Growing Up Postmodern

Neoliberalism and the War on the Young

Ronald Strickland

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
• Year: 2002
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781461637134
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This collection takes its inspiration from Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd, a landmark critique of American culture at the end of the 1950s. Goodman called for a revival of social investment in urban planning, public welfare, workplace democracy, free speech, racial harmony, sexual freedom, popular culture, and education to produce a society that could inspire young people, and an adult society worth joining.

In postmodernity, Goodman's enlightenment-era vision of social progress has been judged obsolete. For many postmodern critics, subjectivity is formed and expressed not through social investment, but through consumption; the freedom to consume has replaced political empowerment. But the power to consume is distributed very unevenly, and even for the affluent it never fulfills the desire produced by the advertising industry. The contributors to this volume focus on adverse social conditions that confront young people in postmodernity, such as the relentless pressure to consume, social dis-investment in education, harsh responses to youth crime, and the continuing climate of intolerance that falls heavily on the young. In essays on education, youth crime, counseling, protest movements, fiction, identity-formation and popular culture, the contributors look for moments of resistance to the subsumption of youth culture under the logic of global capitalism.

Table of contents

• CULTURE AND POLITICS SERIES GENERAL EDITOR: HENRY A. GIROUX, PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 - Introduction: What’s Left of Modernity?
• 2 - “A Caste, a Culture, a Market”: Youth, Marketing, and Lifestyle in Postwar America
• 3 - The War on the Young: Corporate Culture, Schooling, and the Politics of “Zero Tolerance”
• 4 - Richard Price and the Ordeal of the Postmodern City
• 5 - “Remorseless Young Predators”: The Bottom Line of “Caging Children”
• 6 - Growing Up Incarcerated: The Prison-Industrial Complex and Literacy as Resistance
• 7 - Ideology and Interpellation in the First-Person Shooter
• 8 - Trouble Child: Barthes’s Imagined Youth
• 9 - The Big Business of Surfing’s Oceanic Feeling: Thirty Years of Tracks Magazine
• 10 - Female Adolescence and Its Discontents
• 11 - The Mis/Education of Righteous Babes: Popular Culture and Third- Wave Feminism
• 12 - Post- ’68: Theory Is in the Streets
• 13 - To Be Young, Countercultural, and Black: Racial Pluralism, Countercultures, and African American Activism of the 1960s
• Index
• About the Contributors