What's Going On?: The Struggle for Contemporary American Identity

Author:   Lawrence Grossberg
Publisher:   Taylor & Francis Ltd
ISBN:  

9781041120025


Pages:   236
Publication Date:   23 October 2025
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   Not yet available   Availability explained
This item is yet to be released. You can pre-order this item and we will dispatch it to you upon its release.

Our Price $305.00 Quantity:  
Add to Cart

Share |

What's Going On?: The Struggle for Contemporary American Identity


Overview

Full Product Details

Author:   Lawrence Grossberg
Publisher:   Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint:   Routledge
Weight:   0.700kg
ISBN:  

9781041120025


ISBN 10:   1041120028
Pages:   236
Publication Date:   23 October 2025
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  College/higher education ,  Professional & Vocational ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Not yet available   Availability explained
This item is yet to be released. You can pre-order this item and we will dispatch it to you upon its release.

Table of Contents

1. Tilting at Windmills, Part I: Everybody knows, 2. A question of affect, 3. A question of thinking, 4. On the way to thinking…, 5. Contextual thinking, 6. The discipline of the conjuncture, Part II: You want it darker, 7. The problem space of affect, 8. The problem space of being modern, Part III: In the dreams that we dream, we ask what have we done?, 9. Tilting at windmills (Prelude), 10. We stumble and fall: The liberal and hegemonic tendencies, 11. We find we’re alone: Stories of polarization, 12. We beg warmth from the sun: The speculative tendency, 13. We stand for what’s right: The pseudo-revolutionary tendency, Part IV: We would build a new world if we only knew how, 14. There is a crack in everything: Politics, 15. That’s how the light gets in: Stories, 16. I wish there was a treaty we could sign: Difference and belonging, 17. Dance me to the end of love

Reviews

“Our public culture is composed of the stories we tell ourselves, individually and especially together. And it has become deranged. In What’s Going On?, Grossberg draws on his own life experience and engagements as a public intellectual to narrate America’s decades of growing confusion and self-delusion. He goes beyond complaining about media manipulation and promotion of false narratives to probe underlying problems – like how we divide fact from value, affect from thought, music from politics, and academic from public life.” Craig Calhoun, University Professor of Social Sciences, Arizona State University, and author of Degenerations of Democracy “Grossberg is one of the greatest cultural critics in the English speaking world of the last half century. 55 years after Marvin Gaye shook up the world with What’s Going On, a pop album teeming with politics and prophecy, Grossberg offers his summum bonum, What’s Going On? a career defining volume that echoes Gaye’s classic grappling with a world in crisis. This is a tour de force that will leave us clearer about our ambitions and more determined to achieve a common good that seems fugitive and impossible to embrace in our deeply polarized world.” Michael Eric Dyson, University Distinguished Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies and Centennial Chair in African American & Diaspora Studies, Vanderbilt University


Author Information

Lawrence Grossberg is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author and editor of numerous books, including Cultural Studies in the Future Tense (2010), We All Want to Change the World (2015), Under the Cover of Chaos (2018), and On the Way to Theory (2024).

Tab Content 6

Author Website:  

Countries Available

All regions
Latest Reading Guide

NOV RG 20252

 

Shopping Cart
Your cart is empty
Shopping cart
Mailing List