Giroux, Henry A. 1996. New York: Routledge. $16.95 sc. 247 pp. On a train in the summer, in India, I begin reading Henry Giroux's latest book I'm on my way to Ayodhya where Hindu fundamentalists had only a few years ago demolished a Muslim mosque. The crude fact that my salary, paid in dollars, enabled me to undertake this journey in air-conditioned comfort to a place where identities are being fought over with drawn knives, media technology, as well as pages torn from history books, must be set side by side with another set of details, more immediate in this country. These have to do with the book I then held in my hands, its protest against the political naivete often encountered in cultural studies, and the savagery of cuts in education and social welfare imposed by the Republicans with more than a little help from the Democrats. This cultural collage is not a product of the cosmopolitan critic' s whimsy. It is the dominant condition under global capitalism. In Giroux's own engagement - indeed rightful insistence - on a mode of critical contextualization that is criss-crossed with multiple concerns, the most persistent presence is youth in the U.S. More specifically, it is the specter of violence against youth that haunts Giroux's text. The reason for this is not difficult to find, especially when we are thinking of black youth. Giroux's citing of George Lipsitz' s suggestive quote - "Unwanted as workers, underfunded as students, and undermined as citizens, minority youth seem wanted only by the criminal justice system" (39) - provides ground to launch a critique that seeks to analyze the reasons why things are the way they are. Hence, an analysis in terms of unemployment rates, drugs, and poverty but also, quite resolutely, junk culture, social disenfranchisement, and the lack of educational opportunity. Sitting in that train compartment in eastern India, I went through the reasons for advancing culture-based critique. The increasingly unemployed or under-employed English-reading youth in India are provided each week, in a popular newspaper column headlined "Objects of Desire, " the details of the latest consumer offerings of the West. (My nine year-old nephew proudly writes to me in a letter that he has just bought a tee-shirt which has the American flag on it.) Structurally, all this is not different from the condition in this country often described by Giroux, and which serves as the raison d'etre for this book. "Against the scarcity of opportunity, youth face a world of infinite messages and images designed to sell products or peddle senseless violence," Giroux writes. "In the light of radically altered social and economic conditions, educators need to fashion alternative analyses about how youths are being constructed pedagogically, economically, and culturally within the changing nature of a postmodern culture of violence" (29). In the opening pages of his book, Giroux reveals why he might be well- suited to this task. His own youth was shaped in a working-class culture in which he learned the primacy of the body: the body bent in labor, or engaging other sleek and stylized bodies on the floor of that public sphere called the basketball court, or overtaken, as in his mother's case, by repeated attacks of epilepsy. If Giroux's writing on the "racial coding of violence" carries the memory of the intense working-out of the contradictory histories of bodily exchanges in his youth, his repeated emphasis on the deployment of a political understanding in the institutions of higher education and the role of "public intellectuals" bears testimony to his later experience as an oppositional, leftist academic. He was denied tenure by John Silber, the notoriously reactionary President of Boston University, who asked Giroux why he wrote such "shit" (8). Today, as the Director of the Waterbury Forum for Education and Cultural Studies at Penn State University, and as a widely, even incessantly, published author, Giroux commands a different type of attention. Even if in the case of Giroux, the individual, this might mean respectful legitimization, clearly the same cannot be said about this brand of pedagogy which faces hostile reactions from those in power who feel threatened by it. The question that follows then is this: from his position of considerable importance, what kind of public pedagogy model does Giroux provide us? The point of departure for Giroux is, I believe, a real and urgent one: "Few theorists within the field of cultural studies make pedagogy central to their work; nor do they read the politics and practice of cultural studies as fundamentally pedagogical" (18-19). We struggle under the regime of the peculiar division of labor, which means that questions of education get to be posed most commonly in composition and communication programs while radical issues of popular culture tend to be taken up in the new spaces of cultural studies departments. Giroux's scholarship problematizes this distinction; it makes both aspects of the equation dialectically necessary to any effort at progressive education. It is undeniable that in the contemporary U.S. academic culture, both the traditional and the postmodern left seem quite unburdened by vigorous questions about pedagogy. Take, for instance, the recent flap over the "Sokal affair" in which a physicist who identifies himself as a leftist published an article filled with "postmodern" inanities in the journal Social Text. No one from either side of the debate raised, as far as I'm aware, the question of how Sokal's claim to being a progressive pedagogue was never even addressed as a serious issue. This point is made better by John Mowitt: "I have no quarrel with Sokal's desire to invoke his decision to teach in Nicaragua with pride. I respect and even envy him in this regard. My quarrel is with the way he feels entitled to remain silent about his teaching practice, as though how he taught mathematics in Nicaragua is irrelevant to whether we ought to consider him a leftist academic or not" (Mowitt 1997). Giroux, more self-aware, proposes a "border pedagogy" that is cognizant of "the interrelated dynamics of a discourse of commitment, self-critique, and indeterminacy" (138-39). A border pedagogue, in Giroux's somewhat programmatic presentation, crosses