Abstract
This article analyzes Henry Giroux's recent book Youth in a Suspect Society: democracy or disposability? (Palgrave, 2009) and situates it within his post-9/11 critical interventions. Giroux has focused his recent work on theorizing, critiquing and challenging the confluence of militarization, corporatization and right-wing ideology that has characterized US society post 9/11. Giroux's post-9/11 books take up a central concern – higher education, raced biopolitics, media spectacles, neoliberalism – but that central concern is understood within a larger matrix of interconnected forces that have all combined in recent years to create a major threat to the future of democracy in this nation. To that end, this essay surveys how Youth in a Suspect Society analyzes the ways that post-9/11 US society has transformed its understanding of youth from promise and potential to suspect and commodity.