Impure Acts: The Practical Politics of Cultural Studies

This book begins with the premise that the culture of politics--culture's capacity to create those discursive resources and material relations of power that shape democratic public life--appears to be in crisis, subject to derision by a wide range of ideological perspectives. In opposition to such attacks, this book argues that struggles over culture are not a weak substitute for "real" politics, but are central to any struggle willing to forge relations of power, theory, and practice, as well as pedagogy and social change. Henry A. Giroux challenges the contemporary politics of cynicism by addressing a number of issues including the various attacks on cultural politics, the multicultural discourses of academia, the corporate attack on higher education, and the cultural politics of the Disney empire. IMPURE ACTS points to a new kind of cultural politics and a new kind of political culture that put knowledge and practice in the service of a more realized democracy.