Lost Youth in the Global City

Class, Culture, and the Urban Imaginary

Jo-Anne Dillabough, Jacqueline Kennelly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781135163396
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

What does it mean to be young, to be economically disadvantaged, and to be subject to constant surveillance both from the formal agencies of the state and from the informal challenge of competing youth groups? What is life like for young people living on the fringe of global cities in late modernity, no longer at the center of city life, but pushed instead to new and insecure margins of the urban inner city? How are changing patterns of migration and work, along with shifting gender roles and expectations, impacting marginalized youth in the radically transformed urban city of the twenty-first century?

In Lost Youth in the Global City, Jo-Anne Dillabough and Jacqueline Kennelly focus on young people who live at the margins of urban centers, the "edges" where low-income, immigrant, and other disenfranchised youth are increasingly finding and defining themselves. Taking the imperative of multi-sited ethnography and urban youth cultures as a starting point, this rich and layered book offers a detailed exploration of the ways in which these groups of young people, marked by economic disadvantage and ethnic and religious diversity, have sought to navigate a new urban terrain and, in so doing, have come to see themselves in new ways. By giving these young people shape and form – both looking across their experiences in different cities and attending to their particularities – Lost Youth in the Global City sets a productive and generative agenda for the field of critical youth studies.

Part I:
Introduction

A key power of narrative, claims Ricoeur, is to ‘provide ourselves with a figure of something’ […]. So doing, we can make present what is absent. Translated into the idiom of historical time, we are dealing here with the capacity to liberate ourselves from the blind amnesia of the ‘now’ by projecting futures and retrieving pasts. Projection is an emancipatory function of narrative understanding, retrieval a testimonial function. Both resist the contemporary tendency to reduce history to a depthless ‘present’ of ‘irreference’.

(Kearney, 2004: 99)

In this book, we seek to narrate an account of a new social group that has begun to gather both at the edge of the inner core and at the suburban fringes of late-modern Canadian cities. These are young people who have come to be seen by the media and even by some youth studies scholars as the ‘lost young people’ of the post-industrial global city, and who are thought to pose substantial threats to national order (see Nayak, 2003a, for theoretical and sociological critiques).¹ The youthful agents of these growing threats, which are presumed to be facing the ‘West’ at this moment, are seen principally to be deeply disaffected low-income young people, characteristically, but not always, from ethnic or religious minorities, and increasingly presumed to constitute a ‘homegrown’ problem of post-war multicultural nations, perceived – to use the much-quoted words of the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher – as an insidious ‘enemy within’ or, more recently, as a highly mobile worldwide threat.

In making such young people the focus of this book, we must begin by asking: what does it mean to write about a group of people who are often sensationalized in the wider public arena as ‘lost’? Are they to be described in this way because of the impact on their lives of state retrenchment, with all its bleak prospects for the future? And are they thereby constituted as the objects of another impending moral panic? Or perhaps the ‘loss’ is to be understood more in terms of an academic failure – of the inability of theory adequately to represent the complex interrelation of youth and youth cultures with social class and new scales of global change. Or, finally, to draw upon the now seminal work of Paul Ricoeur, have we simply failed as researchers to give young people’s accounts some figurative depth because of our own amnesia of the ‘now’?

In this book we attempt to address these questions. We do so by focusing particularly upon the cultural experiences of diverse groups of young people in two radically transformed modern urban centres: the Canadian cities of Toronto and Vancouver. Through a close engagement with the daily life experiences of 50 young people in these two urban concentrations, we hope to arrive at new conceptual understandings of the ways in which the ‘losses’ of which we have spoken are tied to both traditional and quite new forms of moral regulation in the ‘global city’ (Sassen, 2007; Skeggs, 2005; Skeggs & Binnie, 2004). We also explore the manner in which youth cultures are shaped by urban exclusion, specific local histories, diasporic shifts and migration flows, experienced by young people otherwise sensationalized away into a depthless mythology of the present. In revealing these elements of change, we seek to better understand how new class distinctions and cultural practices in youth groups emerge as they navigate discourses of zero tolerance, increasing surveillance, and new policing and media practices in re-ordered global neighbourhoods, schools and cities increasingly marked by a sense of loss (see Gallagher, 2007). Whilst increasingly unable to access the forms of mobility associated with global capitalism, these young urban dwellers have emerged as the symbolic locus for the general breakdown of life in the late-modern city.

