations of power.9 In doing so, she abstracts pedagogical
practices from the ethicopolitical visions that inform them, and has little to
say about how pedagogy relates the self to public life, social responsibility,
or the demands of critical citizenship. Showalter has no pedagogical
language for dealing with social, racial, and class inequalities. Nor does she
offer her students guidance on matters of justice, equality, liberty, and
fairness that should be at the core of pedagogical practices designed to
enable students to recognize social problems and injustices in a society
founded on deep inequalities. Even basic pedagogical issues regarding how
teacher authority can manifest itself without being inimical to the practice of
freedom are ignored in Showalter’s discourse. By defining pedagogy as an a
priori discourse that simply needs to be uncovered and deployed, Showalter
has nothing to say about pedagogy as the outcome of specific struggles
between diverse groups to name history, experience, knowledge, and the
meaning of everyday life in one’s own terms. Unfortunately, Showalter
94 IMPURE AC T S

offers up a depoliticized pedagogy of “tips” that is effectively silent on

matters of how knowledge, values, desire, and social relations are always
implicated in power and broader institutional practices. One wonders what
Showalter’s stripped-down version of pedagogy has to say about the
increasing corporatization of the university and the ongoing deskilling of
teachers, or the role that pedagogy plays in educating students about what
public and higher education should accomplish in a democracy and why
the institutions often fail.
If Botstein depoliticizes and instrumentalizes questions concerning the
production of knowledge and reduces pedagogy to the logic of
transmission, Showalter similarly reifies pedagogy by stripping it of its
political and ethical referents and transforming it into a grab bag of
practical methods and techniques. Neither theorist has anything to say
about the productive character of pedagogy as a political and moral
discourse. Hence, both are silent about the institutional conditions that
bear down on the ability of teachers to link conception with execution,
and what it means to develop a better understanding of pedagogy as a
struggle over the shaping of particular identities. Nor can they raise
questions about education as a form of political intervention that cannot
elude its role in creating potentially empowering or disempowering
spaces for students, critically interrogate the role of teacher authority, or
engage the limits of established academic subjects in sustaining critical
dialogues about educational aims and practices. These questions barely
scratch the surface of issues that are often excluded when education is
linked solely to the teaching of content, and pedagogy is
instrumentalized to the point of irrelevance.
In opposition to these increasingly dominant views, we draw upon the
timely and provocative work of Homi Bhabha. Bhabha’s recent work is
particularly suited for this task because it refuses a politics with
guarantees while relentlessly questioning what it means to live within
notions of agency, commitment, and education that address important
social issues but do not make a claim to a full understanding of contexts,
texts, and the unfolding of events. For Bhabha, culture is the sphere of
provisional meaning, indeterminacy, and uncertainty, and it is precisely
this emphasis on the conditioned, contingent, and contextual that offers
 TEACHING THE POLITICAL WITH HOMI BHABHA 95

that in-between space where identities are formed, agency develops, and
pedagogy is manifest in the ethical formation of the self in history.10

M A K I N G T H E P E DAG O G I C A L M O R E P O L I T I C A L I N
T H E WO R K O F H O M I B H A B H A

The current debate over the viability of cultural politics and critical
pedagogy provides an important opportunity for assessing the strengths
and limitations of Homi Bhabha’s theoretical analysis of the relationships
between culture and pedagogy, knowledge and power, and meaning and
investment. For Bhabha, culture is the terrain of politics, a site where
power is produced and struggled over, deployed and contested, and
understood not merely in terms of domination, but of negotiation.11
Culture is, in this sense, a performative space, a complex site that “opens
up narrative strategy for the emergence of negotiation” and incites us to
think beyond the limits of theory and “turn pedagogy into the
exploration of its own limits.”12 Culture also provides the constitutive
framework for making the pedagogical more political—by investigating
how educators can make learning meaningful in order to open up its
discursive possibilities and pleasures as part of a broader strategy of self-
and social formation. At a time when the social function of the university
is frequently derided by cultural critics as either the handmaiden of an
ever-evolving and encroaching corporatism or an “always already”
bastion of support for the status quo, Bhabha’s attentiveness to the
relationships among writing, agency, and self- and social transformation
provides educators with a much-needed reminder of the potential
importance of their work in the university. Bhabha refuses to reduce
literacy to the pedagogical imperatives of method or the ethnocentric
appeal to reified notions of knowledge embodied in Western conceptions
of the canon. At the same time, he is careful to assert that we must not
fetishize literacy as a de facto socially ameliorative or democratic force;
he claims, in one of the most insightful and sobering moments of a recent
interview, that the leading ideology of most literate people is racism.13
That caution having been made, Bhabha explores what a postcolonial
criticism has to offer, pedagogically, to the student at all levels of
96 IMPURE AC T S

education. What might it mean, he poses, to approach theory “by doing

a certain kind of writing,” and to develop ideas that “also shape [and]
enact the rhetoric”?14
In contrast to Showalter’s pedagogy-as-method, Bhabha links
questions of teaching, writing, and literacy to issues of self-
representation, and what it might mean for students to function as agents
within a wider democratic culture. For students marginalized by their
race, class, or gender, who cannot find themselves “within the sentence,”
Bhabha proposes a strategy that Ranajit Guha calls “writing in reverse.”15
Such an intervention does not simply articulate the absences of
marginalized histories and narratives, but also reads dominant narratives
against themselves in order to understand the moment of disruption that
is, for Bhabha, the quintessential postcolonial moment. Exposing
students to the discourse of “sententiousness,” educating them to think
“outside of the sentence,” and insisting that they “occupy” the fissures,
gaps, and hesitations in declaratives that they take for granted are for
Bhabha a means of opening up a liminal or middle space for critical and
potentially revisionary—or revolutionary—en-gagement with what he calls
the “consensus of common sense.”16 Pedagogy for Bhabha becomes a
performative act, a mediation rather than simply a medium, that reveals
in its narrative ambivalence an “unsettling tension between where the
sign emerges and where it ends up.”17 Such ambivalence not only offers
a political space for challenging the ideological aspects of a narrative
cultural pedagogy—“what we think we see without really looking”18—but
also draws attention to the disrupted borders and fissures within
dominant social formations, strategies, and practices. Of course, such
strategies run the risk of reversing while maintaining the operative
binaries, but Bhabha’s work is well-known for refusing such a
construction. On the contrary, Bhabha problematizes the very act of
enunciation and address to make both its object and subject a site for
negotiation, dialogue, and critical pedagogical engagement. As important
as the marginalized discourses of race, gender, and sexual orientation are
to any progressive pedagogy, they must also be understood as
antiessentialist and open to interrogating the very nature of authority
that gives such discourses political and ethical valence.
 TEACHING THE POLITICAL WITH HOMI BHABHA 97

Bhabha’s pedagogical imperative is not simply about refining one’s

capacities for rational and rhetorical argument, for identifying and
exploding contradictions within a highly and historically racialized
society. Bhabha provides an additional theoretical service for educators
by complicating the process of becoming critically literate by in-voking
the role that affect and emotion play in the formation of individual
identities and social collectivities. In an attempt to understand how
education as a productive force works in the creation and re-creation of
particular subject positions and contexts, Bhabha makes the pedagogical
more political by taking seriously those maps of meaning, affective
investments, and sedimented desires that enable students to connect their
own lives and everyday experiences to what they learn. Pedagogy in this
sense becomes more than a mere transfer of received knowledge, an
inscription of a unified and static identity, or a rigid methodology; it
presupposes that students are moved by their passions and motivated, in
part, by the affective investments they bring to the learning process. This
suggests, as Paulo Freire points out, the need for a theory of pedagogy
willing to develop a “critical comprehension of the value of sentiments,
emotions, and desire as part of the learning process.”19 The relationships
among pedagogical praxis, critical literacy, and identity in this context
are always seen as part of an ongoing struggle over what constitutes the
social, and how identities are shaped within a culture of movement and
indeterminacy that allows for a proliferation of discourses, languages,
and questions.20
Bhabha’s politics and pedagogy of indeterminacy, partiality, and
movement refuse the traditional modernist narratives of certainty,
control, and mastery that mark transition theories of education. And it is
in Bhabha’s call for educators to “take responsibility for the un-
spoken…to provide a strangeness for framing” that they might recognize
forms of temporal distancing and negotiation that offer them the
possibility to develop pedagogical practices that allow them to argue a
position while refusing the arrogance of theoretical certainty21 Within
Bhabha’s discourse there is no room for grand oppositions of the sort
embraced by conservatives. Identities, like culture itself, are fashioned
performatively in those border crossings, fissures, and negotiations that
98 IMPURE AC T S

connect the public and private, the psyche and the social sphere.22 But
there is more at work in Bhabha’s theory of difference, identity, and
literacy than the production of subjects. There is also the reworking of
the nature of politics itself. Bhabha is instructive on this issue,
commenting, “Politics is as much a process of the ambivalent production
of subjects and psychic identifications—sexuality, guilt, dependency—as it
is a more ‘casual’ discourse of governmental objects and objectives—
alienated labor, wage differentials, affirmative legislative action.”23 To his
credit, Bhabha problematizes the contemporary scholarly affinity for
what he calls the “mantras of multiculturalism” by redefining cultural
difference as “a particular constructed discourse at a time when
something is being challenged about power or authority” rather than “a
natural emanation of the fact that there are different cultures in the
world.”24 To this end, his theory of hybridity both challenges essentialist
claims to an authentic identity and emphasizes the necessity of
negotiation between texts and cultures in situations of iniquitous power
relations through “strategies of appropriation, revision and iteration.”25
In the section that follows, we hope to build on Bhabha’s timely and
insightful work by further investigating the dynamics of writing, literacy,
and social change while raising questions about the relationships among
what we call strategies of understanding, strategies of engagement, and
strategies of transformation, as well as the mediating roles of affect and
desire. Here we attempt to think at the limit regarding theories of
cultural difference and hybridity and identity formation while
understanding their centrality to issues of agency, power, politics, and
pedagogy. In short, we want to extend Bhabha’s insightful attempts to
make the political more pedagogical where we recognize his profound
challenge to the increasingly anti-intellectual and politically reckless
interventions in the public debate over education in general and
pedagogy in particular. In Bhabha’s terms, this means rethinking the
tension between the pedagogical and the performative by asking how the
performative functions pedagogically To this end, we ask the following:
To what degree do Bhabha’s strategies of negotiation in and of
themselves actually challenge iniquitous power relations? In other words,
what other conditions—beyond the capacity to identify and inhabit the
 TEACHING THE POLITICAL WITH HOMI BHABHA 99

gaps and fissures of dominant discourses—must be realized for the subject

of reading/writing to experience herself as an agent of social change?
Clearly Bhabha does not ignore institutional power, but his emphasis on
exploring and exploiting discursive ambivalence at times underemphasizes
the reach and gravity of such forces. To what degree does his pedagogical
theory of reading and writing “outside” or “beyond the sentence” rely on an
already critically engaged and willing inquisitor of commonsense
assumptions? What role do affect and desire play in one’s decision to
critically engage—or disengage from—the process of learning, and what are
the implications of this for educators?26 And finally, what are the limitations
of a politics of identity/difference for theorizing strategies of pedagogical and
social transformation that demand not only individual but also collective
intervention? How might a politics of identity/difference expand the
meaning of citizenship as a principle of action that develops a notion of the
common good but leaves room for dissent?

F R E D E R I C K D O U G L A S S A N D T H E S U B A LT E R N

We would like to work through the density and complexity of these issues
by means of a brief historical illustration. There is an extensive history in
African-American letters of exploring the relationships among critical
literacy, the acquisition of agency, and self- and social transformation. In
what follows, we attempt a theoretical response to the preceding questions
by turning to the celebrated work of another subaltern intellectual whose
dedication to the emancipatory possibilities of rhetoric and writing bear a
striking resemblance to Bhabha’s. Although Frederick Douglass’s work on
race and rhetoric derives from a very different historical context—
engaging four hundred years of enslavement—we find that a careful
translation of Douglass’s work offers much insight for theorizing the
pedagogy and politics of critical literacy in relation to the gross
inequalities of present-day social relations. When one considers a whole
range of new social relations from the privatization of the prison-industrial
complex to the conditions of workers in an ever-growing international sex
trade, “slavery” may well prove an apt metaphor.
100 IMPURE AC T S

In his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, Frederick

Douglass relates his first encounter with the power of rhetoric in the pursuit
of self-representation and self-determination and at the same time
dramatically rewrites the scene as it appeared in his first, much celebrated
autobiography. When young Douglass’s tutelage by his mistress in
Baltimore was cut short by his master’s outrage at the idea of a literate slave,
it was already too late. Douglass rightly assented to his master’s proposition
that “if you teach that nigger…how to read the Bible, there will be no
keeping him…it would forever unfit him for the duties of the slave”27 In
doing so, Douglass discovers what had been for him a painful mystery to
dispel: “to wit, the white man’s power to perpetuate the enslavement of the
black.”28 His master’s comments not only provided Douglass with a special
revelation of the power of literacy to transform his life, it also fed his desire
to read and learn, even under the threat of severe punishment by law. At a
point in his life when he had secreted away enough money, Douglass
recounts his first purchase: a then-popular school rhetoric, The Columbian
Orator. The reader contained, among others, one essay of particular interest
to Douglass that describes a dialogue between a master and his slave; he
summarizes it at length in his autobiography.
It seems that a slave has been captured after his second attempt to run
away, and the dialogue opens with a severe upbraiding by the master.
Having been charged with the high crime of ingratitude, the slave is asked
to account for himself. Knowing that nothing he has to say will be of any
avail, he simply replies, “I submit to my fate.” The master is touched by the
slave’s answer and gives him permission to speak on his behalf. Invited to
debate, the slave makes a spirited defense of himself and an unimpeachable
argument against slavery. Hence, the master is “vanquished at every turn in
the argument; and seeing himself to be thus vanquished, he generously and
meekly emancipates the slave…. ”29 Douglass recalls that speeches such as
these not only added to his “limited stock of language,” but armed him with
“a bold and powerful denunciation of oppression, and a most brilliant
vindication of the rights of man.”30
Shortly after, however, Douglass writes that he himself has been
confronted with the same opportunity to defend himself as the fortunate
ex-slave and refuses it. Aware that his mistress wants an explanation for
 TEACHING THE POLITICAL WITH HOMI BHABHA 101

his dramatic change in temperament, he withholds, stating, “Could I

have freely made her acquainted with the real state of my mind, and
given her reasons therefor [sic], it might have been well for both of us….
[But]—such is the relation of master and slave—I could not tell her…. My
interests were in a direction opposite to hers, and we both had our
private thoughts and plans. She aimed to keep me ignorant; and I
resolved to know.”31 We find that what Frederick Douglass appropriates
from the lessons of his rhetorical self-training is instructive on a number
of levels for engaging both the strengths and limitations of Bhabha’s
theory of hybridity and agency Douglass strategically replays the master/
slave encounter in the context of his own life with a crucial difference
that begs the simple question, Why does he refuse altogether the
invitation to “appropriate” and “revise” dominant discourses about the
immorality of oppression and the rights of man that he so carefully
studied in The Columbian Orator?
On a literal level, Douglass makes clear that one cannot engage the
evils of slavery from the subject position of slave—such is the relation of
master and slave. It seems that finding oneself in a liminal or hybrid space—
no longer subject to a slave mentality and not yet free—does little here to
alter relations of power and oppression. It is only after Douglass has
successfully managed to escape captivity that he engages his former
master on the necessity of abolition. Douglass’s decision to waive his
defense suggests that the strategies of negotiation that Bhabha proposes
must take into account questions of location and power; they must
consider, as Douglass makes clear, where and how the subaltern can
speak in a way that carries authority and meaning. But the capacity to
alter one’s location is crucially tied to questions of one’s mobility and
access to resources. Here, Lawrence Grossberg tells us, agency “is not
simply a matter of places but is more a matter of the spatial relations of
places and spaces and the distribution of people within them…. It is a
matter of the structured mobility by which people are given access to
particular kinds of places (and resources), and to the paths that allow one
to move to and from such places.”32
Moreover, Douglass’s critical repetition of the master/slave narrative
suggests to us that rhetorical strategies of appropriation and revision do
102 IMPURE AC T S

not adequately address the material dimension of discourse. In other

words, the politics of culture cannot be reduced to the politics of
meaning, while issues of material organization and consequences of life
disappear. 33 Douglass’s autobiography everywhere emphasizes the
relationship between the discursive rationalization for slavery and its
concrete material and spatial effects. For example, the sanctioning
discourse of paternalism suggests that slave owners are responsible for
their slaves’ material and spiritual needs and that slaves in return owe
them their work and their undying gratitude. Such logic translates for
Douglass into the denial of those material resources and opportunities
for decision making that might enable any independence of action, any
semblance of self-determination. Aware that a language of resistance may
have dire material consequences in a slave state, Douglass must wait
several long years before he can effect his escape and combat the
institution of slavery from a position of authority disengaged from the
discursive and material limitations of the “peculiar institution.”

