Growing Up Postmodern: Neoliberalism and the War on the YoungRonald Strickland 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. |
Contents
Introduction Whats Left of Modernity? | 1 |
A Caste a Culture a Market Youth Marketing and Lifestyle in Postwar America | 15 |
The War on the Young Corporate Culture Schooling and the Politics of Zero Tolerance | 33 |
Richard Price and the Ordeal of the Postmodern City | 45 |
Remorseless Young Predators The Bottom Line of Caging Children | 63 |
Growing Up Incarcerated The PrisonIndustrial Complex and Literacy as Resistance | 85 |
Ideology and Interpellation in the FirstPerson Shooter | 105 |
Trouble Child Barthess Imagined Youth | 121 |
The Big Business of Surfings Oceanic Feeling Thirty Years of Tracks Magazine | 139 |
Female Adolescence and Its Discontents | 167 |
The MisEducation of Righteous Babes Popular Culture and ThirdWave Feminism | 179 |
Post 68 Theory Is in the Streets | 203 |
219 | |
251 | |
259 | |
Other editions - View all
Growing Up Postmodern: Neoliberalism and the War on the Young Ronald Strickland Limited preview - 2002 |
Common terms and phrases
activism activists adolescent adult advertisements African American argues Australian Barthes's become Black Power capitalism capitalist Carol Gilligan Chicago Clockers consumer consumerism consumption Country Soul crime criminal critical DiFranco discourse drug economic essay example feminism feminist first-person shooter gender ghetto Gilligan Girl Culture Hansberry Hansberry's homosexuality identity ideology images incarceration individual industry interpellation issues juvenile court Kids labor Lauryn Hill liberation lifestyle literacy lives Lorraine Hansberry magazine male masculinity movement neoliberalism organization percent photographs Pipher pleasure political posthuman postmodern prison prison-industrial complex production programs racial radical resistance Roland Barthes role sexism sexual social society Sport strategies subculture surfers surfing surfing's teenage third wave third-wave third-wave feminism third-wave feminists tion Toni Cade Bambara Tracks Tracks's University Press violence Wolfenstein 3D Woman women writing York young youth culture youth market