by Henry A. Giroux
Americans live in an age in which violence has become the problem of the twenty-first century. As brutalism comes to shape every public encounter, democratic values and the ethical imagination wither under the weight of neoliberal capitalism and post-racial racism. Continue reading Terrorizing school children in the American police state
by Henry A. Giroux Authoritarianism in the American collective psyche and in what might be called traditional narratives of historical memory is always viewed as existing elsewhere. Viewed as an alien and demagogic political system, it is primarily understood as … Continue reading The plague of American authoritarianism
by Henry A. Giroux On July 9, soon after Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old African-American woman, moved to Texas from Naperville, Illinois to take a new job as a college outreach officer at her alma mater, Prairie View A&M, she was … Continue reading Taking notes 48: America’s new brutalism: the death of Sandra Bland
by Henry A. Giroux “Let’s hope it isn’t too late to listen, listen intently, carefully, minds open, hearts full. Let’s hope.” – James Baldwin In 1963, James Baldwin published an essay entitled “The Negro Child – His Self-Image,” in The … Continue reading The fire this time: Black youth and the spectacle of postracial violence
by Henry A. Giroux The United States’ addiction to violence is partly evident in the heroes it chooses to glorify. Within the last few months, three films appeared that offer role models, however flawed, to young people while legitimating particular … Continue reading Hollywood heroism in the Age of Empire
by Henry A. Giroux If you want a picture of the future imagine a boot stomping on a human face forever. — George Orwell The larger reasons behind Eric Garner’s execution seem to be missed by most commentators. The issue … Continue reading Taking notes 42: state terrorism and racist violence in the age of disposability
by Henry A. Giroux Across the globe, a new historical conjuncture is emerging in which the attacks on higher education as a democratic institution and on dissident public voices in general – whether journalists, whistleblowers or academics – are intensifying … Continue reading Higher education and the new brutalism
by Giorgio Agamben A reflection on the destiny of democracy today here in Athens is in some way disturbing, because it obliges us to think the end of democracy in the very place where it was born. As a matter of fact, the hypothesis I would like to suggest is that the prevailing governmental paradigm in Europe today is not only non-democratic, but that it cannot be considered as political either. I will try therefore to show that European society today is no more a political society: it is something entirely new, for which we lack a proper terminology and … Continue reading The security state and a theory of destituent power
by Henry A. Giroux In the aftermath of the reign of Nazi terror in the 1940s, the philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote: National Socialism lives on, and even today we still do not know whether it is merely the ghost of what was so monstrous that it lingers on after its own death, or whether it has not yet died at all, whether the willingness to commit the unspeakable survives in people as well as in the conditions that enclose them.[1] Adorno’s words are as relevant today as they were when he first wrote them. The threat of authoritarianism to citizen-based … Continue reading The ghost of Authoritarianism in the Age of the Shutdown
by Henry A. Giroux Military-style command and control systems are now being established to support “zero tolerance” policing and urban surveillance practices designed to exclude failed consumers or undesirable persons from the new enclaves of urban consumption and leisure. — Stephen Graham Young people are demonstrating all over the world against a variety of issues ranging from economic injustice and massive inequality to drastic cuts in education and public services.1 In the fall of 2011, on the tenth anniversary of September 11, as the United States revisited the tragic loss and celebrated the courage displayed on that torturous day, another … Continue reading Criminalizing dissent and punishing Occupy protesters
Philosophers for Change 