C O M B AT I N G O F F I C I A L D I S C O U R S E S

As this example makes clear, combating official discourses demands being

attentive, as Stuart Hall points out, to “both what is said and done.” For
Hall, the importance of the idea of the discursive is to “resist the notion that
there is a materialism which is outside meaning. Everything is within the
discursive, but nothing is only discourse or only discursive.”34 Discourse
does not deny the existence of material reality, but makes problematic how
it is given meaning and how such meaning often translates into discernible
material effects. Unfortunately, according to Hall, what frequently
disappears in most appropriations of Foucault’s notion of the discursive is
the role that social forces play. The upshot is thinking about discourses—like
ideologies—as merely ideational rather than as fully concretized in the
structures of daily life. Hence, a pedagogy and politics of critical literacy
must not only push students to rhetorically challenge and rewrite the
“consensus of common sense,” as Bhabha insightfully argues, but also to
think about and engage the ways that common sense becomes embedded in
 TEACHING THE POLITICAL WITH HOMI BHABHA 103

the material structures and machineries of power that frame their daily
experiences. It is one thing to challenge the logic of racism in our classrooms
and quite another to confront the way its historical legacy has structured the
still largely segregated experience of schooling—and daily life. To view the
crisis of racism as merely a crisis of representation is to engage in a social
mythology that erases the material reality of power and negates the need to
link the language of critique to the practical politics of intervention and
social change.
Bhabha’s astute observation that racism remains the leading ideology of
most literate people poses another interesting problem in relation to his
pedagogical strategies of negotiation and translation. Douglass’s narrative
makes problematic from the start the assumption that his oppressor is
unaware of the contradictions at the heart of the rationality of enslavement.
Historically, the institution of slavery drew upon myriad forms of
knowledge—scientific, philosophical, religious, aesthetic, legalistic, and
economic—for its legitimacy and sanction, largely by “proving” the gross
racial “inferiority” of the en-slaved. Such discourses confirmed that the master
race was rational, civilized, dispassionate, capable of moral judgment, and
hence, capable of self-determination; they also imparted the “knowledge” that
subject races were the antithesis of the master race: irrational, savage, sexually
lascivious, morally bankrupt, and completely incapable of self-determination.
So why the legal prohibition of literacy for the en-slaved, if by virtue of their
biological race they were incapable of rational judgment and moral outrage?
Why does Hugh Auld, Douglass’s former master, astutely argue that reading
leads to freedom if a slave by definition can’t think or act in his own behalf?
Nor was Douglass unaware of the contradictions that constituted the slave
system. Even as a boy, he struggled less with the veracity of how the white
world constructed “reality”—with the insidiousness of the role that it cast for
him and for itself—than with what it meant to fight the seeming historical
inertia of its racist discourses, the sheer historical weight of them. He does not
submit to the crippling logic that another discourse can’t emerge and be
heard; but he is careful not to equate the force of such narratives with his own
counternarrative.
Naming the truth in this instance has its limits. Clearly, much more is
at stake in developing the possibilities for political agency than being able
104 IMPURE AC T S

to challenge and revise, however skillfully, the gaps and contradictions in

the logic of oppression. “The subaltern is not a social category” argues
Rosalind O’Hanlon, “but a statement of power.” 35 As Lawrence
Grossberg notes, this has implications not only for the question of
agency in terms of addressing how interests, investments, and
participation “as a structure of belonging” get “distributed with
particular structured terrains” but also for thinking of agency beyond
questions of cultural identity and how such identities are produced and
taken up through practices of representation.36 In other words, we begin
to see the limitations of Bhabha’s commitment to the politics of
representation, to what he sees as a recent shift in “the very nature of
what can be construed as political, of what could be the representational
objects and objectives of social transformation.”37 That racism exists
among literate people suggests that more is at work than their ignorance
of its untenable and contradictory logic.
Negotiating the terrain of racist ideologies pedagogically necessitates
strategies of understanding, engagement, and transformation. Not only
do students need to understand the economic and political interests that
shape and legitimate racist discourses, they must also address the strong
emotional investments they may bring to such beliefs. For Shoshana
Felman, educators must think about the role of desire in both ignorance
and learning. “Teaching,” she explains, “has to deal not so much with
lack of knowledge as with resistances to knowledge. Ignorance, suggests
[Jacques] Lacan, is a ‘passion.’ Inasmuch as traditional pedagogy
postulated a desire for knowledge, an analytically informed pedagogy
has to reckon with the passion for ignorance.”38 Felman elaborates
further on the productive nature of ignorance, arguing, “Ignorance is
nothing other than a desire to ignore: its nature is less cognitive than
performative…it is not a simple lack of information but the incapacity—
or the refusal—to acknowledge one’s own implication in the
information.” 39 If students are to move beyond the issue of
understanding to an engagement with the deeper affective investments
that make them complicitous with racist ideologies or other oppressive
ideologies, they must be positioned to address and formulate strategies of
transformation through which their individualized beliefs can be
 TEACHING THE POLITICAL WITH HOMI BHABHA 105

articulated with broader public discourses that extend the imperatives of

democratic public life. An unsettling pedagogy in this instance would
engage their identities from unexpected vantage points and articulate
how they connect to existing material relations of power. At stake here is
not only a pedagogical practice that recalls how knowledge,
identifications, and subject positions are produced, unfolded, and
remembered but also how they become part of an ongoing process, more
strategic so to speak, in mediating/accommodating/challenging existing
relations of power. This is not to suggest that Bhabha’s strategies of
appropriation, revision, or iteration are not useful, but that such
strategies are not equipped in and of themselves to bridge the gap
between desire, knowledge, and transformation. What they do provide is
an ethical referent for living in a democratic and multicultural—that is,
antiracist—society that is entirely missing from dominant educational
discourses like Leon Botstein’s and Elaine Showalter’s.
Moreover, Bhabha’s attempt to theorize the relationship between critical
literacy and the politics of difference supports a notion of “public
pedagogy” that is interdisciplinary in its theoretical and poetic reach,
transgressive in its challenge to authority and power, and intertextual in its
attempt to link the local with the national and international. The project
underlying Bhabha’s pedagogy is rooted in issues of compassion and social
responsibility aimed at deepening and expanding the possibilities for
critical agency, racial justice, and democratic life. Rigorous, theoretical,
and playfully and purposefully ambivalent, Bhabha’s work refuses easy
answers to the most central, urgent, and disturbing questions of our time.
Yet it is in his attempt to make hope the basis for freedom and to make
social justice the foundation of his cultural politics and pedagogy that
frames his project as open-ended and self-reflexive. Bhabha’s writing both
instructs and disrupts, opens a critical dialogue but refuses the “arrogance
of theory” or a politics with guarantees.
Bhabha’s work has always refused to limit the sites of pedagogy and
politics to those privileged by the advocates of “realpolitik.” He has
urged educators and others to take up the challenge of critical literacy
and political agency from within dominant institutions, while challenging
their authority and cultural practices. For Bhabha, the context of such
106 IMPURE AC T S

work demands confronting a major paradox in capitalist societies—that of

using the very authority vested in institutions such as higher education
to push against the grain. Such action is not a retreat from politics, as
Todd Gitlin and others have argued,40 but an extension of the possibility
of politics to make visible and challenge the work of dominant
intellectuals and institutions that largely function to incapacitate the
intersection of critical pedagogy, cultural politics, and political agency. At
the same time, cultural workers, educators, and others need to rethink
the relationship between the politics of identity and the possibilities of
self- and social transformation. At stake here is the need for a critical
vocabulary that recognizes the need to combine multiple and shifting
cultures in a way that de-fends their particularity but does so within a
broader defense of social and democratic public life. Ernesto Laclau
rightfully suggests that the politics of pure difference is the route to self-
apartheid and will have no consequences at the wider levels of society As
Lacan points out, identity politics cannot be limited so as to prevent the
specific nature of its struggles from entering into “relations of solidarity
with other groups and engaging in wider struggles at the level of
society.”41 If agency involves “the possibilities of action as interventions
into the processes by which reality is continually being transformed and
power enacted,” as Lawrence Grossberg argues, “then agency must not
be conflated with cultural identity or epistemological issues” but with
questions of how access, affective investments, and interests are
distributed within specific contexts regulated within established
structures of power.42 Agency in this case becomes more than the
struggle over identifications, or a representational politics that unsettles
and disrupts common sense; it is also a performative act grounded in the
spaces and practices that connect people’s everyday lives and concerns
with the reality of material relations of values and power. At stake here is
a cultural politics and public pedagogy rooted in the necessity of critical
understanding and the possibility of social change.
 f ive
5

Te a c h i n g t h e
Te a c h i n g t h e
Cultural with
C u l t u ra l w i t h
Disney
D i s n ey

There is nothing innocuous left. The little pleasures, expressions of life that seemed
exempt from the responsibility of thought, not only have an element of deviant
silliness, of callous refusal to see, but directly serve their diametrical opposite.
—Theodor Adorno, Minima Mom Ha

I N T RO D U C T I O N

Theodor Adorno’s insights seem particularly appropriate at a time when

multinational corporations have become the driving force behind media
culture, making it increasingly difficult to maintain what has always been
a problematic position—that the entertainment industry provides people
with the moments of pleasure and escape that they desire. That
corporate culture is rewriting the nature of children’s culture becomes
clear as the boundaries once maintained between spheres of formal
education and entertainment collapse into each other. To be convinced of

107
108 IMPURE AC T S

this, one only has to consider a few telling events from the growing
corporate interest in schools as profit-making ventures, the production of
curricular materials by toy companies, or the increasing use of school
space for the advertising of consumer goods.
The organization and regulation of culture by large media
corporations such as Disney profoundly influence children’s culture and
increasingly dominate public discourse. The concentration of control
over the means of producing, circulating, and exchanging information
has been matched by the emergence of new technologies that have
transformed culture, especially popular culture, into the primary
educational site in which youth learn about themselves, their relationship
to others, and the larger world. The Hollywood film industry, television,
satellite broadcasting technologies, the Internet, posters, magazines,
billboards, newspapers, videos, and other media forms and technologies
have transformed culture into a pivotal force for, as Stuart Hall sees it,
“shaping human meaning and behavior and regulat[ing] our social
practices at every turn.”1 Although the endlessly proliferating sites of
media production promise unlimited access to vast stores of information,
such sites are increasingly controlled by a handful of multinational
corporations. The Disney corporation’s share of the communication
industry represents a case in point. Disney’s numerous holdings include
a controlling interest in twenty television stations that reach 25 percent of
all U.S. households, and ownership of over twenty-one radio stations
and the largest radio network in the United States, serving 3,400 stations
and covering 24 percent of all households in the country In addition,
Disney owns three music studios, the ABC network, and five motion
picture studios. Other holdings include, but are not limited to, television
and cable channels, book publishing companies, sports teams (the
Atlanta Braves, Atlanta Hawks, and World Championship Wrestling),
theme parks, insurance companies, magazines, and multimedia
productions.2
Mass-produced images fill our daily lives and condition our most
intimate perceptions and desires. At issue for parents, educators, and
others is how culture, particularly media culture, has become a
substantive, if not the primary, educational force in regulating the
 TEACHING THE CULTURAL WITH DISNEY 109

meanings, values, and tastes that set the norms and conventions that
offer up and legitimate particular subject positions. In other words,
media culture influences what it means to claim an identity as male,
female, white, black, citizen, or noncitizen as well as defining the
meaning of childhood, the national past, beauty, truth, and social
agency.3 The scope and impact of new electronic technologies as teaching
machines can be seen in some rather astounding statistics. It is estimated
that “the average American spends more than four hours a day watching
television. Four hours a day, 28 hours a week, 1456 hours a year.”4 Don
Hazen and Julie Winokur report, citing American Medical Association
statistics, that the “number of hours spent in front of a television or
video screen is the single biggest chunk of time in the waking life of an
American child.”5
Such statistics warrant grave concern given that the pedagogical
messages often provided through such programming are shaped largely
by a $ 130 billion-a-year advertising industry, which not only sells its
products but also values, images, and identities that are largely aimed at
teaching young people to be consumers. Alarmed by the growing
influence of the media on young children, the American Academy of
Pediatrics released a report in 1999 claiming that the influence of
television viewing among the young constituted a public health issue.
The report urged parents not to allow children under two years old to
watch television, and recommended that older children not be allowed
tele-visions in their bedrooms. 6 It would be reductionistic not to
recognize that there is also some excellent programming that is provided
to audiences, but by and large much of what is produced on television
and in the big Hollywood studios panders to the lowest common
denominator, defines freedom as consumer choice, and debases public
discourse by reducing it to a spectacle.7
Nothing appears to be out of bounds for the megacorporations and
their counterparts in the advertising industry when it comes to
transforming childhood dreams into potential profits. For example, soon
after the U.S. women’s soccer team won the World Cup in July of 1999,
the dominant media reported that one of the first things the team did to
relax after its World Cup victory was to visit Disney World. Within this
110 IMPURE AC T S

discourse, the long struggle for women to gain some parity in American
sports was transformed into simply another high-profile advertisement for
Disney. Similarly, two days after Mark McGwire had belted out home run
number sixty-two, thus breaking Roger Mar is’s record, a television ad ran
on all the major networks in which McGwire appeared hitting the home
run, jogging around the bases, and picking up his son in celebration of his
record-breaking event. A camera zoomed in on McGwire, hero to millions
of kids, holding his son in his arms, and a voice asked, “What are you
going to do now?” McGwire smiled, looked directly at the camera, and
replied, “I am going to take my son to Disneyland.”
Following the McGwire ad, the dominant media, including the three
major television network news programs, announced that the
groundskeeper who had picked up McGwire’s record-setting baseball
would give it back to him and that this generous deed would be
rewarded with a free round- trip ticket to Disney World. Once again,
Disney managed to appropriate a celebrated American image and turn it
into an advertisement for corporate America.
Yet such commercialism is not limited to appropriating events deeply
associated in the national imagination with the efforts of famous sports
events or heroic sports figures such as Mark McGwire, or even
appropriating celebrities such as New York Knicks “bad boy” superstar
Latrell Sprewell (currently considering a project with Disney).8 No identity,
desire, or need appears to escape the advertiser’s grip. For instance, Disney
Magazine recently ran an ad for the Baby Mickey porcelain doll. The ad
features a baby wearing a cap with the logo Disney Babies on it. The
baby’s pajama top also has a Mickey Mouse logo on it, and just in case the
reader has missed the point, the baby is holding a Baby Mickey doll, with
Baby Mickey emblazoned on its bib. The caption for the ad reads, “He
drifts off to dreamland with Baby Mickey to cuddle nearby!”9 The doll is
part of the Ashton-Drake Galleries collection offered to adults who can
rewrite their own memories of being a child in Disney’s terms while
simultaneously indulging a commodified view of innocence that they can
use to introduce their own infants to Disney’s version of childhood. The
ad appeals to innocence as it appropriates it at one of its most seductive
and vulnerable moments.
 TEACHING THE CULTURAL WITH DISNEY 111

In this case, innocence is emptied of any substantive content so that it

can be commodified and exploited. Disney disingenuously presents
innocence as that untouched psychic space in which the brutal world is
forgotten, and, as Ernest Larsen notes, “the fullness of fantasy reliably, if
pathetically compensates for the emptiness of reality.”10 Larsen argues
that one of Walt Disney’s greatest insights was that he “knew that we all
believe ourselves to be like unto children. And he knew how to exploit
the pathos and comedy—but especially the pathos—of that universal
delusion of innocence.”11
The Disney commercial fantasy machine uses innocence as a
representational image to infantilize the very adults at whom it is aimed.
The appeal to fantasy in Disney’s perfectly scripted world functions to
disable rather than liberate the imagination. Nothing is out of place in
Disney’s landscape, and under the rubric of community Disney purposely
“confuses the personal and the corporate.”12 Within this context critical
agency is replaced by corporate planning, allowing Disney to edit out
conflict, politics, and contradictions, thus relieving adults and children of
having to make any choices beyond those that allow them to indulge in the
fantasy of unfettered consumerism. Of course, the larger issue is that the
commercialization of the media and the culture, in general, limits the
choices that children and adults can make in extending their sense of
agency beyond a commercial culture that enshrines an intensely myopic,
narcissistic, and conservative sense of self and society. Reflecting on his
own study of Disney’s new town, Celebration, Florida, Andrew Ross
ponders this very issue, insightfully pointing out, “The rage for
privatization that has swept the country, and much of the developed world,
routinely sacrifices justice and accountability at the altar of efficiency.”13
Beyond this notion of fantasy and entertainment that supports a loss of
faith in public institutions and participatory democratic politics is a
pedagogical model that suggests that those engaged with Disney culture
become “quiet” citizens just as cast members in Disney’s theme-park labor
force are required to become utterly compliant and obsequious. Jane
Kuenz captures this sentiment in the response of one of the Disney’s “cast
members” at Disney World, who explains, “You’ve got to keep your
mouth shut. You can’t tell them your opinion. You have to do everything
112 IMPURE AC T S

they say. The Disney Way. Never say anything negative. Everything’s
positive. There’s never a no. You never say I don’t know. If you don’t
know something you find out fast, even on your own after work.”14
Within this type of model of cultural and moral regulation, Disney’s
image of innocence is completely nullified next to the power it exercises in
dominating public discourse and undermining the social and political
capacities necessary for individuals to sustain even the most basic
institutions of democracy. The discourse of innocence in Disney’s
worldview is both performative and strategic. Not only does it offer up
subject positions free of conflict, politics, and contradictions, it also offers a
rationale for abstracting corporate culture from the realms of power, politics,
and ideology Against this Disney dreamworld, one has to ask what price the
public pays by simply focusing on the pleasure and fun that culture
industries such as Disney provide while excluding the growing influence
they have in shaping so many other facets of national and global life.
Consider the enormous control that a handful of transnational
corporations have over the diverse properties that shape popular and media
culture. Joshua Karliner has noted that “51 of the largest 100 economies in
the world are corporations.”15 Moreover, the United States media is
dominated by fewer than ten conglomerates, whose annual sales range from
$ 10 to $27 billion. These include major corporations such as Time Warner,
General Electric, Disney, Viacom, TCI, and Westinghouse. Not only are
these firms major producers of much of the entertainment, news, culture,
and information that permeates our daily lives, they also produce media
software and have networks for distribution that include television and
cable channels as well as retail stores.16 Similarly, the heads of these
corporations have amassed enormous amounts of personal wealth, further
contributing to the shameless disparity of income between company CEOs
and factory workers, on the one hand, and the new global elite and the rest
of the world’s population on the other. For instance, in 1997 Disney CEO
Michael Eisner was paid more than $575 million. Russell Mokhiber and
Rubert Weissman explain that, in addition to his $750,000 salary, Eisner
claimed a $9.9 million bonus and cashed in on $565 million in stock
options.17 CEOs like Michael Eisner, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and others
are part of an exclusive club of 35–8 global billionaires whose collective
 TEACHING THE CULTURAL WITH DISNEY 113

income, explains Zygmunt Bauman, “equals the combined incomes of [the]

2.3 billion poorest people (45 percent of the world’s population).”18 Much of
what young people learn today is brought to them by a handful of corporate
elite, including Eisner, Rupert Murdoch, and others, who have little regard
for what kids learn beyond what it means for them to become consumers.
The recognition that this global elite and the corporations they own and
control are involved in every aspect of cultural production—ranging from
the production of identities, representations, and texts to control over the
production, circulation, and distribution of cultural goods—is not a new
insight to theorists of cultural studies. What has been missing from such
work is an analysis of the educational role that such corporations play in
promoting a public pedagogy that uses, as Raymond Williams has pointed
out, the educational force of all of its institutions, resources, and
relationships to actively and profoundly teach an utterly privatized notion of
citizen-ship.19 All too often within the parameters of such a public pedagogy,
consumption is the only form of citizenship being offered to children, and
democracy is privatized through an emphasis on egoistic individualism, low
levels of participation in political life, and a diminishing of the importance of
noncommodified public spheres. In what follows, I want to point to some
theoretical and political implications for focusing on corporations as
“teaching machines” engaged in a particular form of public pedagogy. In
doing so, I will focus specifically on the Disney corporation and what I will
call its discourse of innocence as a defining principle in structuring its public
pedagogy of commercialism within children’s culture.

