What's Going On?

The Struggle for Contemporary American Identity

Lawrence Grossberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040446331
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Démocratie

Exploring the backstory of contemporary political polarization, What's Going On? recognizes that simple stories of blame and uncontested stories of polarization prove themselves to be bad stories that produce bad politics.

This book argues that stories have increasingly become matters of affect rather than meaning—instead of asking what stories mean, we are likely to ask how they make people feel. These stories are cultural tendencies that define the possibilities and limits of political action and behavior, and the book tells its own story about how the stories of America's crises have defined our political culture as they struggle over questions of ideology, identity, and social belonging. It lays out a theoretical position that recognizes the need for complicated stories and rigorous thought, pointing a way forward, out of the chaos, seeking to repair the world and offer better stories and more humane political possibilities.

This work is a vital resource for students and instructors in sociology, political science, cultural studies, media studies, and communication, in such courses as contemporary social theory, contemporary political theory, media, politics and society, and social movements and resistance.

The book will be an important guide for activists, organizers, and community field workers, and for anyone else who wishes to have a better understanding of the contemporary political moment and how to mobilize toward building a better future.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Invocation: To Repair the World
• Preface: How Does It Feel?
• Author’s Note # 1: Under the Cover of Chaos
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Tilting at Windmills
• PART I Everybody Knows
• 2 A Question of Affect
• 3 The Problem of Thinking
• 4 On the Way to Thinking
• 5 Contextual Thinking
• 6 The Discipline of the Conjuncture
• PART II You Want It Darker
• 7 The Problem Space of Affect
• 8 The Problem Space of the Modern
• PART III In the Dreams That We Dream, We Ask What Have We Done?
• 9 We’re on a Marathon (Prelude)
• 10 We Stumble and Fall: The Liberal and Hegemonic Tendencies
• 11 We Find We’re Alone: Stories of Polarization
• 12 We Beg Warmth from the Sun: The Speculative Tendency
• 13 We Stand for What’s Right: The Pseudo-Revolutionary Tendency
• PART IV We Would Build a New World if We Only Knew How
• 14 There Is a Crack in Everything (Politics)
• 15 That’s How the Light Gets in (Stories)
• 16 I Wish There Was a Treaty We Could Sign (DIFFERENCE AND BELONGING)
• 17 Dance Me to the End of Love
• Appendix: The Academy and the Crises of Knowledge
• Not Quite a Glossary of Key Terms (and Not Quite a Summary)
• Index