Henry A. Giroux

eBook, ePUB

Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism (eBook, ePUB)

Second Edition

Beschreibung

In the second edition of Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism, Henry A. Giroux uses the metaphor of the zombie to highlight how America has embraced a machinery of social and civil death that chills any vestige of a robust democracy. He charts the various ways in which the political, corporate, and intellectual zombies that rule America embrace death-dealing institutions such as a bloated military, the punishing state, a form of predatory capitalism, and an authoritarian, death-driven set of policies that sanction torture, targeted assassinations, and a permanent war psychology. The author argues that government and corporate paranoia runs deep in America. While maintaining a massive security state, the ruling forces promote the internalization of their ideology, modes of governance, and policies by either seducing citizens with the decadent pleasures of a celebrity-loving consumer culture or by beating them into submission. Giroux calls for a systemic alternative to zombie capitalism through a political and pedagogical imperative to address and inform a new cultural vision, mode of individual subjectivity, and understanding of critical agency. As part of a larger effort to build a broad-based social movement, he argues for a new political language capable of placing education at the center of politics. Connecting the language of critique to the discourse of educated hope he calls for the reclaiming of public spaces and institutions where formative cultures can flourish that nourish the radical imagination, and the ongoing search for justice, equality, and the promise of a democracy to come.

Technische Details

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• Größe: 0.62MB

Barrierefreiheit

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Autor

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and has a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. His primary research areas are in cultural studies, youth studies, critical pedagogy, popular culture, media studies, social theory, and the politics of higher and public education. In 2002, he was named as one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period in Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education: From Piaget to the Present. He is on the editorial and advisory boards of many scholarly journals and has published numerous books and articles. His most recent books are America's Educational Deficit and the War on Youth (2013), Neoliberalism's War on Higher Education (2014), and The Violence of Organized Forgetting (2014).

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers
• Seitenzahl: 229
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. September 2014
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781454194323
• Artikelnr.: 53492644

Rezensionen

«Henry Giroux is one of the foremost public intellectuals writing on issues of education in the U.S. today. This book is another testament to his long-standing quest for a just, egalitarian, and critical pedagogy against its distortion in the service of economic, political and cultural power. His pungent style gives powerful voice to a passionate commitment to youth whose futures are placed in jeopardy by an educational system that marginalizes their intellectual, ethical, and emotional needs - and all too often becomes complicit in their criminalization. The book should be required reading for anyone concerned with the social consequences of the neoliberal assault on public education, which the present administration regretfully has done

little to roll back.» (Arif Dirlik, Liang Qichao Memorial Visiting Professor, Tsinghua University, Beijing)
«In this timely and compelling critique of U.S. political culture, Henry Giroux makes clear how it is that Americans are living through what Hannah Arendt once called 'dark times', times in which the violence and cruelty of human disposability remains hidden in the black light of an increasingly authoritarian public realm. Passionately and incisively argued, Giroux's critique offers insight into the political and pedagogical conditions that have produced a 'zombie politics' and its associated forms of authoritarianism. In this respect, Giroux illuminates what we need to see in order to reconstitute a lost social democratic imagination.» (Roger I. Simon, University of Toronto)
«Henry Giroux offers his most passionate defense yet of democracy and civic values in his new book. This volume is a must-read in dark times like these. Giroux has for decades been an outstanding tribune for democracy, an advocate for civic values and for questioning the unequal status quo. In this new book, he takes up more vigorously than ever the threats to the public sphere from reactionary forces gaining momentum. For Giroux, these threats to humane democracy fit the 'zombie aesthetic' now pervading television, film, and popular culture. Politics has become a monstrous caricature of public deliberation with wild propositions and charges spreading fear and division. Giroux explores the hostile forces sucking the blood out of our constitutional rights as well as the vitality out of ordinary families. We have become a society of monopolized wealth and distributed poverty, a culture of endless war, legalized torture, detention without trial, bursting prisons, and schools that turn our bright children into data. These intolerable conditions require the outrage and insight Giroux offers in his new book. He has written a volume inviting us to democratic action and civic restoration before these dark times grow even darker.» (Ira Shor, Professor, City University of New York)