DISNEY AND THE POLITICS OF INNOCENCE

Within the last decade, the rise of corporate power and its expansion into
all aspects of everyday life has grown by leaps and bounds.20 One of the
most visible examples of such growth can be seen in the expanding role
that the Walt Disney Company plays in shaping popular culture and daily
life in the United States and abroad. The Disney Company is an
exemplary model of the new face of corporate power at the beginning of
the twenty-first century. Like many other megacorporations, its focus is on
popular culture, and it continually expands its reach to include not only
114 IMPURE AC T S

theme parks but television networks, motion pictures, cruise lines, baseball
and hockey teams, Broadway theater, and a children’s radio program.
What is unique about Disney is that, unlike Time Warner or
Westinghouse, its brand name is synonymous with the notion of
childhood innocence. As an icon of American culture and middle- class
family values, Disney actively appeals to both parental concerns and
children’s fantasies as it works hard to transform every child into a lifetime
consumer of Disney products and ideas. In this scenario, a contradiction
emerges between the company’s cutthroat commercial ethos and a Disney
culture that presents itself as the paragon of virtue and childlike innocence.
Disney has built its reputation on both profitability and wholesome
entertainment. Largely removing itself from issues of power, politics, and
ideology, it embraces a pristine self-image associated with the magic of pixie
dust and Main Street USA. Yet this is merely the calculating rhetoric of a
corporate giant whose annual revenues in 1997 and 1998 exceeded $22
billion as a result of its ability to manufacture, sell, and distribute culture on
a global scale, making it the world’s most powerful leisure icon.21 Michael
Ovitz, a former Disney executive, touches on the enormous power Disney
wields, claiming, “Disney isn’t a company as much as it is a nation-state with
its own ideas and attitudes, and you have to adjust to them.”22
The image of Disney as a political and economic power promoting a
specific culture and ideology appears at odds with a public relations
image that portrays the company as one that offers young people the
promise of making their dreams come true through the pleasures of
wholesome entertainment. The contradiction between the politics at
work in shaping Disney culture and the appeal the company puts forth in
order to construct and influence children’s culture is disturbing and
problematic. Yet making Disney accountable for the ways in which it
shapes children’s desires and identities becomes all the more important
as the Disney corporation increasingly presents itself not only as a
purveyor of entertainment and fun, but also as a political force in
developing models of education that influence how young people are
educated in public schools, spheres traditionally understood to offer
children the space for critical and intellectual development uninhibited
by the relentless fascinations of consumer culture.
 TEACHING THE CULTURAL WITH DISNEY 115

Disney has given new meaning to the politics of innocence as a

narrative for shaping public memory and for producing a “general body
of identifications” that promote a packaged and sanitized version of
American history.23 Innocence also serves as a rhetorical device that
cleanses the Disney image of the messy influence of commerce, ideology,
and power. In other words, Disney’s strategic association with childhood,
a world cleansed of contradictions and free of politics, represents not just
the basic appeal of its theme parks and movies, but also provides a model
for defining corporate culture separate from the influence of corporate
power. Hence, Michael Eisner, as president and CEO of the Walt Disney
Company, is caught in a contradiction when he repeats the company line
that Disney only gives children what they want, or when he panders to
the rhetoric of innocence by arguing that his own role as CEO is
comparable to being in charge of a giant toy store.24 Such comments are
more than simple disingenuousness; witness the recent legal battle
between Michael Eisner and former employee Jeffrey Katzenberg. Not
only did Eisner appear mean-spirited and inflexible in dealing with
colleagues like Katzenberg, whom he once referred to as “the little
midget,” but documented court records suggested that “Disney was
systematically un-derreporting revenue and overreporting expenses to its
creative partners” in the movie and television industries.25 Given the
public airing of corporate greed and mudslinging, Disney’s appeal to the
kinder and gentler values associated with old Walt appear to be simply
dishonest. It gets worse: behind the rhetoric of innocence is the reality of
a company that, Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee
argues, uses subcontractors to produce Disney clothing and toys in
countries not only connected to military dictatorships but also actively
engaged in child labor. The myth of innocence and fun seems all the more
insidious given the fact, according to Russell Mokhiber and Robert
Weissman, that in recent years Disney has outsourced production of its
“clothing and toys to sweatshops in Haiti, Burma, Vietnam, China and
elsewhere.”26 For example, one Disney subcontractor pays approximately
one thousand factory workers in Vietnam “six to eight cents an hour, far
below the subsistence wage estimated at 32 cents an hour.”27 In Haiti,
workers produce Mickey Mouse pajamas; Pocahontas, Donald Duck, and
116 IMPURE AC T S

Lion King T-shirts; and Hunchback of Notre Dame sweatshirts while

being paid an hourly wage of 38 cents, or $3.30 a day.28
These contradictions became all the more glaring to me as I walked, on
a hot day in the summer of 1999, into a Disney Store in Chicago, located
on the famed Magnificent Mile on Michigan Avenue. A recent addition to
Disney’s arsenal of retail stores, the store exterior was covered with more
than 180 pairs of mouse ears, seemingly inspired by the designs of the
famed Chicago architect Louis Sullivan. Soon after the store opened, Blair
Kamin, the Chicago Tribune architecture critic, argued that “The Disney
Store…is a small but telling example of the way America is turning into a
landscape of studied fakes that devalue the very history they pretend to
honor.”29 As I entered the store I was surrounded by well-dressed middle-
class types, many of whom wore Disney clothing, almost all of them
carrying a shopping bag displaying a Disney cartoon character.
Surrounded by some of the most expensive department and fashion stores
in America, The Disney Store greets potential consumers with a motto
carved into white, polished stone near the entrance. The motto, originally
from Walt Disney himself, reads, “The things that we have in common far
outnumber and outweigh those that divide us.” I am not sure what Walt
had in mind, but the unifying principle at work in the store, attempting to
provide a common focus for its inhabitants, is the logic of consumerism.
Every space, advertisement, item, and symbol in The Disney Store exhorts
its inhabitants to buy something, including wine glasses, mugs, watches,
and tables etched with the Mickey Mouse logo. The clothing, stuffed
animals, photo albums, and every other largely useless item in the store,
including Winnie-the-Pooh tricolor pasta, is overpriced in comparison to
the labor that went into producing such goods. Donald Duck shirts sell for
thirty-six dollars, which amounts to a one-week salary for the Haitian
workers who made them. Yet who would wear a Disney shirt without
accessories? In this case, the Haitian workers would have to consider
giving up seven weeks of their salary in order to buy a standard accessory
such as a Mickey Mouse watch, which sells for two hundred dollars.
Maybe the prices will drop, or the workers will be paid even less since
Disney’s retail stores have been losing money since 1998,30 though there is
no evidence of that in the Disney Michigan Avenue store.
 TEACHING THE CULTURAL WITH DISNEY 117

Eisner’s toy-store promotional image is sullied by more than the

company’s use of sweatshops, child labor, and the commercial carpet
bombing of children. It is also tarnished by Disney’s often hostile and
demeaning labor practices endured by its American workers—work relations
scripted from beginning to end and supervised, in part, by hired spies and
informants (known as shoppers) who contribute to an enforced “culture of
mutually generating suspicion and dependence.”31 Eisner also willfully
refuses to acknowledge responsibility for the role that Disney plays in
harnessing children’s identities and desires to an ever-expanding sphere of
consumption; for editing public memory to reconstruct an American past in
its own image; and for setting limits on democratic public life by virtue of its
controlling influence on the media and its increasing presence in the schools.
Education is never innocent, because it always presupposes a particular
view of citizenship, culture, and society, and yet it is this very appeal to
innocence, bleached of any semblance of politics and commerce that has
become a defining feature of Disney culture and pedagogy.
The Walt Disney Company’s attachment to the appeal of innocence
provides a rationale for Disney to both reaffirm its commitment to
children’s pleasure and to downplay any critical assessments of the role
Disney plays as a benevolent corporate power in sentimentalizing
childhood innocence as it simultaneously commodifies it. Stripped of the
historical and social constructions that give it meaning, innocence in the
Disney universe becomes an atemporal, ahistorical, apolitical, and
atheoretical space where children share a common bond free of the
problems and conflicts of adult society. Disney both markets this ideal
and presents itself as a corporate parent who safeguards this protective
space for children by magically supplying the fantasies that nourish it
and keep it alive. Michael Eisner not only recognizes the primacy of
innocence for Disney’s success, he reaffirms the company’s long-standing
public relations position that innocence somehow exists outside of the
reach of adult society, and that Disney alone provides the psychic
economy through which kids can express their childlike fantasies. As he
has said, “The specific appeal of Disneyland, Disney films and products—
family entertainment—comes from the contagious appeal of innocence….
Obviously, Disney characters strike a universal chord with children, all
118 IMPURE AC T S

of whom share an innocence and openness before they become

completely molded by their respective societies.” 32 Eisner’s claim is
important because it now suggests that Disney culture reflects rather
than shapes a particular version of childhood innocence and subjectivity.
There is little to insinuate in Eisner’s comments that Disney has always
viewed children as an enormously productive market to fuel company
profits, and that Walt Disney clearly understood the appeal to innocence
as a universal mechanism for exploiting the realm of childhood fantasies
in what Mike Wallace has referred to as a “relentless quest for new
images to sell”33 Old Walt may have had the best of intentions when it
comes to making kids happy, but he had few doubts about the enormous
commercial potential of youth.
Innocence plays a complex role in the Disney Company’s attempt to
market its self-image to the American public. Not only does it register
Disney’s association with a sentimentalized notion of childhood fantasy,
but innocence also functions as the principal concept of moral regulation
and as part of a politics of historical erasure. Further elaborating this dual
strategy reveals that in Disney’s moral order innocence is presented as the
deepest of truths,34 which when unproblematized can be used with great
force and influence to legitimate the spectacle of entertainment as escapist
fantasy. In addition, innocence becomes the ideological and educational
yardstick through which Disney promotes a conservative set of ideas and
values as the normative and taken-for-granted “premises of a particular
and historical form of social order.”35 Recognizing that Disney has a
political stake in creating a particular moral order favorable to its
commercial interests raises fundamental questions about what it teaches to
produce the meanings, desires, and dreams through which it attempts to
inscribe both young people and adults within the Disney worldview.

M A K I N G T H E P O L I T I C A L M O R E P E DAG O G I C A L

Although my focus is on Disney because of its particular attempt to

mystify its corporate agenda with appeals to fun, innocence, and purity,
the seriousness of the threat to a vibrant democracy that Disney and
 TEACHING THE CULTURAL WITH DISNEY 119

other corporations present through their ownership of the media and

their control over information cannot be underestimated. I don’t mean to
suggest that Disney is engaged in a conspiracy to undermine American
youth or democracy around the world. Nor do I want to suggest that
Disney is part of an evil empire incapable of providing joy and pleasure
to the millions of kids and adults who visit its theme parks, watch its
videos and movies, or buy products from its toy stores. On the contrary,
the main issue here is that such entertainment now takes place under
conditions in which, Toby Miller points out, the media “becomes a
critical site for the articulation of a major intellectual shift in the ground
of public discourse…in which pricing systems are now brought to bear
on any problem, anytime, anywhere.” 36 In other words, media
conglomerates such as Disney are not merely producing harmless
entertainment, disinterested news stories, or unlimited access to the
information age; nor are they removed from the realm of power, politics,
and ideology. But recognition of the pleasure that Disney provides
should not blind us to the realization that it is about more than the
production of entertainment and enjoyment.
I also want to avoid suggesting that the effect of Disney films, radio
stations, theme parks, magazines, and other products is the same for all
those who are exposed to them. Disney is not a self-contained system of
unchanging formal conventions. Disney culture, like all cultural
formations, is riddled with contradictions; rather than viewing the Disney
empire as monolithic, it is important to emphasize that within Disney
culture there are also potentially subversive moments and pleasures.
In fact, any approach to studying Disney must address the issue of why
so many kids and adults love Disney, and experience its theme parks,
plays, and travel opportunities as a counterlogic that allows them to
venture beyond the present while laying claim to unrealized dreams and
hopes. For adults, Disney’s theme parks offer an invitation to adventure, a
respite from the drudgery of work, and an opportunity to escape from the
alienation and boredom of daily life. As Susan Willis points out, Disney
invites adults to construct a new sense of agency founded on joy and
happiness and to do so by actively participating in their own pleasures,
whether it be a wedding ceremony, a cruise ship adventure, or a weekend
120 IMPURE AC T S

at the Disney Institute. Disney’s appeal to pleasure and the “child in all of
us” is also rooted in a history that encompasses the lives of many baby
boomers. These adults have grown up with Disney culture and often
“discover some nostalgic connection to [their] childhood” when they enter
into the Disney cultural apparatus. In this sense, Willis notes, Disney can
be thought of as an “immense nostalgia machine whose staging and
specific attractions are generationally coded to strike a chord with the
various age categories of its guests.”37 Similarly, Disney’s power lies, in
part, in its ability to tap into the lost hopes, abortive dreams, and Utopian
potential of popular culture.
Disney’s appeal to the relationship between fantasy and dreams be-
comes all the more powerful against a broader American landscape in
which cynicism has become a permanent fixture. Disney’s invitation to a
world where “the fun always shines” does more than invoke the Utopian
longing and promise of the sun-drenched vacation; it also offers an acute
sense of the extraordinary in the ordinary, a powerful antidote to even the
most radical forms of pessimism. But at the same time Disney’s Utopia
points beyond the given while remaining firmly within it. As Ernst Bloch
has pointed out, genuine wishes are felt here at the start but these are often
siphoned off within constructions of nostalgia, fun, and childhood
innocence that undercut the Utopian dream of “something else”—that
which extends beyond what the market and a commodity-crazed society
can offer.38 And yet, even in this “swindle of fulfillment,” to quote Bloch’s
coinage,39 there are contradictions regarding how adults experience a
Disney culture that reflect a combination of pleasure and irritation,
subordination and resistance, genuine affective involvement and passive
identifications. For example, Disney’s invitation to adult couples to
experience the pleasures of the erotic fling, the escape into the alleged
rekindling of sensual desire and pleasure that is to be found in a vacation
at one of Disney’s theme parks, is undermined by the reality of an
environment that is utterly septic, overly homogeneous, and completely
regulated and controlled. And yet, this exoticizing of the Disney landscape
does contain a Utopian element that exceeds the reality of the Disney-
produced commercialized spaces in which such desires find their origins as
well as their finale in the fraudulent promise of satisfaction.
 TEACHING THE CULTURAL WITH DISNEY 121

There are no passive dupes in this script, and many of Disney’s texts
offer opportunities for oppositional readings. But at the same time, the
potential for subversive readings, the recognition of the complex
interplay of agency, or the mixture of alienation and pleasure that the
culture industry promotes does not cancel out the power of a corporation
like Disney to monopolize the media and saturate everyday life with its
own ideologies. Although it is true that people mediate what they see,
buy, wear, and consume, and bring different meanings to the texts and
products that companies like Disney produce, it is crucial that any
attempt to deal with the relationship between culture and politics not
stop with such a recognition but investigate both its limits and its
strengths, particularly in dealing with the three to eight year old crowd.40
Hence, it is crucial that any rendering and interpretation of Disney
culture not be seen as either static or universal but be addressed as a
pedagogical attempt to challenge the diverse meanings and
commonsense renderings that students and others bring to their
encounter with Disney culture in its various manifestations.
Engaging Disney’s public pedagogy as a form of cultural politics is
meant to offer readers a set of problematics that enable them to in-quire
into what Disney represents in a way that they might not have thought
about and to shatter commonsense assumptions regarding Disney’s
claim to both promoting fun and games and protecting childhood
innocence. In short, the aim of such a project is to both challenge and go
beyond the charge that cultural critics who take a critical stand on
Disney or argue for a particular interpretation of what its culture
represents fail to consider other possible readings of Disney texts, or, as
David Buckingham notes, “simply offer self-righteous tirades against an
endless litany of ‘isms.’ ”41 In fact, the real issue may not be one of
ideological rigidity on the part of progressive cultural critics or their
failure to assign multiple interpretations to Disney’s texts, but how to
read cultural forms as they articulate with a whole assemblage of other
texts, ideologies, and practices. How audiences interpret Disney’s texts
may not be as significant as how some ideas, meanings, and messages
under certain political conditions become more highly rated as
representations of reality than others, and how these representations
122 IMPURE AC T S

assume the force of ideology by making an appeal to common sense

while at the same time shaping political policies and programs that serve
very specific interests—such as the passing of the 1996
Telecommunications Act, or the forging of school-business partnerships.
For some cultural theorists, the strength of Disney’s texts lies in the
potential they have for pleasure and for the multiple readings—out-side of
the realm of ideology—they provide for diverse audiences. One can grant
that recognizing that reception is itself constitutive of how meaning is
produced, and the fact that the work of conferring meaning cannot be
specified in advance is an important insight, though not one that by
default eliminates the inordinate power of megacorporations such as
Disney to control the range of meanings that circulate within society.
There is a difference between political formations, which involve a mix
of institutional and ideological forces, and reading methods (always
attempting to be more rigorous than the positivist-oriented media effects
studies) that remind us that the relationship between determinations and
effects are problematic. Similarly, Edward Said makes an important point
about the relationship between method and politics when he insists that
some theorists “have fallen into the trap of believing that method is
sovereign and can be systematic without also acknowledging that
method is always part of some larger ensemble of relationships headed
and moved by authority and power.”42 For Said, the forces of cultural
production and reception are not equal; and this suggests dealing very
differently with how we actually think about the relationships among
politics, power, and pedagogy in linking these two modes of intervention.
Focusing on how subjects interpret, mediate, or resist different messages,
products, and social practices does not cancel out the concentrated
assemblage of power that produces them, nor does it address the broader
historical, cultural, and institutional affiliations that often privilege texts
with specific intentions and meanings. Nor does such a method suggest
that one is actually working out of a project that takes a stand against
particular forms of domination while struggling to expand democratic
relations and pluralize democratic public spheres. What is the celebration
of any method, including audience research (in its various
manifestations), actually against? What does it oppose? What is the
 TEACHING THE CULTURAL WITH DISNEY 123

project that gives it meaning? And how does this appeal to method
actually address the growing concentration of political and economic
power and the broad spectrum of texts, institutions, and social practices
that corporations such as Disney effectively reproduce?
Yet, how people mediate texts, produce different readings of various
cultural forms, and allow themselves to experience the pleasure of
various aspects of Disney culture cannot be ignored. How viewers use
Disney’s cultural texts to make sense of their lives, or how such texts
mobilize those pleasures, identifications, and fantasies that connect
audiences to the broader issues that make up their everyday experiences
are crucial issues that need to be addressed in order to understand how
the media do their pedagogical work without reducing respondents to
passive dupes.43 However, the ways in which such messages, products,
and conventions “work” on audiences is one that must be left open to the
investigation of particular ethnographic interventions and/or pedagogical
practices. There is no virtue, ideologically or politically, in simply
pronouncing what Disney means—as if that is all there is to do. I am
suggesting a very different approach to Disney, one that highlights the
pedagogical and the contextual by raising questions about Disney—such
as what role it plays in shaping childhood identity, public memory,
national identity, gender roles, or in suggesting who qualifies as an
American or what the role of consumerism is in American life—that
expand the scope of inquiry in order to allow people to enter into such a
discussion in a way that they ordinarily might not have. Disney needs to
be engaged as a public discourse, and doing so means offering an
analysis that prompts civic discourse and popular culture to rub up
against each other. Such an engagement represents both a pedagogical
intervention and a way of recognizing the changing contexts in which
any text must be understood and engaged.
Questioning what Disney teaches is part of a much broader inquiry
regarding what it is that parents, children, educators and other cultural
workers need to know in order to critique and challenge, when
necessary, those institutional and cultural forces that have a direct impact
on public life. Such inquiry is all the more important at a time when
corporations hold such an inordinate amount of power in shaping
124 IMPURE AC T S

children’s culture into a largely commercial endeavor, using their various

cultural technologies as teaching machines to relentlessly commodify and
homogenize all aspects of everyday life, and in this sense posing a
potential threat to the real freedoms associated with a substantive
democracy. Yet questioning what megacorporations such as Disney teach
also means appropriating the most resistant and potentially subversive
ideas, practices, and images at work in their various cultural productions.
What Disney teaches cannot be abstracted from a number of
important larger issues: What does it mean to make corporations
accountable to the public? If dominant media constitute the primary
public forum for education and exchange, what is the role of cultural
politics in addressing the possible forms that might exist between
corporations and public life in the next century? How might cultural-
studies theorists link public pedagogy to a critical democratic view of
citizenship? How might diverse cultural workers develop forms of critical
education that enable young people and adults to become aware of and
interrogate the media as a major political, pedagogical, and social force?
What role might public schools and higher education play in providing
students with the skills, knowledge, and motivation needed to address
the threat that commercial culture poses to subordinating democratic
values to market values? Where might cultural politics be useful in
developing multiple democratic spheres in which children and adults can
develop the pedagogies, relations, and discourses for defending vital
social institutions as public goods? Put bluntly, how can cultural workers
in a variety of fields come together to create visions, values, and social
relations removed from the narrow logic of the marketplace? At the very
least, such a project suggests that cultural workers give more thought to
the importance of public pedagogy as a vital political project, and how
such a project might be incorporated as a defining principle of cultural
politics in order to offer students and others the opportunity for learning
how to use and critically read the new media technologies and their
various cultural productions as pedagogical practices designed to secure
particular identifications and desires in the service of a privatized notion
of citizenship and democracy. Organizing to democratize the media and
make it accountable to a participating citizenry also demands engaging in
 TEACHING THE CULTURAL WITH DISNEY 125

the hard political and pedagogical task of opening up corporations such

as Disney to public interrogation and critical dialogue.44
Disney’s overwhelming presence in the United States and abroad
reminds us that the battle over culture is central to the struggle over
meaning and institutional power, and that for learning to become
meaningful, critical, and emancipatory, it cannot be surrendered either to
the dictates of consumer choice or to a prohibition on critically engaging
how ideologies work within various social formations and cultural
discourses. On the contrary, critical learning must be linked to the
empowering demands of social responsibility, public accountability, and
critical citizenship precisely as a form of cultural politics.
 six
6

Pe r f o r m n g
Pe r fo r m i n g
Cultural
C u l t u ra l
Studies
Studies

To create a new culture does not only mean to make original discoveries on an
individual basis. It also and especially means to critically popularize already dis-
covered truths, make them, so to speak, social, therefore give them the consistency
of basis for vital actions, make them coordinating elements of intellectual and social
relevance.
—Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks

