"Giroux is society's teacher and conscience"
—Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina
"America has become amnesiac," says Henry Giroux, “a country in which forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but celebrated.” In a series of essays on the intersections of political power, popular culture and new methods of social control, Giroux explores how neoliberal discourse and the ongoing commodification of everyday life constitute an active assault on public memory, chip away at civil rights, and diminish the public's capacity to speak and act in its own interests. Alarmed at the increased authoritarianism creeping into all levels of national experience, Giroux looks to flashpoints in current events to reveal how the institutions of government and business are at work to promote mass quietism and passivity.
For Giroux, widespread acceptance of the militarized lockdown of Boston crystalizes the degree to which society has come to accept martial law and mass surveillance as inevitable necessities of contemporary American life. Over-the-top repression of social movements like Occupy reveals an increasing intolerance and suspicion of those who challenge state and corporate power, while the violence marketed to youth as entertainment promotes further disconnection from a sense of cohesive community. Giroux’s book is a passionate call for public engagement as a means to push back against restrictions on freedom and the passive acceptance of a frightening status quo.
Henry Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University. A prolific author, he writes regularly for Truthout.
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