Channel Surfing: Race Talk and the Destruction of Today's Youth - Softcover

Henry A. Giroux

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0333753240 ISBN 13: 9780333753248

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999

Synopsis

Kate Moss wears an invitingly sexual pout in a Calvin Klein ad. The urban teens in Larry Clark's acclaimed film "Kids" have unsafe sex, use illegal drugs and steal from their parents. "Dangerous Minds", tells us that South LA students of colour can only be saved by an angelic, blow dried Michelle Pheiffer. Kurt Cobain's suicide is held aloft as the archetypal example of teen alienation. What truth, if any, is contained in these depictions of today's youth? What message about our children is being transmitted? In this text, cultural theorist Henry Giroux turns his gaze to this barrage of media images and interprets the message, a message that sells children short by damning them to the preconceived role of alienated outcast. Surfing from one channel of communication to the next, Giroux builds up a complex web of associations between characters in films, tarnished real life teen idols, and sexualized presentations of nubile young clothing models to show us the dark vision of children that rides the airwaves and inhabits the print media.

About this title

Review:

The two sections of Channel Surfing, dealing respectively with youth culture and racial politics, may not appear to have much in common with each other at first. But Henry A. Giroux has an underlying class critique that binds them together. Young people are being barraged, he argues, by consumer culture messages that consistently identify them as alienated outcasts. They are also being assaulted by racial messages "targeting black youth as criminals while convincing working-class white youth that blacks and immigrants are responsible for the poverty, despair, and violence that have become a growing part of everyday life in American society." Although the balance between academic jargon and pop culture is somewhat precarious, Giroux's thesis is packed with the consideration of detail that marks useful cultural criticism.

About the Author:

Henry A. Giroux holds the Global Television Network Chair in Communications in the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University in Canada. He is the author of many books, including Stealing Innocence, The Abandoned Generation, and Take Back Higher Education.

About this edition

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0333753240
• ISBN 13: 9780333753248
• Binding: Paperback