I N T RO D U C T I O N

Within the last decade, artists and educators have been caught in an
ideological crossfire regarding the civic and political responsibilities they
assume through their roles as engaged critics and cultural theorists. I
want to respond, in part, to this debate by addressing the issue of what
roles cultural workers might play as oppositional public intellectuals who
refuse to define themselves either through the language of the market or
through a discourse that abstracts cultural politics from the realm of the
aesthetic or the sphere of the social. This appropriation of cultural

126
 PERFORMNG CULTURAL STUDIES 127

workers as oppositional public intellectuals suggests both a critical

analysis of the relationship between the political and the pedagogical,
and a redefinition of artists, educators, and other cultural workers as
border crossers and intellectuals who engage in intertextual negotiations
across different sites of cultural production. The concept of border
crossing at work here fore-grounds not only the shifting nature of
borders and the problems they pose in naming and articulating the
locations of identity formation, politics, and struggle; it also draws
attention to the kind of cultural work that increasingly takes place in the
border space between “high” and popular culture; between the
institution and the street; between the public and the private. Intellectual
work in this instance becomes both theoretical and performative—that is,
it is marked by forms of invention, specificity, and critique as well as an
ongoing recognition of the border as partial, fluid, and open to the
incessant tensions and contradictions that inform the artist/educator’s
own location, ideology, and authority in relation to particular
communities. At the same time, space and place do not disappear as
markers of memory, history, and lived experience; they become more
porous and unstable, but still bear the weight of history and the legacies
of struggles yet to be fulfilled.
At stake here is not merely the call to link art and other forms of
cultural work to practices that are transgressive and oppositional, but to
articulate a wider project that connects artists, educators, and other
cultural workers to an insurgent cultural politics that challenges the
growing incursions of corporate power while simultaneously developing
a vibrant democratic public culture and society.
The problem that I want to foreground is how the diverse traditions
of critical pedagogy and cultural studies might be engaged to redefine
cultural work as acts of insurgent citizenship that help keep alive, as the
poet Robert Haas puts it, “the idea of justice, which is going dead in us
all the time.”1 In what follows, I try to engage two critical traditions that
offer the opportunity to re theorize not just the role that engaged artists
might play in keeping justice alive but also the role that other cultural
workers might play as public intellectuals who revitalize the dynamics of
an ongoing radical cultural politics.
128 IMPURE AC T S

While critical educators and cultural studies scholars have

traditionally occupied separate spaces and addressed different audiences,
the pedagogical and political nature of their work appears to converge
around a number of points. At the risk of overgeneralizing: both cultural-
studies theorists and critical educators engage in forms of cultural work
that locate politics in the interplay among symbolic representations,
everyday life, and material relations of power; both engage cultural
politics, as “the site of the production and struggle over power,”2 and
learning as the outcome of diverse struggles rather than as the passive
reception of information. In addition, both traditions have emphasized
what I call a performative pedagogy reflected in what such theorists as
Lawrence Grossberg call “the act of doing,” 3 the importance of
understanding theory as the grounded basis for “intervening into
contexts and power…in order to enable people to act more strategically
in ways that may change their context for the better.”4 Moreover,
theorists working in both fields have argued for the primacy of the
political in their diverse attempts to produce critical public spaces,
regardless of how fleeting they may be, in which “popular cultural
resistance is explored as a form of political resistance.”5 Yet although
both groups share certain pedagogical and ideological practices, they
rarely speak to each other, in part because of the disciplinary barriers
and institutional borders that atomize, insulate, and prevent diverse
cultural workers from collaborating across such boundaries.

T H E S E A RC H F O R A P RO J E C T

This subtitle suggests the need to develop elements of a project that

might enable cultural-studies theorists and educators to form alliances
around pedagogical practices that are not only interdisciplinary,
transgressive, and oppositional, but also connected to a broader notion of
cultural politics designed to further racial, economic, and political
democracy.6 Within such a project, theory is connected to social change,
textual analysis to practical politics, and academic inquiry to public
spheres that bear, as Martha Nussbaum sees it, the “texture of social
oppression and the harm that it does.”7
 PERFORMNG CULTURAL STUDIES 129

The meaning and primacy of the notion of the project I mention is

drawn from a long tradition of political work that extends from
Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall to, more recently, Chantal Mouffe,
Nancy Fraser, Lawrence Grossberg, Angela McRobbie, and Stanley
Aronowitz and refers to strategies of understanding, engagement, and
transformation that address the most demanding social problems of our
time. Such projects are Utopian in that they reject the currently
fashionable notion that it is better to adapt to the dominant discourse
and conditions of the new global marketplace. But there is more at stake
than simply a form of utopianism that is compensatory, that offers up
only the great refusal. On the contrary, the utopianism of ongoing
democratic projects consists of both criticizing the existing order of
things and using the terrain of culture and education to actually
intervene in the world, to struggle to change the current configurations
of power in society. Utopianism in this sense is both anticipatory and
provisional. It refuses to be messianic, but because it cannot predict any
final outcome, it does not embrace a politics of despair or cynicism.
Rather, as a form of educated hope, it provides the grounds for thinking
critically and acting responsibly—pushing against the grain so as to
undermine and transform structures of oppression. Similarly, there is
nothing abstract about a critically informed Utopian project, since it
recognizes that progressive educational and political work has to begin at
those intersections where people actually live their lives. Such a project
uses theory to understand such contexts as lived relations of power while
pedagogically fashioning new and imagined possibilities through art and
other cultural practices in order to bear witness to the ethical and
political dilemmas that animate both the specificity of such contexts and
their connection to the larger social landscape. Implicit in this notion of
the project is both the public nature of art as a form of cultural politics
and the importance of culture as a struggle over meaning, identity, and
relations of power—a struggle that is essential to addressing those
practices and forms of domination that have resulted in a massive
increase in social and economic inequality, a marked resurgence in
violence against minorities of color and sexual orientation, a renewed
attack on the global environment, and a full-fledged assault on those
130 IMPURE AC T S

nonmarket, noncommodified, democratic spaces that provide what

Robert McChesney believes are the public forums “necessary for
meaningful participation in decision making.”8
Within the parameters of such a project, I want to address how cultural
studies and critical pedagogy advocates might find common ground in a
radical project and practice informed by theoretically rigorous discourses
that affirm the critical but refuse the cynical, that confirm hope as central
to a critical pedagogical and political practice but eschew a romantic
utopianism. Fundamental to such a project is a notion of the performative
that expands the political possibilities of the pedagogical by highlighting
how education as a critical practice might be used to engage the tension
between existing social practices produced in a wide range of shifting and
overlapping sites of learning and the moral imperatives of a radical
democratic imaginary.
Pedagogy in this context becomes public and performative, in part
because it opens a space for disputing conventional academic borders and
raising questions “beyond the institutional boundaries of the disciplinary
organization of question and answers.”9 Defined through its performative
functions, public pedagogy is marked by its attentiveness to the
interconnections and struggles that take place over knowledge, language,
spatial relations, and history Public pedagogy represents a moral and
political practice rather than merely a technical procedure. At stake here is
not only the call to link public pedagogy to practices that are
interdisciplinary, transgressive, and oppositional, but also to connect such
practices to broader projects designed to further racial, economic, and
political democracy, to strike a new balance and expand what Stuart Hall
and David Held have called the “individual and social dimensions of
citizenship rights.”10
The performative nature of the pedagogical recognizes the partial
breakdown, renegotiation, and repositioning of boundaries as fundamental
to understanding how pluralization is linked to the shifting nature of
knowledge, identities, and the process of globalization. The performative
and pedagogical in this context acknowledge the rise of new spaces and a
social vision regarding what it means to live in a world that has been
radically altered by global capitalism, transnational corporations, and new
 PERFORMNG CULTURAL STUDIES 131

electronic technologies. But linking the performative and pedagogical also

suggests recognizing that cultural workers need to address how new modes
of symbolic and social practice change the way we think about power and
social agency, and what such changes mean for expanding and deepening
the processes of democratic education, social relations, and public life.

B E YO N D T H E P O L I T I C S O F T E X T UA L I T Y

A performative practice in its more orthodox register focuses largely on

events as cultural texts and how they are, to use Simon Frith’s terms,
“presented, ‘licensed,’ or made ‘excessive’ ”11 A growing tendency is
appearing within cultural studies, as I mentioned previously, especially as
it becomes more popular in North America, of privileging text over
context, language over material relations of power, and discursive
relations outside of the frameworks “within which their broader political
significance can be established.” 12 The exclusive emphasis on texts,
however, runs the risk of reproducing processes of reification and
isolation, as when the performative is framed outside of the context of
history, power, and politics. In this instance, texts become trapped within
a formalism that often succumbs to viewing such issues as one’s
commitment to the “other,” the ethical duty to decide between what is
better and what is worse, and, by extension, human rights as either
meaningless, irrelevant, or leftovers from a bygone age.13 Lewis Gordon
argues that in its most reductive moment performativity as a pedagogical
practice often falls prey to a one-sided focus on politics as rhetoric in
which the political dimension of such practice “is rendered invisible by
virtue of being regarded as purely performative…. What one performs is
rendered immaterial. Whatever ‘is’ is simply a performance.” 14
Progressive cultural-studies theorists recognize that the complex terms of
cultural engagement are produced performatively, but unlike Gordon,
many believe that the issue is still open as to how the performative can
have some purchase in social action or help produce new forms of
identity and politics while simultaneously developing a political and
ethical vocabulary for creating the conditions of possibility for a politics
and pedagogy of economic, social, and racial justice.
132 IMPURE AC T S

I would like to address the possibilities of a politically progressive

notion of the performative and its relevance for highlighting the mutually
determining role of theory and practice, on one hand, and the related
project of making the political more pedagogical on the other (thus
amplifying the chapter on Homi Bhabha in this book). This is especially
important as pedagogy becomes more central to shaping the political
project(s) that inform the work of educators, artists, and cultural workers
in a variety of sites, especially within a present marked by the rise of right-
wing politics, a resurgent racism, a full-fledged attack on the public
funding for the arts, and punitive attacks on the poor, urban youth, and
people of color. The invocation of a wider political context suggests that
the intersection of cultural studies and critical pedagogy be analyzed more
critically in light of recent interventions by a growing number of
progressives and conservatives who attempt to either erase the relationship
between power and politics as part of a return to a hermetic view of
teaching and the text, or have narrowly defined politics within a
dichotomy that pits the alleged “concrete” material issues of class and
labor against a fragmenting and marginalizing identity politics on one
hand, and a range of diverse, ineffective, side-show battles over culture on
the other. Unfortunately, this model not only fails to recognize how issues
of race, gender, age, sexual orientation, and class are intertwined, it also
refuses to acknowledge the pedagogical function of culture as the site
where identities are constructed, desires mobilized, and moral values
shaped. Ellen Willis rightly argues that if people “are not ready to defend
their right to freedom and equality in their personal relations, they will not
fight consistently for their economic interests, either.”15 As I argue in more
detail in other chapters in this book, this totalizing model of class functions
largely to cancel out how culture as a terrain of struggle shapes our sense
of political agency and mediates the relations between material-based
protests and structures of power and the contexts of daily struggles.

E D U C AT I O N A S A P E R F O R M AT I V E P R AC T I C E

Progressives willing to engage the pedagogical as a performative practice

that both connects and affirms the most important theoretical and
 PERFORMNG CULTURAL STUDIES 133

strategic aspects of work in cultural studies and critical pedagogy might

begin with Raymond Williams’s insight that the “deepest impulse
[informing cultural politics] is the desire to make learning part of the
process of social change itself.”16 For Williams, a cultural pedagogy
signals a form of permanent education that acknowledges “the
educational force of our whole social and cultural experience… [as an
apparatus of institutions and relationships that] actively and profoundly
teaches”17 This suggests that educators and others need to rethink the
ways in which culture is related to power, and how and where it
functions both symbolically and institutionally as an educational,
political, and economic force. Culture is the ground of both contestation
and accommodation, and as the site where young people and others
imagine their relationship to the world; it produces the narratives,
metaphors, and images for constructing and exercising a powerful
pedagogical force over how people think of themselves and their
relationship to others. While it has become a matter of common sense
for progressive critics to challenge those liberal and conservative
traditions that attempt to purify culture and cultural questions by
rendering them essentially apolitical or untainted by politics, many critics
have failed to take seriously Antonio Gramsci’s insight that “[e]very
relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily an educational relationship”—
with its implication that education as a cultural pedagogical practice
takes place across multiple sites as it signals how, within diverse contexts,
education makes us both subjects of and subject to relations of power.18
As a performative practice, the pedagogical opens up a narrative space
that affirms the contextual and the specific while simultaneously
recognizing the ways in which such spaces are shot through with issues
of power. Referencing the ethical and political is central to a
performative/pedagogical practice that refuses closure, insists on
combining theoretical rigor and social relevance, and embraces
commitment as a point of temporary attachment that allows educators
and cultural critics to take a position without becoming dogmatic and
rigid.19 The pedagogical as performative also draws upon recent cultural-
studies work in which related debates on pedagogy can be understood
and addressed within the broader context of social responsibility, civic
134 IMPURE AC T S

courage, and the reconstruction of democratic public life. Gary Nelson’s

insight that cultural studies exhibits a deep concern for “how objects,
discourses, and practices construct possibilities for and constraints on
citizenship” provides one important starting point for designating and
supporting a project that brings together various educators, academics,
and cultural workers within and outside of the academy.20
Central to this concern for citizenship as an act of critique and
resistance is a notion of border pedagogy that registers a call for
developing theoretical tools and social practices that would enable
educators and cultural workers to move within and across disciplinary,
political, and cultural borders in order to raise new questions, produce
diverse contexts in which to organize the energies of a moral vision, and
draw upon the intellectual resources needed to understand and
transform those institutions and forces that keep “making the lives we
live, and the societies we live in, profoundly and deeply antihumane.”21
Underlying this form of cultural politics is a view of radical pedagogy
that locates itself on the dividing lines where the relations between
domination and oppression, power and powerlessness continue to be
produced and reproduced. For many cultural workers and educators this
means listening to and working with the poor and other subordinate
groups so that they might speak and act in order to alter oppressive
relations of power. But professionalist relegitimation in a troubled time
seems to be the order of the day as an increasing number of academics
both refuse to recognize the university as a critical public sphere and
offer little or no resistance to the ongoing vocationalization of the
university, the continuing evisceration of the intellectual labor force, and
the current assaults on the poor, the elderly, children, people of color,
and working people in this country22
In opposition to such pessimism, educators and other cultural workers
can join with a number of cultural-studies theorists in raising questions
about how culture is related to power—why and how it operates in both
institutional and textual terms—within and through a politics of
representation. Yet a performative pedagogy does more than textualize
everyday life and reveal dominant machineries of power; it is also, as
Lawrence Grossberg points out, “about remaking the context where
 PERFORMNG CULTURAL STUDIES 135

context is always understood as a structure of power.”23 Pedagogical work

in this sense informs and ex-tends cultural studies’s long-standing concern
with mobilizing knowledge and desires that may lead to significant
changes in minimizing the degree of oppression in people’s lives. My call
to make the pedagogical a defining feature of cultural studies is meant to
accentuate the performative as an act of doing—a work in progress
informed by a cultural politics that translates knowledge back into
practice, places theory in the political space of the performative, and
invigorates the pedagogical as a practice through which collective
struggles can be waged to revive and maintain the fabric of democratic
institutions. Such a call to reform also suggests redefining the role of
academics as oppositional public intellectuals in order to reaffirm the
necessity for them to focus on the pedagogical and political dimensions of
culture and interrogate cultural texts as public discourses. This suggests
expanding the tools of ideology critique to include a range of sites in
which the production of knowledge and identities takes place (including
but not limited to television, Hollywood films, video games, newspapers,
fanzines, popular magazines, and Internet sites). Yet once again, as I have
argued throughout this book, it is important to stress that progressive
educators and cultural workers must go beyond the primacy of
signification over power and focus on how these cultural texts work within
the material and institutional contexts that structure everyday life.

P U B L I C I N T E L L E C T UA L S A N D T H E P O L I T I C S
O F T H E P E R F O R M AT I V E

Envisioning the pedagogical as a performative practice also points to the

necessity of rethinking the role that educators and cultural-studies scholars
might take up as public intellectuals. Rather than reducing the notion of
public intellectual to an academic fashion plate ready for instant
consumption by the New York Times and Lingua Franca, a number of critical
theorists have reconstituted themselves within the ambivalences and
contradictions of their own distinct personal histories while
simultaneously recognizing and presenting themselves through their role
136 IMPURE AC T S

as social critics. By connecting the biographical, pedagogical, and

performative, artists such as Suzanne Lacy, Coco Fusco, Luis Alfaro,
Mierle Ukeles, Peggy Diggs, and Guillermo Gomez-Peña rearticulate the
relationship between the personal and the political without collapsing one
into the other.24 As public intellectuals, these cultural workers not only
refuse to support the academic professionalization of social criticism, they
also take seriously their role of critics as teachers and the potentially
oppositional space of all pedagogical sites, including but not restricted to,
the academy. Such artists do not respond to the degradation of civic life by
apologizing for the incivility of social criticism or capitalize on the crisis of
social life by promoting themselves on talk radio and television news
circuits. On the contrary, many performance artists take seriously Pierre
Bourdieu’s admonition, “There is no genuine democracy without genuine
opposing critical powers,”25 and do everything they can to make their
voices heard in those public spaces still available for meaningful dissent,
social criticism, and political theater. In doing so, many performance
artists provide new tools for understanding how culture functions as a
pedagogical and political force at the community level, working to bridge
relations between different audiences, theories, and forms of culture.
Performance artists like Suzanne Lacy have worked relentlessly during
the last three decades to dissolve the differences between artists and
participants, aesthetic artifice and social process, demonstrating that art
should be a force for information, dialogue, and social change. Her
ongoing public work on rape, women’s rights, immigration, racism, aging,
domestic violence, and urban youth has been used to mobilize various
audiences and agencies about the role public services can play in servicing
the needs of diverse communities, especially those who are marginalized
and oppressed.26 Her efforts on Three Weeks in May in 1977 focused on rape
and violence against women and brought together a number of
organizations, media outlets, and groups to both raise consciousness and
implement policies to protect women from male-inflicted violence. In
1993, she installed a public work entitled Underground in which she placed
a rail-road track across the lawn of Pittsburgh’s Point State Park. Three
wrecked cars were placed on the tracks, and were painted with statistics
about domestic violence, as well as words from its victims. A phone booth
 PERFORMNG CULTURAL STUDIES 137

and open telephone line were made available for women to talk to
volunteers from various legal and medical services. The installation
served as a public space that assisted victims of family violence and
educated a larger public about its presence and consequences. It also
served to link such victims and the public with a broad network of social
agencies. Lacy’s most recent work, especially Code 33, continues to
combine art and social activism through a form of public pedagogy that
provides a civic space and form of public outreach to subordinated
groups. In this case, Lacy brings together urban youth and the police in
Oakland, California, to engage in a public dialogue about police brutality,
urban youth violence, and what can be done to address such issues.
Educators, academics, and other cultural workers have much to learn
from artists like Lacy. George Lipsitz reinforces this point in arguing that
academics have much to learn from “artists who are facing up to the
things that are killing them and their communities. Important social
theory is being generated by cultural creators. Engaged in the hard work
of fashioning cultural and political coalitions based on cultural affinities
and shared suffering, they have been forced to think clearly about cultural
production in contemporary society.”27
Of course, few of these artists and cultural workers define themselves
self-consciously as oppositional public intellectuals. Yet what is so
remarkable about their work is the way in which they render the political
visible through pedagogical practices that attempt to make a difference in
the world rather than simply reflect it. The pedagogical as performative
offers cultural workers within and outside education the opportunity to
grapple with new questions and, as Peggy Phelan puts it, ways of “mis/
understanding” how demanding social issues are “framed/acknowledged/
and erased” within dominant and resistant ideologies.28 The pedagogical as
performative in this work does not merely provide a set of representations/
texts that imparts knowledge to others; it also becomes a form of cultural
production in which one’s own identity is constantly being rewritten, but
always with an attentiveness to how culture functions as both a site of
production and a site of contestation over power. In this instance, cultural
politics and the authority to which it makes a claim are always rendered
suspect and provisional—not to elude the burden of judgment, meaning, or
138 IMPURE AC T S

commitment, but to enable teachers and students alike to address what

Stuart Hall calls “the central, urgent, and disturbing questions of a society
and a culture in the most rigorous intellectual way…available.”29
Refusing to reduce politics to the discursive or representational,
performative interpretation suggests reclaiming the political as a pedagogical
intervention that links cultural texts to the institutional contexts in which
they are read, and the material grounding of power to the historical
conditions that give meaning to the places people actually inhabit in their
attempts to live out the futures they desire. Within this notion of
pedagogical practice, the performative becomes a site of memory work, a
location and critical enactment of the stories we tell in assuming our roles as
oppositional public intellectuals willing to make visible and challenge the
grotesque inequalities and intolerable oppression of the present moment.
A cultural politics that makes the performative pedagogical engages ideas
of how power operates within and across particular cultural spheres so as to
make some representations, images, and symbols under certain political
conditions more valuable as representations of reality than others. At issue
here is the attempt to develop a theory of articulation in which the meanings
produced within texts are understood in terms of how they resonate with
other public discourses within other cultural sites and locations. There is an
important distinction here between the attempt to simply read a text and
make claims for it, and to read it in light of a whole assemblage of social
relations in order to understand how some meanings resonate as ideologies
by being able to define the terms of reality with a greater power than other
meanings. In this instance, texts and events cannot be analyzed in isolation
from their place within the material contexts of everyday life. Texts in this
instance become objects of pedagogical inquiry as well as pedagogical
events through which educators and others might analyze the mechanisms
that inform how a politics of representation operates within dominant
regimes of meaning so as to produce and legitimate knowledge about
gender, youth, race, sexuality, work, public intellectuals, pedagogy, and
other issues. Making the political more pedagogical means raising questions
about how domination and resistance actually operate, are lived out and
mobilized, and how they both deploy power and are themselves the
expression of power.
 PERFORMNG CULTURAL STUDIES 139

C A N E D U C AT I O N B E P O L I T I C A L ?

