What's Going On?

“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