on the canvas) but instead feel we can enter and touch the colours and forms it offers without identifying what it is that is touching us, we find ourselves in an intense pregnant moment that will affect our sensing.
The Pinturas Negras qualify as bearing what the German philosopher Wolfgang Welsch (2002) would call ‘transcultural effectiveness’. With regards to Japanese art, he describes a situation comparable to Julie‐Anne’s experience at the Prado. His words are insightful in defining attraction:
As distant as those works or conceptions may be in time and space, we yet feel, strangely enough, that it is we who are at stake here. Irresistible fascination is the outset. We sense a radiation emanating from these objects: though not made for us, they seem to approach us, to address us, we are strongly attracted and even fascinated by them. They appear to bear a promise – one, perhaps, of unexpected insight or of future enrichment. In any case a promise we should respond to. They seem to bear potentials able to improve and enlarge our sensitivity, our comprehension and perhaps even our way of being. (Welsch 2002)
Beyond works of art, everyday urban life is filled with pregnant moments. Living in a world of cities compels us to be sensitive to unusual political forms and immerse ourselves in everyday lifeworlds. We are inspired by Bence Nanay (2016), who stresses the multiplicity of aesthetic experiences and ‘resist[s] the urge to find some kind of essential feature of aesthetics: it comprises a diverse set of topics’. Because we are concerned with aesthetics as it relates to different dimensions of urban life and the politics embedded in and produced through urban experiences, our analyses mobilize conceptual resources from the main fields of aesthetic studies briefly discussed so far: everyday and environmental aesthetics (Berleant 1992, 2012; Blanc 2013) and aesthetic politics (Panagia 2009).
In the following chapters, we more specifically emphasize aesthetic political relations that operate through seduction and attraction, involving the strange feeling of being sucked into them, as within a magnetic field. This defines a pleasurable sensation, a hopeful horizon, ‘a promise we should respond to’ (Welsch 2002), because attraction involves responsiveness. Aesthetic political relations thus open up the imagination, prefiguring or charting new or other ways of being in the world (Murphy and Omar 2013; Carlson 2019). Seduction and attraction are twin modalities of power at play in aesthetic political relations. Examining their functioning entails looking at the execution of power (agency) and its effects in the world. In order to do so, agency is understood as embodied and distributed among human and other‐than‐human actors. Political action, therefore, results from embodied political gestures and the sensual, intuitive response to situational opportunities producing political acts which can become transformed into a politicized narrative through their accumulation in everyday life.
In short, aesthetic political gestures and acts are expressive of what Black feminist scholar Christa Davis Acampora (2007, p. 5) calls ‘aesthetic agency’ and potentially ‘transformative aesthetics’. She writes that ‘the core idea of aesthetic agency is that integral to our understanding of the world is our capacity for making and remaking the symbolic forms that supply the frameworks for the acquisition and transmission of knowledge’ (Acampora 2007, p. 5) and our sensory dispositions. In this book, we explore this by immersing ourselves in various youth urban worlds.
Youth Urban Worlds
In La révolution urbaine, written in the midst of the 1968 movement in Nanterre (Paris), Lefebvre (1970) specifically locates the potential for a Marxist revolution in the urban historical period. Indeed, urbanity, youthfulness, and political action have long been interrelated. This raises the question: Is the contemporary visibility of urban and youthful political action the simple continuity of the urban revolts of the 1960s across the world?
In the 1960s, as in the 2010s, young people were facing rapid processes of urbanization and globalization. They were constructing a clear generational rupture, what has been called a ‘cultural revolution’. There are, however, two major differences between the two historical contexts. The 1960s was a flourishing period of nation‐state construction, with the development in the Global North of the welfare state and the rise of social populism and national economic protectionism in the Global South. The 2010s was rather a period of nation‐state austerity measures and economic deregulation, in the North as in the South. The 1960s urban political mobilizations occurred in a period of economic boom, just before the economic crises of the 1970s and the rise of neoliberalism. The 2010s mobilizations represent instead the culmination of the struggle against neoliberalism in a context of global economic urban crisis generated by a mortgage debacle. One could argue that the global urban youth movements of the 1960s and 2010s represent the beginning and the end of what Tarrow (1998) would call a ‘protest cycle’, characterized by the visibility of youth and an urban logic of political action that fosters specific repertoires of action: spatial occupations, arts and cultural creativity, alternative lifestyles and rhythms, sexual liberation, embodied and spiritual explorations, global connections and interactions, closeness to ‘nature’, and more‐than‐human agency.
The development of global urban youth movements since the 1960s has been studied in France and Italy as the New Social Movement approach. In this literature, the objective is to uncover the structural socioeconomic and cultural transformations that led to the emergence of newly politicized issues (such as sexual orientation, feminism, and ecology) outside of the labour–capital nexus (see e.g. Melucci 1989; Touraine 1992). Inspired by Marx’s idea of labour as the motor of history, these authors define a social movement as a force that has transformative social power. The fact that social movement theory is interested in newly politicized issues that are particularly visible in young urban dwellers’ lifestyles might have initiated a reflection on the impact of youthfulness and urbanity on social mobilization. Yet, Lefebvre (1970), although not a social movement theorist per se, but widely perceived as writing within this context, is the only author who has explicitly raised this question. For this, he was criticized by Castells (1972) and Harvey (1973). In The Urban Question, Castells emphasizes that there is nothing specifically urban about the way history progresses. According to the young Castells, the prevailing motor of action is still class struggle. He rejects the idea that an urban mode of production is displacing the industrial capital–labour nexus and sees youthfulness as an irrelevant variable. He interprets political claims arising in cities as the contemporary manifestation of the capital–labour conflict, shifted from the workplace to the collective consumption spaces of the city. In Social Justice and the City, Harvey makes a similar argument, suggesting that the urban is still heavily dependent on industrial capital and thus cannot be analysed as a new mode of production. His evidence is that in the 1960s and 1970s, industrial capital was still far stronger than land capital.8 Until the 1990s, social movement theory did not theorize the urbanity of these new movements. Youthfulness was always implied given the demographics of activists in these movements, but never directly theorized.
In the field of youth studies, beginning with the Chicago School, youngsters were associated with deviance: hoodlums, aggressors, wasters, and so on (Thrasher 1927; Cohen 1955; Becker 1973). The focus of this work was on explaining why social problems emerge and their consequences for the ecological equilibrium of cities. At its beginnings in Chicago, youth subcultural studies tended to explain transgressive youth behaviour by emphasizing that marginalization produces specific sets of needs and behaviours and that deviance is more prominent in cities because urbanity challenges traditional community ties (Simmel 1903; Whyte 1943). In order to face marginalization, it explained, youth with similar problems of social adjustment will get together and invent their own frames of reference as a sort of support system. Subcultures generally refer to relatively distinct (urban) social subsystems within a larger culture (Williams 2007). By the 1970s, however, youth subcultural studies in the United States was moving from sociology to criminology, emphasizing youth as potential criminals and leaving behind the earlier focus on youth cultural production.
Meanwhile,