Critical pedagogy as a theory and practice should not legitimate a

romanticized notion of the cultural worker who can only function on the
margins of society, nor should it legitimate notions of teaching wedded to an
infatuation with method, formalism, and technique. When viewed as both a
moral and political practice, pedagogy becomes both a site of struggle and
the outcome of struggles informed by social relations that always presuppose
some vision of the future, some notion of what it means to be a citizen
participating in public life. Pedagogy and other cultural practices whose aim
is to inform and empower are often dismissed as being either doctrinaire or
impositional.30 Unfortunately, the conservative and liberal dismissal of
appropriating the pedagogical as political often fails to make a distinction
between what can be called a political education and that which is a politicizing
education. Political education means recognizing that education is political
because it is directive, and addresses itself to the unfinished nature of what it
means to be human, to intervene in the world because human agency is
conditioned and not determined. It also suggests recognizing that schools
and other cultural sites cannot abstract themselves from the sociocultural
and economic conditions of their students, families, and communities.31
Political education also means teaching students to take risks, ask questions,
challenge those with power, honor critical traditions, and be reflexive about
how authority is used in the classroom and other pedagogical sites. A
political education provides the opportunity for students not merely to
express themselves critically, but to alter the structure of participation and
the horizon of debate through which their identities, values, and desires are
shaped. A political education constructs pedagogical conditions in order to
enable students to understand how power works on them, through them, and
for them in the service of constructing and expanding their roles as critical
citizens. Central to such a discourse is the recognition that citizenship is not
an outcome of technical efficiency but is instead a result of pedagogical
struggles that link knowing, imagination, and resistance, that, as bell hooks
has put it, disrupt “conventional ways of thinking about the imagination and
imaginative work, offering fictions that demand careful scrutiny, that resist
passive readership.”32
140 IMPURE AC T S

Moreover, a politicizing education refuses to address its own political

agenda, and often silences through an appeal to a specious methodology,
objectivity, or notion of balance, or through an appeal to professionalism.
Politicizing education polices the boundaries of the disciplines, often
refuses to name or problematize its own cultural authority, and generally
ignores the broader political, economic, and social forces that legitimate
pedagogical practices consistent with existing forms of institutional
power. Politicizing education appears indifferent to opening up the
questions about the intersection of knowledge, power, ideology, and
struggle that are fundamental to the teaching/learning process. In
politicizing education, the language of objectivity, methodology, or the
rigors of institutional process often ignores the systems of inclusion and
exclusion at work in pedagogical spaces; similarly, the appeal to method
and rigor too often undercuts any critical attempts to interrogate the
normative basis of teaching and the political responsibility of educators,
including issues regarding how they might help students identify, engage,
and transform relations of power that generate the material conditions of
racism, sexism, poverty, and other oppressive conditions.33 Ignored in
politicizing education is the crucial issue of how pedagogy puts into place
and legitimates certain forms of identification and subject positions:
student as consumer, worker, citizen, and so on. Politicizing education
also rarely address how pedagogy might function to close down
opportunities for students to critically engage the conditions under which
knowledge is produced, circulated, and legitimated, and how particular
pedagogical practices work to shape particular narratives about the past,
present, and future—thus forfeiting any claim to neutrality. Lacking a
political project, the role of the public school and university intellectuals
is reduced to that of a technician engaged in formalistic rituals or
professional boosterism, largely unconcerned with the disturbing and
urgent problems that confront the wider society.

C O N C LU S I O N

I would like to argue that pedagogy as a critical and performative practice

be considered a defining principle among all cultural workers—journalists,
 PERFORMNG CULTURAL STUDIES 141

performance artists, lawyers, academics, representatives of the media,

social workers, teachers, and others—who work in popular culture,
composition, literary studies, architecture, and related fields. In part, this
suggests the necessity for academics and other cultural workers to develop
dynamic, vibrant, politically engaged, and socially relevant projects in
which the traditional binarisms of margin/center, unity/difference, local/
national, and public/private can be reconstituted through more complex
representations of identification, belonging, and community. Paul Gilroy
has suggested that progressive cultural workers need a discourse of
ruptures, shifts, flows, and unsettlement, one that functions not only as a
politics of transgression but also as part of a concerted effort to construct
a broader vision of political commitment and democratic struggle.34 This
implies a fundamental redefinition of the meaning of educators and
cultural-studies workers as oppositional public intellectuals. And as
oppositional public intellectuals, we might consider defining ourselves not
as marginal, avant-garde figures, professionals, or academics acting alone,
but as critical citizens whose collective knowledge and actions presuppose
specific visions of public life, community, and moral accountability.
Crucial to this project is a conception of the political that is open yet
committed, respects specificity and place without erasing global
considerations, and provides new spaces for collaborative work engaged
in productive social change. Such a project can begin to enable educators
and other cultural-studies scholars to rethink how pedagogy as a
performative practice can be expressed by, as Suzanne Lacy deems it, an
“integrative critical language through which values, ethics, and social
responsibility” are fundamental to creating shared critical public spaces
that engage, translate, and transform the most vexing social problems we
now face nationally and internationally.35 Given the current corporate and
right-wing assaults on public and higher education, coupled with the
emergence of a moral and political climate that has shifted towards a new
social Darwinism, it is crucial for educators, artists, and other cultural
workers to begin to find ways to join together to both defend and
reconstruct those cultural sites and public spheres that are essential to
reformulate the relationship between cultural studies and critical
pedagogy—not as a new academic fad but as a broader effort to revitalize
democratic public life.36
 notes

I N T RO D U C T I O N

1. For three excellent sources on this issue, see Edward Herman and Robert W. McChesney,
The Global Media (Washington, D.C.: Cassell, 1997); Charles Berber, Corporation Nation (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998); Noam Chomsky, Profit Over People (New York: Seven Stories
Press, 1999).
2. Herbert Marcuse, “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology,” in Technology, War,
and Fascism: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, ed. Doug Kellner (New York: Routledge, 1998), p.
41.
3. See, in this regard, the important comments of Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Cornel
West, The Future of American Progressivism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998); see also Stanley Aronowitz’s
more sustained and theoretically informed work: Stanley Aronowitz, The Death and Rebirth of
American Radicalism (New York: Routledge, 1996).
4. Russell Jacoby, The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy (New York: Basic
Books, 1999), p. xi.
5. On this issue, see Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday
Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Unger and West, The Future of American
Progressivism.
6. Robert W.McChesney, introduction to Noam Chomsky, Profit Over People, p. 11.
7. See, for instance, the stories following the suppression of dissent on Disneyowned ABC,
or the increasing corporatization of the university: Robert W.McChesney, Corporate Media and
the Threat to Democracy (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1997); Henry A.Giroux, The Mouse That
Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999); Russell
Mokhiber and Robert Weissman, Corporate Predators: The Hunt for Mega-Profits and the Attack on
Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1999); Chomsky, Profit Over People.
8. This position becomes almost caricature when it is applied to cultural studies by some

142
 NOTES 143

conservatives. One typical example can be found in Edward Rothstein, “Trolling ‘Low’ Culture
for High-Flying Ideas: A Sport of Intellectuals,” New York Times, Sunday, March 28, 1999, p.
A33. The sixties as the source of most contemporary problems has become a fundamental
tenet of right-wing ideology, and includes the work of such academics as Harold Bloom and
Getrude Himmelfarb, and the strident commentaries of former house majority leader Newt
Gingrich.
9. David Williams, “Mr. Delay Had It Right; Absolutism and Relativism Were at the Heart
of the Clinton Matter,” Washington Post, March 7, 1999, p. B2.
10. Anthony Lewis, “Self-Inflicted Wound,” New York Times, Tuesday, February 9, 1999, p. A31.
11. This position can be found in the work of Neil Postman. See, for example, his Technopoly:
The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Knopf, 1992).
12. Two typical examples include Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is
Wracked by Culture Wars (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1995); and Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont,
Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’Abuse of Science (New York: Picador, 1998).
13. For a brilliant critique of this issue, see Stanley Aronowitz, The Crisis of Historical Materialism
(Westport, Conn.: Bergin and Garvey, 1981). As Judith Butler insightfully points out, the left’s
call for unity around class “prioritizes a notion of the common” that is not only purified of race
and gender considerations, but also “forgets” that those social movements that organized around
various forms of identity politics emerged, in part, in opposition to the principles of exclusion
in which such calls for class unity were constructed. See Judith Butler, “Merely Cultural,” Social
Text 15:3–4 (Fall/Winter 1997), p. 268.
14. On this issue, see Lawrence Grossberg, “Identity and Cultural Studies: Is That All
There Is?” in Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay, eds., Questions of Cultural Identity (Thousand Oaks,
Calif.: Sage, 1996), pp. 87–107.
15. Elizabeth Long, “Introduction: Engaging Sociology and Cultural Studies: Disci plinarity
and Social Change,” in Elizabeth Long, ed., From Sociology to Cultural Studies (Maiden, Mass.:
Basil Blackwell, 1997), p. 17.
16. Sygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1998).
17. Stuart Hall, “The Centrality of Culture: Notes on the Cultural Revolutions of Our
Time,” in Kenneth Thompson, ed., Media and Cultural Regulation (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage,
1997), p. 209.
18. Grossberg, “Identity and Cultural Studies: Is That All There Is?” pp. 99–100.
19. Henry A.Giroux, Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education (New York:
Routledge, 1992).
20. James Young, “The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the
Afterimages of History,” Critical Inquiry 24 (Spring 1998), p. 673.
21. On the issues of pedagogy, hope, and historical contingency, see Paulo Freire, Pedagogy
of Freedom (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998); Richard Johnson, “Teaching Without
Guarantees: Cultural Studies, Pedagogy, and Identity,” in Joyce Canaan and Debbie Epstein,
eds., A Question of Discipline (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997), pp. 42–77; Alan O’ Shea, “A
Special Relationship? Cultural Studies, Academia, and Pedagogy,” Cultural Studies 12:4 (1998),
pp. 512–27.
22. Michel Foucault, “Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations: An Interview with Michel
Foucault” in Paul Rabinow, ed., Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault
19.54–1984 (New York: The New Press, 1994), pp. 111–19.
14 4 N OT E S

23. Lost from this discourse is any attempt to engage, guide, direct, and stimulate new
forms of practice and expression. Rather than being a dynamic, critical force, such discourse
becomes a kind of pretense for interviewing oneself, a form of self-aggrandizement. On this
issue, see Maurice Berger, “Introduction: The Crisis of Criticism,” in Maurice Berger, ed., The
Crisis of Criticism (New York: The New Press, 1998), pp. 1–14.
24. In this regard, see the brilliant and chilling analysis in Jeffrey Wallen, Closed Encounters in
Literary Politics and Public Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
25. Chantal Mouffe, cited in Lynn Worsham and Gary A.Olson, “Rethinking Political Community:
Chantal Mouffe’s Liberal Socialism,” Journal of Composition Theory 19:2 (1999), pp. 180–81
26. For an excellent summary of this movement, see Richard Apelbaum and Peter Dreier,
“The Campus Anti-Sweatshop Movement,” The American Prospect 46 (September/ October 1999),
pp. 71–78; For a report on the strike at the University of CaliforniaBerkeley and its resolution,
see June Jordan, “Good News of Our Own,” The Progressive, August 1999, pp. 18–19.
27. Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance (New York: New Press, 1999), pp. 8–9.

CHAPTER 1

1. Andrew Ross, Real Love: In Pursuit of Cultural Justice (New York: New York University
Press, 1998), p. 3.
2. Harold Bloom, “They Have the Numbers; We Have the Heights,” Boston Review 23:2
(April/May 1998), p. 27.
3. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon (New York: Riverhead Books, 1994), p. 29. Bloom’s
position is rooted in a nostalgia for the good old days when universities taught the select few
who qualified as talented writers and readers willing to carry on an aesthetic tradition purged
of the contamination of politics, ideology, and power. Unfortunately for Bloom, the universities
are now filled with the stars of the “School of Resentment,” who debase themselves by teaching
social selflessness.
4. Bloom, “They Have the Numbers; We Have the Heights,” p. 28.
5. Ibid.
6. Cheney, “Scholars and Society,” American Council of Learned Societies Newsletter 1 (Summer
1988), p. 6.
7. Ellen Messer-Davidow, “Whither Cultural Studies?” in Elizabeth Long, ed., From Sociology
to Cultural Studies (Maiden, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1997), p. 491.
8. Michael Bérubé, The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future (New York: New
York University Press, 1998), p. 181.
9. John Silber, quoted in Jamin Raskin, “The Great PC Cover-Up,” California Lawyer, February
1994, p. 69.
10. Richard Rorty, “The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature,” Rariton 16:1
(1996), p. 13.
11. Lindsay Waters, “Dreaming with Tears in My Eyes,” Transition 7:2 (1998), p. 86.
12. Richard Rorty, “The Dark Side of the American Left,” The Chronicle of Higher Education,
April 3, 1998, p. B5.
13. Waters, “Dreaming with Tears in My Eyes,” p. 85.
14. Homi Bhabha, “The White Stuff,” Artforum, May 1998, p. 22.
 NOTES 145

15. Rorty, “The Dark Side of the American Left,” p. B6. This argument is repeated in
greater detail in Rorty’s Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in 20th-century America (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).
16. Richard Rorty, “First Projects, Then Principles,” The Nation, December 22, 1997, p. 19.
17. For a brilliant rejoinder to this type of historical amnesia, see Robin D.G.Kelley, Yo’
Mamas Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997).
18. Kuan-Hsing Chen, “The Formation of a Diasporic Intellectual: An Interview with Stuart
Hall,” in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds., Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural
Studies (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 484–503.
19. See Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Our Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 1995); Michael Tomasky, Left for Dead: The Life, Death and
Possible Resurrection of Progressive Politics in America (New York: The Free Press, 1996); Jim Sleeper,
The Closest of Strangers (New York: W W Norton, 1990). For an insightful critique of Tomasky,
and a brilliant defense of cultural politics, see Ellen Willis, Don’t Think, Smile! Notes on a Decade of
Denial (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999). See also various critiques of cultural studies in Majorie
Ferguson and Peter Golding, eds., Cultural Studies in Question (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage,
1997), which includes a chapter by Gitlin. One of the most strident attacks on cultural politics
and cultural studies can be found in Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern
Intellectuals ‘Abuse of Science (New York: Picador, 1998). For a sustained critique of Sokal’s and
Bricmont s position, see Ted Striphas, “Cultural Studies, ‘So-Called’,” Review of Education/Pedagogy/
Cultural Studies, forthcoming.
20. Gitlin’s most sustained development of this argument can be found in his The Twilight of
Our Common Dreams.
21. Judith Butler, “Merely Cultural,” Social Text 15:52–53 (Fall/Winter 1997), p. 266.
22. Ibid., p. 268.
23. I take these issues up in my Fugitive Cultures: Race, Violence and Youth (New York: Routledge,
1996) and Channel Surfing: Racism, the Media, and the Destruction of Today’s Youth (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1998).
24. For an insightful analysis of this position, see Lawrence Grossberg, “Cultural Studies:
What’s in a Name?” in Bringing It All Back Home: Essays on Cultural Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 1997), pp. 245–71.
25. Kelley, Yo’Mamas Disfunktional!, pp. 113–114.
26. Ibid.
27. Iris Marion Young, “The Complexities of Coalition,” Dissent, Winter 1997, p. 67.
28. Butler, “Merely Cultural,” p. 268.
29. Kelley, Yo’Mamas Disfunktional!.
30. Gitlin, “The Anti-Political Populism of Cultural Studies,” Dissent, Spring 1997, p. 81.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., p. 82.
33. Stuart Hall, “The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities,”
October 53 (Summer 1990), p. 18.
34. Gitlin, “The Anti-Political Populism of Cultural Studies,” p. 82.
35. Ellen Willis, “We Need a Radical Left,” The Nation, June 29, 1998, p. 19.
36. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quinten
Hoare and Geoffrey Smith (New York: International Press, 1971), p. 350.
37. Raymond Williams, Communications (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967), p. 15.
146 N OT E S

38. T.W.Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by John
Cumming. (New York: Seabury Press, 1972).
39. Janet Batsleer, et al., “Culture and Politics,” in Janet Batsleer, et al., eds., Rewriting English:
The Cultural Politics of Gender and Class (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 7.
40. Batsleer, et al., “Culture and Politics,” p. 7.
41. Andrew Ross, Real Love: In Pursuit of Cultural Justice (New York: New York University
Press, 1998), p. 3.
42. Ibid.
43. Jon Katz, Virtuous Reality (New York: Random House, 1997), p. 11.
44. See the excellent story on video literacy and schooling in Ellen Pall, “Video Verite,” New
York Times, January 3, 1999, section 4A, pp. 34–36, 38.
45. Anson Rabinach, “Unclaimed Heritage: Ernst Bloch’s Heritage of Our Times and the
Theory of Fascism,” New German Critique, Spring 1977, p. 8. For a classic example of a critique of
the utopian impulse that suggests hoping against hope, see Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, “Toward a
Nonrepressive Critical Pedagogy,” Educational Theory 48:4 (Fall 1998), pp. 463–86. Gur-Ze’ev’s
is so utterly unreflective and unself-critical that it never occurs to him to question seriously
either the shortcomings of his own basic arguments or his complicity with a form of politics in
which any possibility that the future can overtake the present is viewed as futile. In this diatribe
against hope, now so common among educators, any notion that pedagogy, history, cultural
politics, or social struggle contain the possibilities of freedom are often misrepresented and
summarily derided.
46. This theme is taken up in Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and
Littlefleld, 1998).
47. Maurice Berger, “Introduction: The Crisis of Criticism” in Maurice Berger, ed., The
Crisis of Criticism (New York: The New Press, 1998), p. 11.
48. I have appropriated this idea from James Young, “The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art
Spiegelman’s Maus and the Afterimages of History,” Critical Inquiry 24 (Spring 1998), pp. 668–69.
49. I have taken these ideas from Homi Bhabha, in Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham,
“Staging the Politics of Difference: Homi Bhabha’s Critical Literacy,” Journal of Composition
Theory 18:3 (1998), pp. 361–91.
50. Lawrence Grossberg, “Toward a Genealogy of the State of Cultural Studies,” in Cary
Nelson and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, eds., Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies (New
York: Routledge, 1996), p. 142.

