prefiguratively, developing new political forms, following an urban logic of action. Indeed, ‘taking young people seriously’, as Skelton (2010, p. 145) argues, ‘may well lead to new definitions of the political and demonstrate other ways of conceptualizing geopolitics and political geographies’. In the following chapters, as we immerse ourselves in various urban worlds, we will show how ‘millennials’ engage in a politics of social transformation based on digital and social media, but also – and mostly – on the sensuousness of the street. Rather than analysing these forms of youth transgressions and politics as mere deviance or countercultural excess, we see in these youth urban worlds the stuff of urban change.
Montreal in a World of Cities
It is from our ethnographies of Montreal that the complexity of aesthetic political action theoretically emerged for us. Montreal is a city where politics, arts, and experimentation are intensely felt every day by its dwellers. This is what Ivan, Kabisha, and Hubert expressed at the onset of this introduction. It is also what David Austin explains in the preface to his extraordinarily profound book on ‘Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal’. Quoting him at length is worthwhile:
My first sense of Montreal’s historical importance within the Black diaspora came in the 1980s when I was a high‐school student in Toronto. My older brother, Andrew, introduced me to a book that critically assessed the significance of a Black‐led protest at what is today Concordia University. Around the same time, I read Walter Rodney’s The Groundings with My Brothers, a book that I had discovered at the famous Third World Books and Crafts, which no longer exists. The book included three presentations that Rodney had delivered in Montreal in 1968. Clearly, Montreal had been home to major developments in the Black diaspora, and yet oddly very little had been written about it. (Austin 2013, p. ix)
Through oral histories, Austin depicts a Montreal central to the transnational Black Left and where Black political thought and actions have left significant imprints on ways of reading the world, as we will see in Chapter 1. He highlights the intertwining of embodied suffering and disciplining with racism and youthful politics. The following pages are inspired by his work, thinking about Montreal as a place with its own role in global urban youthful politics. Without explicitly stating so, Austin’s work on the role of Montreal in the transnational Black Left movement follows what Simone (2010) calls an ‘epistemology of Blackness’. Such epistemology requires situating the analysis in a specific place where, over time, certain ways of doing have crystallized because of the constant movement and intermingling of Black people. As a heuristic device, this epistemology helps emphasize circulations and connections; it enables, through sensibility to affective interactions, a description of specific worlds.
Our own experience in Montreal and the intellectual stimulation it provided us are at the origins of this book, as are our exchanges with students and colleagues who have moved through or near the Laboratoire Ville et ESPAces politiques (VESPA) research laboratory where we speculated and reflected (to borrow from Harvey’s (1985a) terminology) on a research programme aiming to explore urbanity as an object of study and a critical epistemology. We strove to consider the ways in which our urbanity in Montreal transforms our understanding of the world while opening up possibilities for acting and engaging with it.
In Chapter 1, we will describe how the intense sensorial experience of long winters, playful politics and street art performance, sexual nationalism, ‘White niggers’ and racism, linguistic spatializations, a youthful population, and a vibrant punk scene are some of the elements we bring forward to speak of Montreal’s urban feel. We could have chosen others, such as the role of balconies and back streets in public sociability. Despite its relatively small size, Montreal has long been a city within a world of cities, a city embedded in world culture and politics. This is notable in its activism, but also in its cultural production since the 1960s. This is why Montreal makes an interesting place to examine the transformation of the political process and logics of political action in an increasingly urban and connected world.
Marcotte (1997, p. 150; our translation) describes the arrival of a new type of character in Montreal novels in the 1980s, a character that has a ‘particular way of living the action’. This novel character enacts what we call in this book the ‘urban logic of action’, an action that unfolds with a concept of space, time, and affect very different from that which was prevalent in the world of nation‐states. Marcotte (1997, pp. 150–151) explains that starting in the 1980s, the unfolding of action in novels took place ‘within a dilated space, without boundaries or with very thin boundaries, a space that in itself invites crossing, displacement’. With regard to time, 1980s novels emphasize ‘infinity in the sense that time is not counted, sliced in function of an objective to attain, but it is lived through privileged instants. On the one hand, the “spectacular” stops, freezes, glorifies the present time; on the other hand, the importance given to look, fashion, dating, periodization, makes of time a pure succession of moments that evidently has nothing to do with what we call a historical movement.’ Finally, Marcotte (1997) notes that in contrast with novels from the 1960s and 1970s, the 1980s novel is not marked by historical confrontation. Instead, ‘in this space of mobility, in this time freed from the duty of orientation, action unfolds as a vital activity, game, party sometimes’.
In a nutshell, Marcotte’s analysis of Montreal novels evokes to us how urban ways of life transform our conceptual apparatus and filters of perception for understanding the world. He synthesizes what we call the exacerbation of an urban logic of political action, characterized by a conception of space, time, and rationality different from that which dominated the world of nation‐states. From the 1960s to today, global urban protest movements have made visible new ways of acting politically based on the confusion and dilemmas provoked by urbanization.
A Methodological Note
In order to understand the provocations of these urban political forms, or even to ‘see’ them, we must enter youth urban worlds, share their everyday political gestures. In other words, we suggest that political analysis requires ethnography, and not only ethnography of the state (Bernstein and Mertz 2011). It is, of course, a matter of academic discipline. Political philosophy and other fields have a very important role to play. Yet, this book is a plea for a stronger recognition of an ethnographic approach to political analysis. This means describing how action unfolds in concrete situations before explaining or justifying it. It means adopting an inductive rather than a deductive posture. It means engaging in ethnographic work ‘as a mode of “epistemic partnership”’ (Marcus 2006, cited in Papastergiadis 2014, p. 20).
Ethnography has been a prominent method in urban studies for a very long time. Chicago School ethnographies continue to inspire the field of urban studies, incorporating sophisticated intersectional analyses of power relations (see for instance Duneier 1999; Wacquant 2004; Ralph 2014). In the following chapters, we build on this tradition in order to make the argument that the current urban moment is uniquely in need of ethnography. This book suggests that in order to analyse political forms in the contemporary moment, a good unit of analysis is the relational micro, because it is at that scale that everyday and aesthetic politics come to make sense. Inspired by urban ethnographies such as Caldeira’s (2012) work on taggers and motobikers in Sao Paulo and Ghertner’s (2015) analysis of world‐city making in Delhi, immersing ourselves in youth urban worlds is a springboard for theorizing the political beyond resistance and organized protest.
This book emerges from various ethnographic projects undertaken at the VESPA Lab in Montreal between 2008 and 2016. Taken together, these projects constitute some of the urban youth worlds that we moved through during that period. We selected the following four ethnographies based on a sense of responsibility towards youth and intuitive attraction to objects of analysis often overlooked or disregarded by political analysts, but which open up different possibilities for learning about the transformation of the political process
