Richard Hoggart was creating the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, moving the centre of subcultural studies across the Atlantic Ocean. Hoggart was less concerned with how marginalized youth get together and more with explaining subcultural formations in terms of power relations. From Chicago’s explanation in terms of deviance, Hoggart and his team positioned youthfulness as class resistance (Clarke 1976). Henceforth, subcultures were understood as spaces of resistance to cultural hegemony, the most visible sign of which is youth styles. From Chicago’s ethnographic methodologies, youth subcultural studies turned towards semiology and phenomenology (Dillabough and Kennelly 2010)9. With this turn away from ethnography, the initial theoretical and empirical articulation between youthfulness and urbanity disappeared as subcultural studies moved from Chicago to Birmingham.
Straw (2002) suggests speaking in terms of urban scenes instead of subcultures. The idea of an urban scene emphasizes practices instead of stable identities. Because the city consists of ‘experiential fluxes and excesses’, individuals rely on urban scenes to find their bearings (Straw 2014). They offer places to see and be seen, but also to experience various identities and share common values. For Straw, a scene is a cultural phenomenon which participates in the effervescence of the city and its sociability. This is interesting because it focuses the analysis on the relationship between specific cultural activities and the space, time, and affectivity of the city (Born, Lewis, and Straw 2017). Yet, by moving away from subcultures, the concept of the urban scene has abandoned the initial concern with deviance and transgression. Political action is absent from this analysis.
During the1970s, in the francophone world, the sociologie de la jeunesse developed around very different sets of concerns centred in education and psychology. Researchers attempted to understand biological transformations and educational models. The 1980s marked an important shift towards a nonbiological conception of age in France, as in Quebec. The question became: How do young people enter adulthood? (Galland 2011). French sociologists identified various rituals constitutive of this transition to adulthood, such as moving out of the family home or having a child. Instead of studying marginalization or style (subcultures), the French‐speaking debate asked whether age was an efficient angle for social categorization (Gauthier and Guillaume 1999). If the British debate moved away from the urban, the French debate has never spatialized the youth question. It proposes a linear temporal model for understanding how youth grow up, how they grow out of youthfulness. It is not concerned with the specificities of being young and urban. For instance, when hip‐hop emerged in the French banlieues in the 1980s, the urbanity and spatiality of this cultural phenomenon was not considered relevant either by Bourdieu’s (1993) structuralist explanation or by Dubet’s (1987) more agency‐oriented analysis. In both cases, it was seen not as a youth subculture but as a poor copy of the North American original (Warne 2014, p. 59). The fact that French hip‐hop was born in and of the banlieue as a specific space and culture was not theorized.
In this book, our approach explicitly articulates urbanity and youthfulness to political action. Like the early Chicago School, we work with ethnography. Like the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, we adopt a critical perspective linking youthfulness and political action (although we do not necessarily frame this action in terms of resistance). Like the French sociologie de la jeunesse, we are concerned with understanding what it means, socially, to be young, as opposed to being ‘adult’. But we wish to explicitly spatialize this reflection. Doing so alongside racialized youths living in racialized neighbourhoods necessitates (as we will see in Chapter 2) that we pay critical attention to the effects of racial discourses, practices, and state apparatuses on experiences of youthfulness. The question for us is not so much: Why and how do young people transgress the adult norm or grow into socially functioning adults? Instead, articulating youthfulness, urbanity, and political action, we ask: Who can claim to be young? Who can assign youthfulness to a political subject? Under what and whose terms? What is youthfulness as a form of political action?
We find inspiration in the literature emerging from studies of youth and urbanity in the Global South. This literature is particularly insightful in theoretically articulating youthfulness and urbanity, perhaps because both are so much more visible in these Southern cities given the intensity of the urbanization process there and the inverted age pyramid in relation to the ageing population of the Global North. Of course, the urban context that inspired these studies is very different from that of Montreal. Nevertheless, if adapted to the specificities of the latter, the theoretical proposals emerging from these contexts are most useful for decentring the analysis.
Studying young trendsetters in Mexico City, Urteaga (2012) suggests seeing youthfulness as a position from which to experiment with cultural and social change. Youthfulness for her consists of a specific ‘way of being together’. Being together, for youth, is about opening spaces of fluxes and games in which they can constantly recreate their ways of being through aesthetic, a specific conception of work, ways of organizing themselves to work, new verbal and body languages, and forms of social conduct. In short, Urteaga emphasizes the idea of a youthful social and spatial position.
Simone’s (2005) work expands on this idea by emphasizing the mobile and fluid nature of this sociospatial position. Studying youth mobility cultures in Douala, he shows how circulation gives youth the opportunity to experiment through dispersion rather than confinement, thereby rejecting the enclosed idea of subcultures with clear boundaries. In the politically and economically unstable context of Douala, becoming somebody means being able to move around, to operate everywhere in the city rather than being known locally as the ‘son of Mr. X’. In this context, writes Simone (2005, p. 520), ‘disrespect for a confined sense of things, therefore, becomes a key element of self‐fashioning’. In Douala, being young means assembling various discordant temporalities and situations of potential informal work, because the present can no longer be considered a platform for the future. Youth life, in Douala, is a life of permanent circulation, rather than following the well‐known track of marriage and formal employment. Simone thus squarely rejects the French aspatialized perspective on the transition to adulthood.
Being young and mobile provides a very different vantage point from that of being married and employed, in Douala and elsewhere. This networked mode of spatial relations changes worldviews (and it is not exclusive to youth, even if it is perhaps more visible for them). The world becomes less linear, built from networks of significant places and collections of temporalities. A vantage point (Urteaga’s sociospatial position) not only provides a framework for reading the world, it also constructs a platform for fashioning oneself as a political subject. Bhabha (1994) explains clearly how travelling provokes a rupture in one’s identity, because being in a new place provokes feelings of estrangement; it displaces one’s identity; it changes one’s standpoint (in the proper sense of changing what we see and feel as we change where we stand). The more vantage points we experience, the more political subjectivity we develop. This entails discontinuous political ideas: we change more often what we think is the right political claim to make. We can more easily change ‘causes’, move across value systems and political influences. Political engagement becomes highly dependent on the various encounters we have along our many displacements. Allegiances are often only temporary.
This is what Bayat (2010) attempts to capture with the notion of a youth non‐movement, based on his analysis of young people’s resistance to the Iranian regime in the 1980s. Looking at almost invisible gestures such as the underground world of youth dancing parties and the informal market for prohibited music, he qualifies Teheran’s youth culture as a youth non‐movement. Instead of speaking of youth subcultures, Bayat prefers to speak in terms of youthfulness, to emphasize a political form and a way of life, instead of youth as an essentialized and biological category. What characterizes youths are youthful ‘ways of being, feeling, and carrying oneself (e.g. a greater tendency for experimentation, adventurism, idealism, autonomy, mobility, and change) that are associated with the sociological fact of “being young”’ (Bayat 2010, p. 118). Youthfulness, pursues Bayat (2010, p. 119),