CHAPTER 2

1. The advertisement appears in World Traveler, March 1998, p. 76.

2. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1989). This
conflation of democracy and capitalism is also celebrated in Robert J.Samuelson, The Good Life
and Its Discontents: The American Dream in the Age of Entitlement, 1945–1995 (New York: Vintage,
1997).
3. Seyla Benhabib, “The Democratic Moment and the Problem of Difference,” in Seyla
Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 9.
4. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History,” The National Interest, Summer 1989, p. 2.
 NOTES 147

5. Stuart Ewen has traced this trend to the emergence in the nineteenth century of the
culture of abundance that allowed “for the flowering of a provocative, if somewhat passive,
conception of democracy…consumer democracy” See Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images (New
York: Basic Books, 1988), p. 12.
6. The classic dominant texts on corporate culture are Terrance Deal and Alan Kennedy,
Corporate Culture: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life (Reading, Mass.: AddisonWesley, 1982)
and Thomas Peterson and Robert Waterman, In Search of Excellence (New York: Harper and
Row, 1982). I also want to point out that corporate culture is a dynamic, ever changing force.
But in spite of its innovations and changes, it rarely if ever challenges the centrality of the profit
motive, or fails to prioritize commercial considerations over a set of values that would call the
class based system of capitalism into question. For a brilliant discussion of the changing nature
of corporate culture in light of the cultural revolution of the 1960s, see Thomas Frank, The
Conquest of Cool (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
7. Alan Bryman, Disney and His Worlds (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 154.
8. For example, see Steve James, “Rich Man Gates Just Keeps Getting Richer,” Boston Globe,
June 21, 1999, p. A14.
9. Charles Derber, Corporation Nation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), p. 12.
10. The growing extent of such inequality and the amassing of huge fortunes by a limited
number of individuals can be seen in a recent report claiming that just three people own more
personal wealth than six hundred million people combined in the world; CNN Headline News,
July 17, 1999.
11. There are many books that address this issue, but some of the most helpful in providing
hard statistical evidence for the growing corporate monopolization of American society can be
found in Charles Berber’s Corporation Nation; Dan Hazen and Julie Winokur, eds., We the Media
(New York: The New Press, 1997); Robert W.McChesney, Corporate Media and the Threat to
Democracy (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1997); Erik Barnouw, et al., Conglomerates and the
Media (New York: The New Press, 1997); William Wolman and Anne Colamosca, The Judas
Economy: The Triumph of Capital and the Betrayal of Work (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing
Company, Inc., 1997); Robert W.McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1999).
12. Robin D.G.Kelley, Yo’Mama’s Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1997).
13. Peter Edelman, “The Worst Thing Bill Clinton Has Done,” The Atlantic Monthly, March
1997, pp. 43–58.
14. For a context from which to judge the effects of such cuts on the poor and the children
of America, see Children’s Defense Fund, The State of America’s Children—A Report from the Children’s
Defense Fund (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998).
15. Statistics cited in Ruth Sidel, Keeping Women and Children Last (New York: Penguin, 1996), p. xiv.
16. Henry A.Giroux, Stealing Innocence (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000).
17. See especially John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: The Free Press, 1944;
originally published in 1916).
18. Robert Zemsky, cited in Stanley Aronowitz, “The New Corporate University,” Dollars
and Sense, March/April 1998, p. 32.
19. For a critically insightful set of commentaries on the politics of work in higher education,
see Randy Martin, ed., Chalk Lines: The Politics of Work in the Managed University (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 1999).
148 N OT E S

20. Critical educators have provided a rich history of how both public and higher education
has been shaped by the politics, ideologies, and images of industry. For example, see Samuel
Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America (New York: Basic Books, 1976); Michael
Apple, Ideology and Curriculum (New York: Routledge, 1977); Martin Carnoy and Henry Levin,
Schooling and Work in the Democratic State (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1985); Stanley
Aronowitz and Henry A.Giroux, Education Still Under Siege (Westport, Conn.: Bergin and Garvey,
1993); Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio, The Jobless Future (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1994); Gary Nelson, ed., Will Teach for Food (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1997); D.W.Livingstone, The Education-Jobs Gap (Boulder, Colo.: Westview,
1998).
21. Katherine S.Mangan, “Corporate Know-How Lands Presidencies for a Growing Number
of Business Deans,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 27, 1998, p. A43.
22. Ibid., p. A44.
23. Aronowitz, “The New Corporate University,” pp. 32–35. For a detailed analysis of the
rise and workings of the corporate university, see Stanley Aronowitz, The Knowledge Factory:
Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000).
24. Cited in Martin Van Der Werf, “A Vice-President from the Business World Brings a
New Bottom Line to Penn,” The Chronicle of Higher Education 46:2 (September 3, 1999), p. A72.
25. Van Der Werf, “A Vice-President from the Business World Brings a New Bottom Line
to Penn,” p. A73.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Louis V.Gerstner Jr., “Public Schools Need to Go the Way of Business,” USA Today,
March 4, 1998, p. 13 A.
29. Ibid.
30. Catherine S.Manegold, “Study Says Schools Must Stress Academics,” New York Times,
Friday, September 23, 1998, p. A22. It is difficult to understand how any school system could
have subjected students to such a crude lesson in commercial pedagogy.
31. Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio, “The New Knowledge Work,” in A. H.Halsey,
et al., eds., Education: Culture, Economy, Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p.
193.
32. This is amply documented in Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work (New York: G.P. Putnam’s,
1995); Wolman and Colamosca, The Judas Economy: The Triumph of Capital and the Betrayal of
Work; Aronowitz and DiFazio, The Jobless Future (New York: Times Books, 1996); and Stanley
Aronowitz and Jonathan Cutler, Post-Work (New York: Routledge, 1998).
33. Ralph Nader, “Civil Society and Corporate Responsibility,” speech given to the National
Press Club and broadcast on C-Span 2 on March 25, 1998.
34. Cornel West, “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” October 53 (Summer
35. Mangan, “Corporate Know-How Lands Presidencies for a Growing Number of Business
Deans,” p. A44.
36. James Carlin, cited in William H.Honan, “The Ivory Tower Under Siege,” New York
Times, Section 4A (January 4, 1998), p. 33.
37. Ibid.
38. Carlin, “Restoring Sanity to an Academic World Gone Mad,” The Chronicle of Higher
Education, November 5, 1999, p. A76.
39. Ibid., A71.
 NOTES 149

40. Bill Tierney, “Tenure and Community in Academe,” Educational Researcher 26:8 (November
1997), p. 17.
41. Alison Schneider, “More Professors Are Working Part Time, and More Teach at 2-Year
Colleges,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 13, 1998, p. A14.
42. Statistics cited in Reed Abelson, “Silcon Valley Aftershocks,” New York Times, April 4,
1999, section 3, p. 1.
43. Reference to Eisner cited in liane Bonin, “Tragic Kingdom,” Detour, April 1998, p. 70.
44. Aronowitz, “The New Corporate University,” pp. 34–35.
45. This issue is taken up in Michael Bérubé, “Why Inefficiency Is Good for Universities,”
The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 27, 1998, pp. B4–B5.
46. There are a number of books that take up the relationship between schooling and
democracy; some of the more important recent critical contributions include Elizabeth A.Kelly,
Education, Democracy, and Public Knowledge (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1995); Wilfred Carr and
Anthony Hartnett, Education and the Struggle for Democracy (Philadelphia: Open University Press,
1996); Henry A.Giroux, Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education (New York:
Routledge, 1993); Stanley Aronowitz and Henry A.Giroux, Postmodern Education (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1991); Aronowitz and Giroux, Education Still Under Siege; and
Henry A.Giroux, Pedagogy and the Politics of Hope (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1997).
47. Vaclav Havel, “The State of the Republic,” New York Review of Books, June 22, 1998, p. 45.
48. Robin D.G.Kelley, “Neo-Cons of the Black Nation,” Black Renaissance Noire 1:2 (Summer/
Fall 1997), p. 146.
49. See Cary Nelson, ed., Will Teach for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis.
50. Cornel West, “America’s Three-Fold Crisis,” Tikkun 9:2 (1994), p. 42.
51. On this issue, see Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus (New York: Routledge, 1997).

CHAPTER 3

1. The term multiculturalism covers an extraordinary range of views about the central issues
of culture, diversity, identity, nationalism, and politics. Moreover, the theoretical and political
slipperiness of the term immediately make suspect any analysis that moves from the specific to
the general in engaging a topic so diverse. Yet the arbitrary nature of such an analysis seems
necessary if certain general tendencies that characterize a field are to be addressed and critically
engaged, in spite of the presence of marginal discourses that are sometimes at odds with such
tendencies. Some important recent books that address the multiple meanings of multiculturalism
include Henry A.Giroux, Living Dangerously: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Culture (New York:
Peter Lang, 1993); Henry A.Giroux, Border Crossings (New York: Routledge, 1992); David Theo
Goldberg, ed., Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader (Maiden, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1994); Avery
Gordon and Christopher Newfield, eds., Mapping Multiculturalism (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1996); and David Bennett, ed., Multicultural States (New York: Routledge,
1998).
2. For an extensive topography and critical analysis of diverse positions in multicultural
education, see Joe L.Kincheloe and Shirley R.Steinberg, Changing Multiculturalism (New York:
Open University Press, 1997).
150 N OT E S

3. A classic example of this type of work is Becky W.Thompson and Sangeeta Tyagi, eds.,
Beyond a Dream Deferred: Multicultural Education and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1993).
4. An example of this can be found in Lawrence Levine, The Opening of the American Mind
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).
5. On the reforms in general education that have been enacted under the banner of
multiculturalism, see Michael Geyer, “Multiculturalism and the Politics of General Education,”
Critical Inquiry 19 (Spring 1993), pp. 499–533.
6. One important text in this genre is Gloria Anzaldua, ed., Making face, Making Soul/Haciendo
Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Foundation,
1990). I would include here the emergence of critical scholarship on whiteness studies. The
literature is too extensive to cite but some recent work includes Richard Delgardo and Jean
Stefancic, eds., Critical Whiteness Studies (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997); Ruth
Frankenberg, ed., Displacing Whiteness (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997); Mike
Hill, ed., Whiteness: A Critical Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1997); Annalee
Newitz and Matthew Wray, eds., White Trash (New York: Routledge, 1997); David R.Roediger,
ed., Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to BeWhite (New York: Schocken Books, 1998);
Abby L.Ferber, White Man Falling (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and littlefield, 1998). For an interesting
essay on white studies, see Mike Hill, “ ‘Souls Undressed’: The Rise and Fall of New Whiteness
Studies,” The Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies 20:3 (1998), pp. 229–39.
7. One example of such work can be found in Robert Gooding-Williams, ed., Reading Rodney
King: Reading Urban Uprising (New York: Routledge, 1993).
8. See, for example, Michael Awkward, Negotiating Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1995).
9. This notion of breaking into common sense is taken from Homi Bhabha, in Gary Olson
and Lynn Worsham, “Staging the Politics of Difference: Homi Bhabha’s Critical Literacy—an
Interview,” Journal of Composition Theory 18:3 (1998), p. 367.
10. John Beverly, “Pedagogy and Subalternity: Mapping the Limits of Academic Knowledge,”
in Rolland G.Paulston, ed., Social Cartography (New York: Garland, 1996), pp. 351–52.
11. For a selection of articles that address these issues, see Goldberg, ed., Multiculturalism: A
Critical Reader (Maiden, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1994).
12. On the issue of multiculturalism and border crossing, see Giroux, Border Crossings.
13. David Theo Goldberg, “Introduction: Multicultural Conditions,” in Goldberg, ed.,
Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader, pp. 7–8.
14. This may explain why such conservatives as Nathan Glazer argue that we are all
multiculturalists. Glazer’s view of multiculturalism is so fatuous that to subscribe to it is to
undermine any critical possibilities it might hold for educators. See Nathan Glazer, We Are All
Multiculturalists Now (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).
15. For a critique of multicultural texts that depoliticize issues of cultural difference while
promoting forms of cultural tourism, see Julie Drew, “Cultural Tourism and the Commodified
Other: Reclaiming Difference in the Multicultural Classroom,” The Review of Education/Pedagogy/
Cultural Studies 19:2–3 (1997), pp. 297–309.
16. For example, see Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “On Race and Voice: Challenges for
Liberal Education in the 1990s,” Cultural Critique, Winter 1998–1999, pp. 179–208; Stanley
Fish, “Bad Company,” Transition 56 (1992), pp. 60–67; Katya Gibel Azoulay, “Experience,
Empathy and Strategic Esstentialism,” Cultural Studies 11:1 (1997), pp. 89–110.
 NOTES 151

17. Angela Y.Davis, “Gender, Class, and Multiculturalism: Rethinking ‘Race’ Politics,” in
Gordon and Newfield, eds., Mapping Multiculturalism, p. 41.
18. A classic example of this type of radical liberalism can be found in Charles Taylor, et.
al., Multiculturalism, ed. Amy Gutman (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994),
especially Charles Taylor’s work on the politics of recognition.
19. David Bennett, introduction to his Multicultural States (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 4.
20. Ibid., p. 5.
21. Avery Gordon and Christopher Newfield, “Multiculturalism’s Unfinished Business,”
in Gordon and Newfield, eds., Mapping Multiculturalism, p. 80.
22. Wendy Brown argues that identity has to be explored as a historical production and
that some forms of identity politics often locate subordinated groups within a politics of
recrimination that reinscribes the discourse of pain, victimization, and suffering as a substitute
(an incapacity) for any form of resistance and action. See Wendy Brown, “Injury, Identity,
Politics,” in Gordon and Newfield, eds., Mapping Multiculturalism, pp. 149–65.
23. See, for instance, S.Gillespie and R.Singleton, eds., Across Cultures: A Reader for Writers,
3rd ed. (Boston: Bedford, 1992); and G.R.Colombo and B.Lisle, eds., ReReading America: Cultural
Contexts for Critical Thinking and Writing, 2nd ed. (Boston: Bedford, 1992).
24. Homi Bhabha, cited in Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham, “Staging the Politics of
Difference: Homi Bhabha’s Critical Literacy—An Interview,” pp. 371–72.
25. One example of this approach can be found in Elizabeth Ellsworth, “Double Binds of
Whiteness,” in Michelle Fine, et al., eds., Off White: Readings on Race, Power, and Society (New
York: Routledge, 1997).
26. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993);
M.Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, eds., Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies,
Democratic Futures (New York: Routledge, 1997); Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking
Eurocentrism (New York: Routledge, 1994).
27. An excellent version of this argument can be found in Maurice Berger in the introduction
to his The Crisis of Criticism (New York: The New Press, 1998), pp. 1–14.
28. Herman Gray, “Is Cultural Studies Inflated?” in Gary Nelson and Dilip Parameshway
Goankar, eds., Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 211.
29. David Theo Goldberg, “Introduction: Multicultural Conditions,” in Goldberg, ed.,
Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader, pp. 13–14.
30. Of course, there are many exceptions to this rule, but they are marginal to the
multiculturalist discourses within the university. See, for example, many of the essays in Cameron
McCarthy and Warren Crichlow, eds., Race, Identity, and Representation in Education (New York:
Routledge, 1993), as well as William V.Flores and Rina Benmayor, Latino Cultural Citizenship
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1997); E.San Juan Jr., Racial Formations/ Critical Transformations: Articulations
of Power in Ethnic and Racial Studies in the United States (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press,
1992); Peter McLaren, Revolutionary Multiculturalism (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997);
Slavoj Zizek, “Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism,” New Left
Review 225 (September/October 1997). pp. 28–51.
31. George Lipsitz, “Listening to Learn and Learning to Listen: Popular Culture, Cultural
Theory, and American Studies,” American Quarterly 42:4 (December 1990), p. 621.
32. In opposition to this type of textualism, Lawrence Grossberg argues that Edward Said’s
Orientalism is a classic example of a text that focuses on questions of difference, identity, and
subjectivity while engaging the related issues of materialism and power. See Lawrence Grossberg,
152 N OT E S

“Identity and Cultural Studies: Is That All There Is?” in Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay, eds.,
Questions of Cultural Identity (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1996), pp. 87–107.
33. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America (Knoxville, Tenn.: Whittle District
Books, 1992); Richard J.Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class
Structure in American Life (New York: The Free Press, 1994); Dinesh D’Souza, The End of Racism
(New York: The Free Press, 1995); Robert Bork, Slouching Toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism
and American Decline (New York: Regan Books, 1996); Shelby Steele, A Dream Deferred: The
Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America (New York: HarperCollins, 1998); Stephan and
Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1997).
34. Jack H.Geiger, “The Real World of Race,” The Nation, December 1, 1998, p. 27.
35. For a detailed treatment of the way in which race shapes these attitudes between blacks
and whites, see David K.Shipler, A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America (New York:
Vintage, 1998).
36. For a brilliant analysis of support and funding of right-wing attacks on multiculturalism,
and other progressive causes, see Eric Alterman, “The ‘Right’ Books and Big Ideas,” The Nation,
November 22, 1999, pp. 16–21.
37. Stanley Fish, “Bad Company,” Transition 56 (Winter 1992), p. 64.
38. Pier re Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market (New York: The New
Press, 1998), pp. 2–3.
39. See, for example, McLaren, Revolutionary Multiculturalism; Goldberg, ed., Multiculturalism:
A Critical Reader; Gordon and Newfield, eds., Mapping Multiculturalism; Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts:
On Asian American Cultural Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996); Wahneema
Lubiano, ed., The House That Race Built (New York: Pantheon, 1997); Montserrat Guibernau
and John Rex, eds., The Ethnicity Reader (New York: Polity, 1997); Bennett, ed., Multicultural
States; Rodolfo D.Torres, Louis F.Miron, and Jonathan Xavier Inda, eds., Race, Identity, and
Citizenship: A Reader (Maiden, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1999).
40. Wahneema Lubiano, “Like Being Mugged by a Metaphor: Multiculturalism and State
Narratives,” in Gordon and Newfield, eds., Mapping Multiculturalism, pp. 64–75.
41. Manning Marable, “Beyond Color-Blindness,” The Nation, December 14, 1998, p. 31.
42. Lawrence Grossberg, “Cultural Studies: What’s in a Name?” Bringing It All Back Home:
Essays on Cultural Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 268.
43. Ibid., p. 248.
44. Marable, “Beyond Color-Blindness,” p. 31.
45. Grossberg, “Cultural Studies: What’s in a Name?” pp. 252–53.
46. David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture (Maiden, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1993), p. 105.
47. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, cited in “Race On Screen and Off,” The Nation, December 29,
1997, p. 6.
48. David K.Shipler, summarized in Jack H.Geiger, “The Real World of Race,” p. 27. See
also David K.Shipler, “Reflections on Race,” Tikkun 13:1 (1998), pp. 59, 78; and David K.Shipler,
A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America (New York: Vintage, 1998).
49. Ellen Willis argues that the two major upheavals in America’s racial hierarchy have
been the destruction of the southern caste system and the subversion of whiteness as an
unquestioned norm. She also argues rightly that to dismiss these achievements as having
done little to change racist power relations insults people who have engaged in these struggles.
 NOTES 153