and recrosses disciplinary boundaries as well as institutional boundaries that separate high culture from low culture. To the extent that this book is itself an example of such an intervention, Giroux crosses several lines as he examines with integrity the culture of Disney, Quentin Tarantino's representations of hyper-real violence in film, Rush Limbaugh as a talk-show host, and the limits of the kind of liberal cultural studies typified by the work of Richard Rorty. In doing all this, it seems to me, Giroux positions himself against a figure like Newt Gingrich whom he sees, quite rightly, as "a right-wing border-crosser, moving in and out of diverse public spheres and in doing so reinforcing the idea of teaching as a political pedagogy" (142). The mobilization of diverse knowledges as well as the ambition to be truly oppositional are both irreproachable impulses. And, indeed, we can see Giroux's quick effectivity when he succeeds in his double move of demystifying an issue and reframing it from a left perspective. Even at a rather basic level, he is quite adept at delineating the double standards at work in a racist U.S. culture: "When he [the black rapper, Ice-T] released his speed-metal album Body Count, it contained a song titled 'Cop Killer' and contained lyrics that advocated killing cops (through an act of self-defense). There was a massive public protest to censure the lyrics and to ban the album from being sold on the market. And yet when a white man, G. Gordon Liddy, used the same violent language, he received a Freedom of Speech Award. One wonders where the white guardians of free speech were when a prominent black musician was being censored for inflammatory speech" (146). And yet, one must ask, in connection with the title of his book, how might one think of what Giroux makes available as "fugitive" knowledge? Given the rise of what Ruth Conniff has called "the culture of cruelty" (quoted in Giroux, 22), surely Giroux's repeated return to a politics of compassion foregrounds rare virtues. But, if that term refers to a rarer presentation of youth cultures, including the work and thoughts of our students, then Giroux's work remains lacking. Although Giroux recognizes that critical educational work must "provide conditions for the production of 'fugitive' knowledge to enable students to move beyond symbolic resistance to specific acts of resistance" (128), there is very little present in the pages of this book to suggest that this indeed is happening in any of the classes around us. Even though it is possible Giroux arrived at these formulations through dialogues with his students and other youth, their voices are missing in this book, except for a couple of instances, This is disturbing not because every text on decentered pedagogy ought to reflect that broad plurality, but because, in a book focused on youth, the history of a shared investigation by the writer would have offered a collective narrative where the "fugitive cultures" would have found expression. And, in that case, other public intellectuals, including youth who are dj's, rappers, performers, scholars and critics, would have found representation in this otherwise - characteristically - widely-researched book. I finished reading the last few essays in Fugitive Cultures: Race, Violence, and Youth only when I was back in this country. Bill Clinton was debating Bob Dole on television and, even after cutting $54 billion out of public assistance, he actually had the gall to suggest that he had saved the cause of education from a remorseless Republican Congress. I had exchanged the sight of two men on their way to a far- away hospital in India, carrying on their heads a cot with a sick woman lying on it - for the television spectacle of two talking heads, both faithful servants of American corporate power, engaging in a debate that fully displayed what Michael Moore has dubbed "the evil of the two lessers." In a Mickey Mouse culture where the Disney-ABC control of media and entertainment is only a symptom of the loss of a shared, public sphere, one cannot but appreciate Giroux's practice of dissent as well as his efforts to locate and build counter-public spheres of learning. At the same time, for reasons not limited to the text under review, I must take note of the power of Disney and ask myself why Giroux has written his book - and why am I writing this review for College Literature? Rather than put on parade an empty populism, what this question really foregrounds is the issue of the form of criticism and the challenge of cultural production. Midway through his book, Giroux notes that "rather than deny the long- standing relationship between entertainment and pedagogy, cultural workers and educators need to insert the political and the pedagogical back into the discourse of entertainment" (109). Yes, but what about the other way around? The answer to that comes fifty pages later when Giroux writes that "progressives need to develop cultural and pedagogical practices that combine critical commentary with Mort Sahl-like irony and humor" (154). I will trust Giroux and agree that following Sahl will help critical pedagogy move beyond stodginess to things more gay. But, that's in the future. In the present, one is stuck with Stephen Talbot's reminder that it is Rush Limbaugh who is "funny" (quoted in Giroux 1996, 148) or Jon Weiner's opinion that it is Limbaugh's blending of right-wing ideology and pop-culture that is "brilliant" (quoted in Giroux 1996, 157). (Personally, I'm closer to Al Franken' s assessment that Limbaugh is a "big fat idiot" - and I mention this to remind ourselves that it is Franken, not Limbaugh, who is funny.) In any case, in the present, I hold close to my heart the Brechtian dictum "Cunning is necessary to spread the truth" - and look forward, for that reason, to future books on how "to instruct and to please" - by both Giroux and other cultural critics. WORKS CITED Mowitt, John. 1997. Survey and discipline: Literary pedagogy in the context of cultural studies. In Class issues: Pedagogy, cultural studies and the public sphere, ed Amitava Kumar. New York: New York University Press. Kumar, Amitava, Fugitive Cultures: Race, Violence, and Youth.(book reviews). Vol. 25, College Literature, 03-22-1998, pp 201(4).