Reporting on the urban riots in France in the summer of 2007, CNN offers us the following vivid and characteristically lurid expression of the prevailing mood of loss and disorder, together with the clear implication that particular groups of youth are still not to be seen by the wider public as a legitimate part of Western nations:

The violence has spread to poor neighbourhoods across France, shocking French society. ‘The response of the government is firmness,’ said de Villepin. He said that Monday night 8000 police backed up by 1500 reserve police will be deployed to quell the violence. De Villepin said that so far more than 1200 arrests had been made. He blamed some of the violence on ‘criminal networks’ but said much of it was carried out by ‘gangs of very young youths’ who feel they have suffered discrimination and deprivation […] [A]cting under a 1955 law, city leaders would be able to ‘apply a curfew to ensure a return to peace and calm’. Asked who was causing the violence, the prime minister responded, ‘They are delinquents.’

(CNN online news, [email protected]/2005/US/11/07/monday/index.html)

It is with these twenty-first-century moral fields in mind that we must necessarily begin our account by examining the question of the ‘lost generations’ of young people who live on the fringes of the urban core in the new global cities of today. We do so by pointing to the historical paradoxes associated with the common fixation, exemplified by much of the corporate media, upon the new ‘folk devils’ of today. Accounts based on these assumptions do nothing so much as to highlight the capacity of the social ‘world of the text’ to generate distorted images of young people through the lens of moral assumptions. For us, what this means is that we will need to look beyond the representation of economically disadvantaged young people as being ever in need of rescue from the clutches of vice and criminality, towards a temporal and spatial narrative of youth experience which does not leave these young people frozen in the text or in ‘historical time’ (see Ricoeur, 1981).

Such a recognition of temporality and historicity, alongside that of more dominant theoretical concepts in the study of youth cultures such as ‘culture’, ‘spatial imaginaries’, ‘discourses’ or ‘structures’, calls for sustained attention to some of the wider theoretical debates concerned with youth subculture and post-subcultures and their very limited presence in contemporary youth studies research (see Shildrick, 2006; Shildrick & MacDonald, 2006). For example, some argue that, along with the supposed death of class as a category of social analysis (the post-subculturalists), the utility of subcultural theory has now run its course (see Muggleton, 2000; Redhead, 1993, 1997, 2004). Others, by contrast, have retained an interest in analyses of the symbolic elements of youth cultures as they might remain connected to global variations in social class relations (see Nayak, 2003c; Pilkington, 2004; Shildrick, 2006). And still others argue for ‘next wave cultures’, ‘can do’ cultures or post-subcultures (see Harris, 2009).

Our approach here is to pursue a middle course, arguing that the residual weight of the past retains a hold over young people’s cultural expressions and social practices at the same time as change infiltrates and reconfigures those symbolic practices that form the basis of youth identity work. To talk of dispensing with the material, temporal and cultural forms of subject narration is to dispense with the power of meaningful experience through which any potentially displaced or de-centred subject must necessarily speak. In other words, we seek to show the relationship between the existence of what Paul Ricoeur refers to as an ‘opaque subjectivity’ which expresses itself through countless mediations – signs, symbols, texts – and meaningful human practices which are narrated across time and place.

At the same time, and regardless of place or temporality, young people are always the bearers of something which must necessarily exceed their own frontiers. To understand these frontiers and their excesses requires us to pay adequate attention to the temporal and spatial complexity which lies at the heart of narrative identity,² and to accept that there are uneven degrees and scales of global change which impact on young people at the level of local experience. The complexity and unevenness of youth culture across waves of change and context ultimately require us to turn towards the narrative accounts of young people themselves. We can thereby offer a temporalized comparative account of late-modern life that is able to incorporate the contemporary conditions that young people face as they navigate urban social arrangements which are ‘more than local and less than global’ (Pinney, 2001) and in no simple way linked just to the present. In our attempt to assess these frontiers, we hope to capture novel forms of youth culture which not only operate at the edge of our exemplar cities – Toronto and Vancouver – but which point to quite new ‘forms of selfhood and patterns of social life’ (see McDonald, 1999) associated with being young in global cities at the start of the twenty-first century.

In looking to the idea of narration and young storied lives, our concern is directed to moving away from ‘trauma narratives’ (see Felman, 1992, 2000) and ‘voice accounts’ of young people, and towards the idea of the young person who is always in the process of becoming someone through the relational practices of recognition. This is a storied process which operates through deeply symbolic, often invisible and sometimes quite unremarkable practices of recognition as young actors compose their experiences in particular places and temporal moments. This means that, for us, the story of being young forms the object of representation rather than the identity of the young person. And, in embracing this idea of the story of youth selfhood as operating somewhere between truth and fiction, myth and legend, and between the objective and subjective, we seek to show how youth narratives encode and recode ‘human time’. As Caverero (2000: 37) writes: ‘the identity that materializes in a “life story” has no future that is properly its own if it has no past in the present of its memory’.³ That is to say, that human time is a temporalized account of one’s life as represented in a story.