See Ellen Willis, “The Up and Up: On the Limits of Optimism,” Transition 7:2 (1998), pp.
44–61.
50. For a compilation of figures suggesting the ongoing presence of racism in American
society, see Ronald Walters, “The Criticality of Racism,” Black Scholar 26:1 (Winter 1996), pp.
2–8; The Children’s Defense Fund, The State of America’s Children A Report from the Children’s
Defense Fund (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998).
51. For a devastating critique of Randall Kennedy’s move to the right, see Derrick Bell,
“The Strange Career of Randall Kennedy,” New Politics 7:1 (Summer 1998), pp. 55–69.
52. Azoulay, “Experience, Empathy and Strategic Essentialism,” p. 91.
53. Robin D.G.Kelley, “Integration: What’s Left,” The Nation, December 14, 1998, p. 18.
54. Randall Johnson, “Editor’s Introduction.” Art, Literature and Culture,” in Pierre
Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1993), p. 19.
55. Ibid., p. 17.
56. This issue is taken up in John Devine, Maximum Security: The Culture of Violence in Inner-City
Schools (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Unfortunately, Devine’s remedy for the
militarization of school space is to blame students for not being civil enough. Hence he
undermines an interesting analysis of the culture of violence in schools by framing his solutions
within a paradigm that is utterly privatized and trapped within the discourse of the genteel
brigade led by ultra self righteous moralizers like William Bennett.
57. These figures are cited in Fox Butterfield, “Crime Keeps on Falling, But Prisons Keep on
Filling,” New York Times, Sunday, September 28, 1997, p. AI.Jimmie L.Reeves and Richard
Campbell provide a more extensive picture of prison growth in the United States: “During the
Reagan era, in fact, the U.S. prison population nearly doubled (from 329,821 in 1980 to 627,402
in 1989) as the number of drug arrests nationwide increased from 471,000 in 1980 to 1,247,000
in 1989. By 1990 the United States had the highest incarceration rate in the world: 942.6 per
100,000 compared to 333 per 100,000 in South Africa, its closest competitor). In that same
year—when about half the inmates in federal prisons were there on drug offenses—African
Americans made up almost half of the U.S. prison population, and about one in four young
black males in their twenties were either in jail, on parole, or on probation (compared to only
6 percent for white males).” Jimmie L.Reeves and Richard Campbell, Cracked Coverage: Television
News, the Anti-cocaine Crusade, and the Reagan Legacy (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
1994), p. 41.
58. Marable, “Beyond Color-Blindness,” p. 31.
59. Lawrence Grossberg, “The Victory of Culture, Part I,” University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, unpublished manuscript, February 1998, p. 27.
60. Figures cited in The Justice Policy Institute/Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice
Policy Report, From Classrooms to Cell Blocks: How Prison Building Affects Higher Education and African
American Enrollment in California (San Francisco: Justice Policy Institute, 1996), p. 2.
61. Cited in “From Classrooms to Cell Blocks: A National Perspective,” The Justice Policy
Institute, February 1997, p. 2.
62. These quotes come from Reeves and Campbell, Cracked Coverage:Television News, the Anti-
cocaine Crusade, and the Reagan Legacy, pp. 40–41.
63. Michael Bérubé, “Disuniting America Again,” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language
Association 26:1 (Spring 1993), p. 41.
154 N OT E S

CHAPTER 4
1. I take this issue up in more detail in Henry A.Giroux, Stealing Innocence: Youth, Corporate Power,
and the Politics of Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000).
2. Leon Botstein, “Making the Teaching Profession Respectable Again,” New York Times,
Monday, July 26, 1999, p. A19. Elaine Showalter, “The Risks of Good Teaching: How 1 Professor
and 9 T.A.’ s Plunged into Pedagogy,” The Chronicle of Higher Education 45:44 (July 9, 1999), pp.
B4–B6.
3. Leon Botstein, “Making the Teaching Profession Respectable Again,” A19.
4. Elaine Showalter, “The Risks of Good Teaching: How 1 Professor and 9 T.A.’s Plunged
into Pedagogy,” p. 64.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., p. B5.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., p. B6.
9. To be fair to Showalter, she is not alone among humanities scholars in refusing to step
outside of her discipline in order to gain some theoretical purchase on important work done in
critical pedagogy. Another recent example can be found in Biddy Martin, “Introduction:
Teaching, Literature, Changing Cultures,” PMLA 112:1 (January 1997), pp. 7–25.
10. For an extensive analysis of the ethical grounding of critical pedagogy in the unfinishedness
of human beings and their insertion into the permanent process of decision making, freedom,
options, breaking with the past, and the ongoing formation of the self, see Paulo Freire, Pedagogy
of Freedom (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999).
11. See, for example, Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994).
12. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 181.
13. Gary A.Olson and Lynn Worsham, “Staging the Politics of Difference: Homi Bhabha’s
Critical Literacy—An Interview,” Journal of Composition Theory 18:3 (1998), pp. 361–91.
14. Ibid., p. 363.
15. Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1983), p. 333.
16. Olson and Worsham, “Staging the Politics of Difference,” p. 367.
17. Ibid., p. 369.
18. Homi Bhabha, “Dance This Diss Around,” Artforum, April 1995, p. 20.
19. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom, p. 48.
20. On this issue, see Ernesto Laclau’s remarks in Lynn Worsham and Gary Olson,
“Hegemony and the Future of Democracy,” Journal of Composition Theory 19:1 (1999), pp. 1–34.
21. Homi Bhabha, “The World and the Home,” Social Text 30–31 (1992), pp. 141–153. See
also Homi Bhabha, “The Commitment to Theory,” New Formations, Summer 1998, pp. 5–22.
22. Bhabha takes this up in a number of pieces. We particularly like his rendering of the
issue in “The World and the Home,” pp. 141–53, and “The Enchantment of Art,” in Carol
Becker and Ann Wiens, eds. The Artist in Society (Chicago: New Art Examiner, 1994), pp. 24–34.
23. Homi Bhabha, “A Good Judge of Character: Men, Metaphors, and the Common
Culture,” in Toni Morrison, ed., Race-ing Justice, Engendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence
Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (New York: Pantheon, 1992), pp. 244–45.
24. Olson and Worsham, “Staging the Politics of Difference,” p. 372.
25. Ibid., p. 390.
 NOTES 155

26. This issue is taken up in Lynn Worsham, “Going Postal: Pedagogic Violence and the
Schooling of Emotion,” Journal of CompositonTheory 18:2 (1998), pp. 213–46.
27. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Dover, 1969), p. 146.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., pp. 157–58.
30. Ibid., p. 158.
31. Ibid.; emphasis added.
32. Lawrence Grossberg, “Identity and Cultural Studies: Is That All There Is?” in Stuart
Hall and Paul Du Gay, eds. Questions of Cultural Identity (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1996), pp.
101–2.
33. This position is taken up in Lawrence Grossberg, “Toward a Genealogy of the State of
Cultural Studies,” in Cary Nelson and Dilip Parmeshwar Gaonkar, eds., Disciplinarity and Dissent
in Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 131–47.
34. Stuart Hall, cited in Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal, “Culture and Power: Interview
with Stuart Hall,” Radical Philosophy 86 (November/December 1997), p. 31.
35. Rosalind O’Hanlon, cited in Lawrence Grossberg, “Identity and Cultural Studies,” p.
99.
36. Ibid., p. 100.
37. Homi K.Bhabha, “Editor’s Introduction: Minority Maneuvers and Unsettled
Negotiations,” Critical Inquiry 23 (1997), p. 432.
38. Shoshana Felman, Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary
Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 79. For an extensive analysis of the
relationship between schooling, literacy, and desire, see Ursula A.Kelly, Schooling Desire: Literacy,
Cultural Politics, and Pedagogy (New York: Routledge, 1997); Sharon Todd, Learning Desire: Perspectives
on Pedagogy, Culture, and the Unsaid (New York: Routledge, 1997).
39. Shoshana Felman, Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight, p. 79.
40. Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Our Common Dreams:Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 1995).
41. Cited in Ernesto Laclau, “Lynn Worsham and Gary A. Olson,” Hegemony and the
Future of Democracy: Ernesto Laclau’s Political Philosophy,” Journal of Composition Theory 19:1
(1999), p. 12.
42. Lawrence Grossberg, “Identity and Cultural Studies: Is That All There Is?” pp. 99–100.

CHAPTER 5

I have developed many of the ideas presented in this chapter in Henry A.Giroux, The Mouse
That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999).

1. Stuart Hall, “The Centrality of Culture: Notes on the Cultural Revolutions of Our
Time,” in Kenneth Thompson, ed., Media and Cultural Regulation (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage,
1997), p. 232.
2. A list of Disney’s holdings, cited in “The National Entertainment State Media Map,” The
Nation, June 3, 1996, pp. 23–26. See also, Robert W.McChesney, “Oligopoly: The Media Game
Has Fewer and Fewer Players,” The Progressive, November 1999, p. 22.
156 N OT E S

3. The concentrated power of the media market by corporations is evident in the following
figures. According to Robert W McChesney, “In cable, Time Warner and TCI [now AT&T]
control 47.4 percent of all subscribers; in radio, Westinghouse, in addition to owning the CBS
Television network, now owns 82 radio stations; in books, Barnes & Noble and Borders sell 45
percent of all books in the United States…. In newspapers, only 24 cities compared to 400 fifty
years ago support two or more daily newspapers.” Robert W.McChesney, “Global Media for
the Global Economy,” in Don Hazen and Julie Winokur, eds., We the Media (New York: The
New Press, 1997), p. 27.
4. Don Hazen and Julie Winokur, “Children Watching TV,” Hazen and Winokur, eds., We
the Media (New York: The New Press, 1997), p. 64.
5. Ibid.
6. See Lawrie Mifflin, “Pediatricians Urge Limiting TV Watching,” New York Times, August
4, 1999, pp. A1,A4.
7. Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of the systemic corruption of television in France is equally
informative when applied to the United States. See his On Television, trans. Priscilla Parkhust
Ferguson (New York: The New Press, 1998).
8. The Disney/Sprewell deal is mentioned in William C.Rhoden, “Long Road for a Short,
Wild Season,” New York Times, June 26, 1999, p. B15.
9. Disney Magazine, Fall 1998, p. 61.
10. Ernest Larsen, “Compulsory Play,” The Nation, March 16, 1998, p. 31.
11. Ibid., p. 32.
12. Karen Klugman, et al., Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 1995), p. 119.
13. Andrew Ross, The Celebration Chronicles (New York: Ballantine Books, 1999), p. 310.
14. Klugman, et al., Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World, p. 119.
15. Joshua Karliner, “Earth Predators,” Dollars and Sense, July/August 1998, p. 7. For an
extensive analysis of media concentration and its effects on democracy, see Robert
W.McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy (Urbana, 111.: University of Illinois Press, 1999).
16. Robert W.McChesney, Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy (New York: Seven
Stories Press, 1997), p. 18. There is an enormous amount of detailed information about the
new global conglomerates and their effects on matters of democracy, censorship, free speech,
social policy, national identity, and foreign policy. For example, see such classics as Herbert
I.Schiller, Culture Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1989); Edward S.Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent (New York:
Pantheon, 1988); Ben H.Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, 4th ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992);
George Gerbner and Herbert I.Schiller, eds., Triumph of the Image (Boulder, Colo.: Westview
Press, 1992); Douglas Kellner, Television and the Crisis of Democracy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview
Press, 1990); Philip Schlesinger, Media, State and Nation (London: Sage, 1991); John Fiske, Media
Matters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon,
Through the Media Looking Glass (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995); and Erik
Barnouw, Conglomerates and the Media (New York: The New Press, 1997).
17. Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman, Corporate Predators: The Hunt for Mega-Profits and
the Attack on Democracy (Munroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1999), p. 167.
18. Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1998), p. 70.
19. Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism (London: Verso Press, 1989).
 NOTES 157

20. Two recent critical commentaries can be found in Robert W.McChesney, Corporate
Media and the Threat to Democracy (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1997); and Erik Barnouw, et
al., eds., Conglomerates and the Media (New York: The New Press, 1997).
21. Figures taken from Michael D.Eisner, “Letter to Shareholders,” The Walt Disney Company
1997Annual Report (Burbank, Calif.: The Walt Disney Company, 1997), p. 2. For the 1998
reference, see Lauren R.Rublin, “Cutting Back the Magic,” Barrons, July 26, 1999, p. 28.
22. Michael Ovitz, cited in Peter Bart, “Disney’s Ovitz Problem Raises Issues for Showbiz
Giants,” DailyVariety, December 16, 1996, p. 1.
23. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1962), p. 26.
24. Eisner, “Letter to Shareholders,” p. 5.
25. Michael D.Eisner, cited in Peter Bart, “The Mouse Mess,” GQ, August 1999, p. 82.
26. Mokhiber and Weissman, Corporate Predators, p. 168.
27. Ibid.
28. Ray Sanches, “‘Misery’ for Haitian Workers,” New York Newsday, June 16, 1996, pp. A4,
A30.
29. Blair Kamin, “Faking History,” Chicago Tribune, August 5, 1999, section 5, p. 1B.
30. Disney’s stock was the worst performer on the Dow Jones Industrial Average from
August 1998 to August 1999; Lauren R.Rublin, “Cutting Back the Magic,” Barron’s, July 26,
1999, pp. 27–30.
31. Karen Klugman, et al., Inside the Mouse, p. 125. For an excellent chapter on Disney’s
relations with its workers at Disney World, see Jane Kuenz, “Working at the Rat,” also in
Klugman, et al., Inside the Mouse, pp. 110–61.
32. Michael Eisner, “Planetized Entertainment,” New Perspectives Quarterly 12:4 (Fall 1995), p.
9; emphasis added.
33. Mike Wallace, Mickey Mouse History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), p.
170.
34. Chris Rojeck, “Disney Culture,” Leisure Studies 12 (1993), p. 121.
35. Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch (London: Basil Blackwell, 1985), p. 4.
36. Toby Miller, Technologies of Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p.
90.
37. Susan Willis, “Problem with Pleasure,” in Klugman, et al., eds., Inside the Mouse: Work and
Play at Disney World, p. 5.
38. See Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank
Mecklenburg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988). Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1,
trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986).
39. Ernst Bloch, cited in Anson Rabinach, “Unclaimed Heritage: Ernst Bloch’s Heritage of
Our Times and the Theory of Fascism,” New German Critique, Spring 1977, p. 8.
40. I invoke here Meaghan Morris’s argument in which she identifies the chief error of
cultural studies to be the narcissistic identity that is made “between the knowing subject of
cultural studies, and a collective subject, the ‘people.’” The people in this discourse “have no
necessary defining characteristics—except an in-domitable capacity to ‘negotiate’ readings,
generate new interpretations, and remake the materials of culture…. So against the hegemonic
force of the dominant classes, ‘the people’ in fact represent the most creative energies and
functions of critical reading. In the end they are not simply the cultural student’s object of
study, [but] his native informants. The people are also the textually delegated, allegorical emblem
158 N OT E S

of the critic’s own activity.” See Meaghan Morris, “Banality in Cultural Studies,” Discourse
10:2 (Spring/Summer 1988), p. 17.
41. David Buckingham “Dissin’ Disney: Critical Perspectives on Children’s Media Culture,”
Media, Culture,and Society 19 (1997), p. 290.
42. Edward W.Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1983), p. 169.
43. This issue is raised in an interesting way in Roger Silverstone, “So Who Are These
People,” Sight and Sound 9:5 (May 1999), pp. 28–29.
44. On another political register expanding democratic public culture means working hard
to get organized labor and progressive social movements to join together to forge new
partnerships willing to pool some of their intellectual and material resources in order to create
alternative public spheres in which democratic identities, relations, and values can flourish and
offer multiple sites of resistance to a culture industry such as Disney in which the call for
innocence, happiness, and unity appears to be “transformed into a prohibition on thinking
itself.” Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p.
290.

CHAPTER 6

1. Sarah Pollock interview with “Robert Haas,” in Mother Jones, March/April 1997, p. 22.
2. Lawrence Grossberg, “Bringing It All Back Home—Pedagogy and Cultural Studies,” in
Henry A.Giroux and Peter McLaren, eds., Between Borders: Pedagogy and the Politics of Cultural
Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 248.
3. Lawrence Grossberg, “Toward a Genealogy of the State of Cultural Studies,” in Cary
Nelson and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, eds., Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies (New
York: Routledge, 1996), p. 143.
4. Ibid., p. 143.
5. David Bailey and Stuart Hall, “The Vertigo of Displacement,” Ten 8 2:3 (1992), p. 19.
6. My notion of interdisciplinary comes from Mas’ud Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton,
“Theory, Pedagogy, Politics: The Crisis of the ‘Subject’ in the Humanities,” in Mas’ud Zavarzadeh
and Donald Morton, eds., Theory Pedagogy Politics: Texts for Change, (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1992), p. 10. At issue here is neither ignoring the boundaries of discipline-based knowledge
nor simply fusing different disciplines, but creating theoretical paradigms, questions, and
knowledge that cannot be taken up within the policed boundaries of the existing disciplines.
7. Martha C.Nussbaum, “The Professor of Parody,” The New Republic, February 22, 1999, p.
42.
8. Robert W.McChesney, introduction to Noam Chomsky, Profit Over People (New York:
Seven Stories Press, 1999), p. 9.
9. Lawrence Grossberg, “Toward a Genealogy of the State of Cultural Studies,” p. 145.
10. Stuart Hall and David Held, “Citizens and Citizenship,” in Stuart Hall and Martin
Jacques, eds., New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 173–
88.
11. Simon Frith, Performance Rites (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p.
204.
 NOTES 159

12. Grant Kester, “(Not) Going with the Flow: The Politics of Deleuzean Aesthetics,” in
Amitava Kumar, ed., Poetics/Politics: Radical Aesthetics for the Classroom (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1999), p. 25.
13. Needless to say, cultural studies theorists such as Stuart Hall, Meaghan Morris, Tony
Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, Angela McRobbie, Doreen Massey, Herman Gray, and Stanley
Aronowitz, to name only a few, have long refused reducing cultural studies to a form of textualism.
14. Gordon cited in Joy James, Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American
Intellectuals (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 175.
15. Ellen Willis, “We Need a Radical Left,” The Nation, June 29, 1998, p. 19.
16. Raymond Williams, “Adult Education and Social Change,” in What I Came to Say (London:
Hutchinson-Radus, 1989), p. 158.
17. Raymond Williams, Communications (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967), p. 15.
18. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Press, 1971),
p. 350.
19. I take this issue up in great detail in Henry A.Giroux, Border Crossings: Cultural Workers
and the Politics of Education (New York: Routledge, 1992).
20. Cary Nelson, “Cultural Studies and the Politics of Disciplinary,” in Nelson and Gaonkar,
eds., Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies, p. 7.
21. Stuart Hall, “Race, Culture, and Communications: Looking Backward and Forward at
Cultural Studies,” Rethinking Marxism 5:1 (Spring 1992), p. 18.
22. The term professionalist legitimation comes from my personal correspondence with Professor
Jeff Williams of the University of Missouri.
23. Lawrence Grossberg, “Cultural Studies: What’s in a Name?” in Bringing It All Back
Home: Essays on Cultural Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 261.
24. See Suzanne Lacy, “Introduction: Cultural Pilgrimages and Metaphoric Journeys,” in
Suzanne Lacy, ed., Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle: Bay State Press, 1995), pp.
19–47; Guillermo Gomez-Pefia, The New World Border (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996).
25. Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance (New York: New Press, 1999), p. 8.
26. For a summary of some of Lacy’s work, see Jeff Kelley, “The Body Politics of Suzanne
Lacy,” in Nina Felshin, ed., But Is It Art? (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), pp. 221–49.
27. George Lipsitz, “Facing Up to What’s Killing Us: Artistic Practice and Grass-roots
Social Theory,” in Elizabeth Long, ed., From Sociology to Cultural Studies (Maiden, Mass.: Basil
Blackwell, 1997), p. 252.
28. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), see
especially the afterword, “Notes on Hope.”
29. Stuart Hall, “Race, Culture and Communications: Looking Backward and Forward at
Cultural Studies,” p. 11.
30. For a response to the charge that critical pedagogy, especially the work of Paulo Freire,
is overly doctrinaire and impositional, see Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, “A Dialogue:
Culture, Language, and Race,” in Pepi Leistyna, Arlie Woodrum, and Stephen A.Sherblom,
eds., Breaking Free: The Transformative Power of Critical Pedagogy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
Educational Review, 1996), pp. 199–228.
31. This issue is taken up brilliantly in Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom (Lanham, Md.:
Rowman & Littlefield, 1999).
32. bell hooks, “Narratives of Struggle,” in Philomena Mariani, ed., Critical Fictions: The
Politics of Imaginative Writing (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991), p. 56.
160 N OT E S

