What's Going On?

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).

“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

• 1. Tilting at Windmills, Part I: Everybody Knows, 2. A Question of Affect, 3. The Problem 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 the Modern, Part III: In the Dreams That We Dream, We Ask What Have We Done?, 9. We're on a Marathon (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