Henry A. Giroux:

Fugitive cultures – race, violence & youth

New York & London: Routledge, 1996.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part is about race, violence and children’s culture. The second is about public intellectuals and populist persuasions, and the third part concerns race and national identity. In the introduction Giroux reflects on his own youth and neighbourhood. Growing up in a working class ‘site’ made some restrictions that were more oppressive than liberating. He writes about the lack of security of a middle-class childhood, and the working-class culture that neither accorded a voice nor guaranteed economic independence. They had more experience from what he calls a ‘fugitive culture’. The fugitive culture designates less rigid cultural formation and a conflicting and dynamic set of experiences rooted in a working-class youth culture marked by flows of uncertain interventions into everyday life. The contradiction between the brutal racism, violence, and sexism that marked their lives was a constant attempt to go against the grain by investing in the pleasures of the body, in warmth and solidarity, and the appropriation of neighborhood spaces as an outlaw public place.

The term ‘youth’ has different representations. Youth may refer to a personal, historical, and social construction that operates under many signs. It is an empty signifier whose complex meanings and representations are produced and expressed in a variety of sites (social contexts) and through a number of determinations. Sites are important for understanding how knowledge is produced. Youths learn in different sites as peers, popular culture and media. These sites have great influence on their knowledge in a post-modern society. Giroux argues for cultural studies as a primary area to analyze how youth as a social category is constructed within various contexts and spheres of popular culture.

Films like Pulp Fiction, Kids and the violence in Disney animations is analyzed with reference to representations of youth. Why do films like Natural born killers have a character who is white, with an individual pathology, political extremism or class specific nihilism, but violence in movies with a rap-culture subject is centered on gangs, black-on-black violence and social problems with race. Giroux’s viewpoint is that the violence in films promotes and distributes representations of the young black population. Blacks in urban society are violent and a danger for white people. People interpret violence as a spreading problem with young black Americans, which gives rise to white panic on the right-wing of society. The racist coding of representations of black youth tells us less about such youth than it does about how white society shapes public memory, disorder and marginal groups in America.

The political right-wing in society uses these representations of youth for their own purposes. Public intellectuals use the media to admonish the government to do something about violence in society. They use radio programs (public space) to advance populist opinions, and persuasions in public discussion. How can cultural studies and pedagogy confront all this and make access to information about race and violence more democratic in United States? Giroux’s views of ‘political correctness’ is both a political and pedagogical question. Social agency is important for education in different sites that youths use in their everyday life – school, popular culture etc. Public intellectuals are shaped in many sites. Inner city youth have produced their own public intellectuals, like black rap-artists, young film-makers and talk radio hosts.

Public intellectuals have to respond to what Giroux sees as the crisis of democratic public life in the United States. The conservatives’ attacks on race, the feminist movement and radical groups in university demonstrates that knowledge and power interact. Giroux argues that intellectuals cannot be detached from collective action. Public intellectuals act and cross broader political, cultural and social formations that both support their work and allow them to engage in collective struggles with others. Teachers need to understand and use those electronically mediated forms of popular culture: the world of media texts, videos, films, music, and other mechanisms outside the world of printed books. The curriculum needs to be organized around knowledge that relates to communities, cultures and traditions of students, which in turn provide them with opportunities to critically appropriate a sense of history, social identity and place.

The conclusion comments on national identity and multiculturalism with reference to globalization. Nationalism is crucial to understanding the debates over identity and multiculturalism, and is as important as the discourse of globalization, but we cannot overlook how national identity reasserts itself within new discourses and sites of learning. The right-wing hegemonic struggle for the construction of national identity is an attack on multi-culturalism, a defence of a common culture and a denial of pluralist democracy. Giroux claims that the culture of nationalism is rigidly exclusive and defines its membership in terms of narrowly-based common culture; nationalism tends to be xenophobic, authoritarian, and expansionist.

Giroux’s fugitive cultures interpret the social construction of youth, the white panic in the US and the right-wing public opinion of violence as a question of race. Power and knowledge interact, and intellectuals can give youths some access to knowledge about their own situation and how representations in popular culture are distributed. However, the moral campaign against the directors of hyper-real films and the question of a more realistic site or social context where violence is produced, is more dubious.