NYU Press Class Issues: Pedagogy, Cultural Studies, and the Public Sphere

The university classroom has been turned into an intensely bitter battlefield. Conservatives are attacking the academy's ability to teach, and at times its very right to educate. As the dust begins to settle, the contributors to this volume weigh in with a constructive and wide-ranging statement on the progressive possibilities of teaching. This is, in many ways, a book for the morning after the PC Wars, when the shouting dies down and the imperatives of pedagogy remain. Asserting a complex, inter-related agenda for teachers and students, Class Issues is an anthology of essays on radical teaching. Leading scholars of literary and cultural studies, queer studies, ethnic studies and working-class literature examine the challenges that confront progressive pedagogy, as well as the histories that lie behind the achievements of cultural studies. Class Issues offers a plan for the construction of an alternative public sphere in the rapidly changing space of the classroom in the academy. Class Issues is a compilation of important new work on the tradition of radical teaching as well as forceful suggestions for the mobilization of radical consciousness. Contributers:Goerge Lipsitz, Bruce Robbins, Maria Damon, John Mowitt, Donald K. Hedrick, Neil larsen, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Peter Hitchcock, Alan Wald, Mike Hill, Ronald Strickland,Henry A. Giroux, Rachel Buff, Jason Loviglio, Carol Stabile, Timothy Brennan, Jeffrey R. di Leo, Christian Moraru, Vijay Prashad, Judith halberstam, Gregory L. Ulmer, John P. Leavey, Jr., Jeffrey Williams. Review Class Issues reminds us that university intellectuals work in knowledge factories; that the factories produce engines of dominance; and that, therefore, sabotage has to be the order of the day. The essays state their cases with elegance, with thoroughness, and with economical precision. No one interested in addressing his or her mite of effort to transforming the world can afford to ingore this book.--Wahneema Lubiano, Duke University About the Author Manjit Kumar has a degree in physics and philosophy. He is deputy editor of the journal Paradigm, and a tutor at the City Literary Institute, London.