33. Gerald Graff, “Teaching the Conflicts,” Darryl J.Gless and Barbara Herrnstein Smith,
eds,. The Politics of Liberal Education (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992), pp. 57–73
34. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994).
35. Suzanne Lacy, “Introduction: Cultural Pilgrimages and Metaphoric Journeys,” p. 20.
36. For a brilliant analysis of the importance of radical democracy as a project for progressive
and left cultural workers, see Stanley Aronowitz, The Death and Rebirth of American Radicalism
(New York: Routledge, 1996).
 index

ABC network, 4, 108 Bennett, William, 4, 21

Academic freedom, 4, 21–22, 53–54 Berger, Maurice, 36
Academic multiculturalism Bernstein, Richard, 19
diversity management, 64–67 Bertlesmann, 3
limits of, 61–65 Bérubé, Michael, 85
pedagogical strategy of, 63 Beverly, John, 63
process of schooling, 62 Bhabha, Homi, 24, 66, 88, 94–105, 132
Activism, 15 Bilingual education, 84
Adorno, Theodor, 30, 107 Black history, 23
Advertising industry, 109 Black underclass, 70, 75
Advocacy programs, 21 Bloch, Ernst, 120
Affirmative action programs, 21, 42, 58, 62, 70, ` Bloom, Harold, 16, 18–20, 24–25, 34, 73
75, 84 Bordo, Susan, 14
Agency, 10, 101, 106 Bork, Robert, 70
AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), Bosnia-Herzegovina, 40
27 Boston Globe, 4
Alfaro, Luis, 136 Boston University, 21, 52
Allen, Paid, 41 Botstein, Leon, 89–92, 94, 105
American Association of University Professors, 47 Bourdieu, Pierre, 15, 71, 136
American Medical Association, 109 Bowles, Samuel, 91
Anti-Semitism, 28 Harry Bradley Foundation, 4, 21
Aronowitz, Stanley, 4, 14, 46, 55, 129 Buchanan, Pat, 4–5
Assimilation, 66, 70 Buckingham, David, 121
Auld, Hugh, 103 Buffett, Warren, 41, 112
Bush administration, 70
Business-university partnerships, 46–47, 49,
Bard College, 89
54, 59
Batsleer, Janet, 30
Butler, Judith, 26, 28
Bauer, Gary, 5
Bauman, Zygmunt, 112
Becker, Carol, 14 Cable television, 2
Belly (film), 84 California Civil Rights Initiative, 42
Benhabib, Seyla, 40 Campaign finance laws, 23
Bennett, David, 66 Campbell, Richard, 84

161
162 INDEX

Capitalism, 39–44, 59 race and popular unconscious, 75

Carlin, James, 51–53 social change and, 17
CBS, 4 textuality and, 68
Chechnya conflict, 40 undertaking of, 31–38 youth work, 27
Cheney, Lynn, 18, 20–21, 25 Cultural revolution, 9
Chicago Tribune, 4, 116 Cultural studies, 7, 13, 145 n. 19
Child labor, 44, 49, 115–16 citizenship and, 133–34
Chomsky, Noam, 4 Gitlin’s critique of, 28–30
Chow, Key, 14 Cultural workers
Chronicle of Higher Education, 45, 52, 54, 92 justice and, 127
Citigroup, 54 politics of the performative and, 135–38
Citizenship, 13–14, 37–38, 59, 72 corporate as public intellectuals, 126–27, 141
culture and, 41–42 search for a project, 128–31, 160 n. 36
cultural studies and, 133–34 Culture; see also Corporate culture; Political
Civil rights legislation, 70 culture; Popular culture Bhabha’s analysis
Class politics, 24–26, 29 race and gender, 26–27 of, 95 democracy and, 5 economics forces and,
Class struggles, 70, 72, 74–75 30–31 negative “other”, 2 as pedagogical
Clinton, Bill, 42 force, 10, 24 as political capital, 8 political
Code 33 (film), 137 education and change, 6 and politics, 8–13,
Colonial ideology, 67 24, 71–77 politics of cynicism, 7–8 power and,
The Columbian Orator, 100–101 9, 18, 26, 64, 73 as teaching force, 32–34
Commercialism, no
Commercial spheres, 41–42
Dangerous Minds (film), 77, 84
Committee for Economic Development, 48
Davis, Angela, 4, 66
Communism, 40 Deindustrialization, 48
Consensus, 5, 66 DeLay, Tom, 5
Conservatism, 4 Democracy; see also Citizenship
attacks on cultural politics, 17–22 capitalism and, 44, 59
multiculturalism and, 69–71 culture and, 5, 11
Consumerism, 116 education and, 37–39, 59, 64
as civic participation, 3, 146 n. 5 effectiveness of, 3
Corporate culture, 11, 17, 35–36, 145 n. 6 global village and, 40
bottom line accountability, 42 human rights and, 40
citizenship, 41 schooling and, 56–60, 149 n. 46
Congressional funding of, 43–44 Department of Housing and Urban
defined, 41 Development, 43
democracy and, 45 Derber, Charles, 39
limits of, 43–45 Dewey, John, 44, 91
megaconglomerates, 42 Diallo (Amadou) shooting, 84
politics of schooling, 39–43, 51–56 Diggs, Peggy, 136
power of, 26, 28, 41, 147 n. 11 Digital communications, 2
schooling and democracy, 56–60 Dirlik, Arif, 14
Corporate power, 26, 28, 41, 147 n. 11 Discrimination, 28, 85
A Country of Strangers (Shipler), 74 Walt Disney Company, 2–4, 7, 32, 42, 55
Criminal justice system, 85 commercialism and commodification,
Cultural difference, 66–67 110–12
Cultural identity, 63 consumerism and, 116 cultural influences of,
Cultural politics 108–10 as political and economic power,
conservative and liberal attacks on, 17–25, 114–15 politics of innocence, 113–18 public
145 n. 19 pedagogy as cultural politics, 118–25
cultural to economic left, 23 Disney Magazine, 110
economic forces and, 30–31 Disney, Walt, 111
left orthodoxy and, 25–31 Diversity management, 64 politics of recognition,
multiculturalism as, 73 65–67
politics and, 88 Douglass, Frederick, 99–103
 INDEX 163

Downsizing, 48 Gomez-Peña, Guillermo, 136

D’Souza, Dinesh, 19, 70 Gordon, Avery, 66
Dyson, Michael, 14 Gordon, Lewis, 131
Gramsci, Antonio, 30, 126, 133
Gray, Herman, 68
Economic equity, 26 culture and, 30–31
Greene, Maxine, 91
Education; see also Higher education academic
Grossberg, Lawrence, 9–10, 14, 22, 72, 74, 83,
standards and, 18–19 as a civil asset, 45
101, 104, 106, 127, 129, 134
conservative vs. liberal ideologies, 4–5,
Guha, Ranajit, 96
17–25 corporatizing of, 4, 11, 17 culture a
pedagogical force, 10–12 democratic learning
and, 37–39 failure of, 89–90 Hollywood’s Haas, Robert, 127
urban public schools, 77–85 as performative Hall, Stuart, 1, 9, 14, 22, 25, 29, 102, 108,
practice, 132–35 as political, 139–40 school 129–30, 137
reform, 48–49 Hazen, Don, 109
Educators; see also Cultural workers; Pedagogy Health insurance, universal coverage, 23
academic freedom and, 4, 21–22, 53–54 civic Held, David, 130
and political responsibilities of, 16–17 as Helms, Jesse, 75
public intellectuals, 35–37, 58, 90, Herrenstein, Richard J., 70
135–38, 141 Higher education academic freedom, 53–54
Eisner, Michael, 55, 112, 115–18 business-university partnerships, 49 corporate
“End of history”, 40 ideology and, 53 corporate managers in,
Ethnic conflict, 40–41 45–50 corporatized model of, 46–47, 54, 59
Ethnicity, 25 culture and, 62 as democratic public sphere,
73 downsizing and reorganization of, 54
Felman, Shoshana, 104 globalization and employment, 55–56
Feminism, 19–23, 27 knowledge as capital, 50 multiculturalism and,
Finn, Chester, 45 61 politics of schooling, 51–56, 147 n. 20
Fish, Stanley, 70 profit standard, 55 public culture and, 64
Food stamp program, 42 radical multiculturalism and, 71–72 schooling
Forbes, 39–40 and democracy, 56–60, 149 n. 46 school
Former Soviet Union states, 40 reform and, 48–49 social responsibilities of, 74
Foucault, Michel, 14, 102 teacher-student relationships, 51 university as
Fraser, Nancy, 14, 129 democratic public sphere, 17 vocationalizing
Freire, Paolo, 22, 91, 97 of, 47, 54
Frith, Simon, 131 High School High (film), 77
Fry, John A., 46–47 Hightower, Jim, 4
Fukuyama, Francis, 40 Hispanic-American studies, 23
Fusco, Coco, 135 hooks, bell, 4
Hopwood v.Texas, 42
Horkheimer, Max, 30, 61
Gates, Bill, 2, 41–42, 112 Hudson Institute, 45
Gates, Daryl, 84
Gay and lesbian studies, 23, 62
Gender, 25–29, 70 IBM, 48
General Electric, 42, 112 Identity market-based, 44 media culture and, 109
Genocide, 40–41, 85 “Identity clubs”, 18
George Mason University, 51 Identity formation, 97–98
Gerstner, Louis, Jr., 48 Identity politics, 13, 24, 27–28, 143 n. 13,
Gilroy, Paul, 141 151 n. 22
Ginsburg, Ruth Bader, 74 Immigrants, 70, 84
Gintis, Herbert, 91 Imperialism, 28
Gitlin, Todd, 16, 25–31, 34, 73, 106 Individualism, 43–44
Globalization, 55, 130 Information, as capital, 2
Global village, 40 Institutional power, 31
Goldberg, David Theo, 65, 68 Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 22
164 INDEX

Internet culture, 31, 33 McGwire, Mark, 109–10

McKeachie s Teaching Tips (McKeachie), 93
McKeachie, Wilbert J., 93
Jackson, Samuel L, 78
McRobbie, Angela, 129
Jacoby, Russell, 3
Madison Center for Educational
James, Joy, 14
Affairs, 22
Jefferson, Thomas, 45
Majority values, 28
Johnson, Randall, 77
Mangan, Katherine S., 45–46
Justice Policy Institute, 84
Manhattan Institute, 70
Mann, Horace, 60
Kamin, Blair, 116 Marcuse, Herbert, 2, 14
Karliner, Joshua, 112 Market values, 40
Katzenberg, Jeffrey, 115 Marxism, 6, 20, 24, 30, 40
Katz, Jon, 33 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),
Kelley, Robin D.G., 14, 26–28, 57, 76–77 47
Kennedy, Randall, 75 Massachusetts State Board of Education, 51
Kernaghan, Charles, 115 Mass media; see also Popular culture
Kimball, Roger, 4 class-specific representations of, 27
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 60 concentrated corporate control of, 4,
Knowledge 156 n. 3, 156 n. 16
as capital, 50 free flow of information and, 4
self-definition, 90 literacy programs, 33
self-determination, 90 multinational corporations and, 107–13
Kosovo conflict, 40 new technologies and, 2, 32–34
Kozlowski, Dennis, 54 Mastering the Techniques of Teaching (Lowman), 93
Kramer, Hilton, 19 Master/slave narrative, 99–101
Kristol, Irving, 21 Materialism, 6, 28, 87
Kristol, William, 4 Media culture, multinational corporations and,
Kuenz, Jane, 111 107–13
Messer-Davidow, Ellen, 21
Migrant studies, 23
Lacan, Jacques, 104, 106
Miller, Toby, 119
Laclau, Ernesto, 106
Mills, C.Wright, 45
Lacy, Suzanne, 135–37, 141
Minority literature, 19
Language, experience and, 89
Modern Language Association, 89
Larsen, Ernest, 110–11
Mohanty, Chandra, 66
Latino studies, 62
Mokhiber, Russell, 112, 115
Lewinsky scandal, 3
Monoculturalism, 70
Liberalism, 5–6, 22–25
Moral behavior, 43
attacks on cultural politics, 17–22
Moral relativism, 5
Lipsitz, George, 69, 137
Morris, Meachan, 14, 157 n. 40
Literacy, 63
Morrison, Toni, 14
language of social criticism and
Moslem fundamentalism, 40
responsibility, 35–36
Mouffe, Chantal, 14, 129
as transforming power, 100
Multiculturalism, 18–19, 22, 25–26, 61, 98,
video literacy, 146 n. 44
149 n. 1; see also Academic multiculturalism
Literary criticism, 18
conservative attacks on, 69–71, 152 n. 36
Littleton school tragedy, 3
democratizing higher education, 64 politics of
Long, Elizabeth, 7
textuality, 67–69 professionalized theory and,
Los Angeles Police Department, 84
67–69 racial coding and, 82
Louima (Abner) torture case, 84
Multinational corporations, media culture
Lowman, Jospeh, 93
and, 107–13
Lubiano, Wahneema, 71
Murdoch, Rupert, 112
Murray, Charles, 70
McChesney, Robert W., 3, 130 My Bondage and My Freedom (Douglass), 100
 INDEX 165

Nader, Ralph, 49 Politics of exclusion, 72

National Alumni Forum, 20 Politics of representation, 25–26, 63, 104
National Association of Scholars, 22, 71 Popular culture, 18–19, 23, 25 demonization of
National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), 21 minority youths, 84 Disney’s influence,
National Endowment for the Humanities 113–118 Hollywood’s urban public schools,
(NEH), 20–21 77–85 pedagogy and, 31–34 racial coding and,
National Labor Committee, 115 82
Native Americans, 28 Populism, 30
Nelson, Cary, 133 Postcolonial criticism, 95–96
Neoconservativism, 16 Poststructuralism, 20
Neoliberals, 5–6, 12 Poverty, 44
Newfield, Christopher, 66 Power, 10, 13, 18 culture and, 18–19, 26, 73
New Left, 25 cultural politics and, 25–31 knowledge and, 34, 50, 89 politics and, 74
New York City Police Department, 84 Prison-industrial complex, 75, 84 growth of,
New York Times, 4, 48, 51, 89 83–84, 153 n. 57
Nussbaum, Martha, 128 Privatization, 43–44, 72, 111
Progressive educational reforms, 89
Public education, local financing of, 23
O’Hanlon, Rosalind, 104
Public intellectuals educators as, 35–37, 58, 90,
John M.Olin Foundation, 4, 21–22, 70
135–38, 141 politics of the performative and,
187 (film), 78–85
135–38
“Oppression studies”, 19
Public memory, 36–37
“Other”, 85
Public sphere, 28, 41 corporate culture and, 44
Ovitz, Michael, 114
economic determinism and, 24

Patriotism, 28
Rabinach, Anson, 35
Pedagogy
Race, 25–29, 70, 74
academic freedom and, 21–22
and popular unconscious, 75
academic multiculturalism and, 63
Race-based programs, 42
Bhabha’s teaching the political, 88, 95–99
Racial coding, in Hollywood text, 77–85
Botstein’s disciplinary knowledge, 89–92
Racial justice and equality, 70, 72, 75, 85
combating official discourses, 102–6
Racial stereotyping, 82
cultural politics and, 20–21
Racism, 66, 70, 74–75, 103–4, 153 n. 50
Douglass and the subaltern, 99–102
Radical humanism, 28
educated hope, 35 education as political,
Ramsden, Elsa R., 47
139–140 erasing the politics of, 89–94
Reagan administration, 70
informal learning from technology, 32–34
Reality politics, 6, 22
language of social criticism and responsibility,
Real politics, 26, 29
35–26 as moral and political discourse, 94 as a
Reeves, Jimmie, 84
political practice, 23 popular culture and, 31–
Religious values, 5
34 public pedagogy, 105 radical educators, 20
Reynolds, Kevin, 78
Showalter’s pedagogy-as-method, 92–94, 96
Rorty, Richard, 18, 22–25, 34
Phelan, Peggy, 137
Ross, Andrew, 17, 30, 111
Pluralism, 65
Ross, Brian, 4
Polemics, 14
Political culture, 71–77 citizenship vs.
consumerism, 3 crisis of, 1–6 as force of Said, Edward, 14, 122
change, 11 Gitlin’s model of, 29 need for new Schindler s List, 32
paradigm, 7 power and, 74 public’s loss of Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 70
faith in, 3, 13 Schneider, Alison, 54
Political education, 139–140 “School of Resentment”, 18, 144 n. 3
Political identities, 66 Segregation, 28
Politics of culture, 9–10, 71 public and higher Self-representation, 96
education, 32–34 Sexual abuse, 27
Politics of cynicism, 7–8 Sexual orientation, 25–29, 70
166 INDEX

Shattuck, Roger, 4 Tyco International, 54

Shipler, David, 74
Shohat, Ella, 66 Ukeles, Mierle, 136
Showalter, Elaine, 89, 92–94, 96, 105 Underground (Lacy), 136
Silber, John, 21, 52 University of California at Berkley, 15
Silicon Valley, 2 University of California at Irvine, 47
Sixties culture, 5, 18, 24–25 University of Pennsylvania, 46–47
Slavery, 27, 44, 103 master/slave narrative, 99–101 Urban ghettoization, 28
Sleeper, Jim, 25 Urban Institute, 42
Smith Richardson Foundation, 4, 70 USA Today, 48
Social change, 2, 17 cultural politics and, 17 Utopianism, 129
learning and, 88
Social identities, 62–63, 66
Viacom, 2–4, 42, 112
Social justice, 8, 12, 24, 38 “Victim studies”, 19, 23
Social movements, 23–25 as cultural, 29 Gitlin’s Vocationalism, 16
critique of, 25–31 politics of representation,
25–26
Social services, 8, 42 Wallace, Mike, 118
Sokal, Alan, 73 “War on drugs”, 82–83
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 66 Watergate scandal, 5
Sprewell, Latrell, 110 Waters, Lindsay, 23
Stam, Robert, 66 Weill, Sandy, 54
Stanford University, 45 Weissman, Robert, 112, 115
Steele, shelby, 70 Welfare programs, 5, 23, 42, 84, 87
Stigmatization, 85 West, Cornel, 14, 59
Subaltern, 99–102, 104 Western civilization, cultural politics and, 20–21
The Substitute, 77, 84 Westinghouse, 42, 112, 114
Sullivan, Louis, 116 Whiteness studies, 150 n. 6
Sykes, Charles J., 4 White supremacy, 28, 66, 85
Will, George, 19
Williams, Raymond, 30, 113, 129, 133
Taylor, Charles, 66 Willis, Ellen, 14, 132, 152 n. 49
TCI, 112 Willis, Susan, 119–120
Technology innovations applied sciences and, 1–2 Winokur, Julie, 109
global capital and, 8 pedagogy and, 33 Women’s studies, 23, 62, 87
Telecommunications Act of 1996, 4, 122 World Trade Organization, 15
Tenure, 52–54 “Writing in reverse”, 96
Textuality, 64 politics of, 67–69, 131–32
Thernstrom, Abigail, 70
Thernstrom, Stephan, 70 Yagemann, Scott, 78
Three Weeks in May (Lacy), 136 Young, Iris, 27
Tierney, Bill, 54 Young, James, 10
Time Warner, 2–3, 42, 112, 114
Tomasky, Michael, 25 Zemsky, Robert, 45
20/20 news program, 4 Zinn, Howard, 4