The paragraphs above encapsulate some of the major dilemmas and challenges which have led towards our thinking on youth narratives and social class, seen here as forming part of the ‘social world of the text’ and serving as a partial reflection of late-modern narratives of state life. If the narratives (e.g. visual, linguistic, aesthetic, written) we had encountered in our spatial ethnography had a clear substantive dimension, opening previously unexplored connections between the lives of young people in the post-industrial city and the lives of young people from an unknown past, they also spoke directly to larger theoretical concerns about the need for a temporally and geographically bounded account of youth culture. For us, young people’s accounts of life at the edge of the global city spoke to the need to find new ways of working towards a localized expression of that ‘temporalised sociology’ of youth cultures about which Patrick Baert (1992: 1) has so thoughtfully written. These expressions are not free-standing accounts of youth identity – as in sameness or in the same place – but instead represent the shifting moral registers of time and place as they are embodied and performed by young people themselves.⁴

All of these considerations lead us to our key questions: Why does the spectral image of late-modernity’s ‘lost youth’ sit so close to the core of public consciousness in ‘the new global city’? How are we to understand this image, penetrate its meanings and relate it to radical urban transformations? Such questions point us towards the kind of contemporary narrative account that appears here – the stories related by the Gangsta Girls and Boys, the Thugs, the Nammers, the Hardcore Asians, and the Ginas and the Ginos of today’s urban Canada – and that we place at the heart of the book.

Our hope in invoking contemporary accounts from young people is that we might begin to view youth narrations of contemporary cultural practice in the global city as a ‘mode of emplotment which synthesizes heterogeneous elements’ (see Kearney, 2004: 34) which unfold in the face of time and space, as well as simultaneously visualizing the official and unofficial forms of classification and governance of young people from a distant past and its modes of operation (see Foucault, 1977). Significantly, then, these youth narrations are not best seen as origins or as wholly unbounded discourses. Rather, they may be better understood as ‘effective’ narrations which help us recognize that

if everything is an effect of historical accident rather than will or design, then we are, paradoxically, both more severely historical and also more plastic than we might have otherwise seemed […]. We are more sedimented by history but also more capable of intervening in our histories.

(Brown, 2001: 102)

Our point here is that in contemporary political dialogue about young people, the association of the present to the past is typically cast through ‘idealizations and demonizations in particular epochs and/or [classed] individuals’ (Brown, 2001: 102; brackets our addition). How, this leads us to ask, do these representations hide, elide, defer or symptomize the place of young people in the present? How do they mask the most challenging questions about young people who live at the edge of twenty-first-century political economies, largely ignored by the nations who claim still to care for them whilst simultaneously mourning their own losses of apparent stability and tradition? In addressing such questions we hope to reveal the identity work in which young people themselves engage as they interweave lived experience in the twenty-first-century city with the landscapes, rituals and legends of the urban past.

Youthful Subjectivities of Cultural Loss, Risk and ‘Individualized’ Failure

At the same time as we endeavour to track novel patterns of youth cultural activity, we also seek to uncover what Willis (1977), three decades earlier, referred to as the forms of ‘caged resentment’ or what we call, following Raymond Williams and Frederic Jameson, the deep structures of ambivalent ‘feeling’ experienced by economically disadvantaged young people.⁵ In so doing we do not, however, wish to return to the factory shop floor, a pre- and post-war site of labour now also lost to the project of global change on a vast scale. And nor do we wish to remain tied to the other post-subcultural polarity of ‘lost youth’, entertaining seemingly oblivious and apolitical twenty-first-century lives on the techno dance floor or on the Ecstasy-driven global and digital transdance beaches of a once ‘distant East’. Grossberg’s (1997) ‘Dancing Despite Myself’ or the Ecstasy-driven phrase ‘I’d Rather Feel Bad than Feel Nothing at All’ come to mind here as apposite metaphorical devices for entertaining ‘lost youth’.

Clearly, the space of observation or of change is long past a fixed labour site, an apparently selfish Ecstasy-driven club culture, and an overly simplified account of territorial class practices of protection, kinship control and resistance. Instead, what we witnessed comparatively as we encountered the young people in our study was, on the one hand, the spatialized unfolding of a story about a wholly new group of young people, a group which still undoubtedly carried the historical burdens of social resentment towards a state which remained substantially tied to class (a class that was not yet dead but rather still mired in boredom or ‘anomie’).⁶ On the other hand, and often simultaneously, we also recognized youthful experiences of quite substantial post-war diasporic movement leading to new spatialized and localized forms of youth classification (see Nayak, 2003b). Here was a spatially and culturally reconfigured ‘urban imprisonment’, a kind of ‘dancing in the dark’ which was most typically expressed as...

Table of contents

• Critical Youth Studies
• Contents
• Series Editor Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Young People’s Urban Imaginaries in the Global City
• Notes
• References
• Index