Identities

Global Studies in Culture and Power

ISSN: 1070-289X (Print) 1547-3384 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gide20

Introduction: youth, subjectivity and Utopia –

ethnographic perspectives from the Global South

Oscar Salemink, Susanne Bregnbæk & Dan Vesalainen Hirslund

To cite this article: Oscar Salemink, Susanne Bregnbæk & Dan Vesalainen Hirslund (2018)
Introduction: youth, subjectivity and Utopia – ethnographic perspectives from the Global South,
Identities, 25:2, 125-139, DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2017.1400280

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2017.1400280

Published online: 18 Apr 2018.

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IDENTITIES: GLOBAL STUDIES IN CULTURE AND POWER, 2018
VOL. 25, NO. 2, 125–139
https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2017.1400280

Introduction: youth, subjectivity and Utopia –

ethnographic perspectives from the Global South
Oscar Saleminka, Susanne Bregnbæk b
and Dan Vesalainen Hirslunda
a
University of Copenhagen, Denmark; bUniversity College Copenhagen, Denmark

ABSTRACT
As a fluid age cohort and a social category between childhood and adulthood –
and hence with tenuous links to the status quo – youth are variously described
as ‘at risk’, as victims of precarious and unpredictable circumstances, or as
agents of social change who embody the future. From this future-oriented
generational perspective, youth are often mobilised to individually and collec-
tively imagine, enact and embody Utopian futures as alternatives to reigning
orders that moulded their subjectivities but simultaneously fail them. The
papers in this issue look at how divergent Utopias inspire strategies, whereby
young people come together in transient communities to ‘catch’ a fleeting
future, cultivate alternative subjectivities and thus assume a sense of minimum
control over their life trajectories, if only momentarily. This special issue of
Identities explores the individual and collective strategies at play when political
and religiously inspired Utopias motivate youth in the Global South to imagine,
enact and embody what was missing in the past and present.

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 23 April 2017; Accepted 21 September 2017

KEYWORDS Youth; subjectivity; Utopia; Global South; generation; future

Youth in the Global South

It is easy to be taken in by the effervescence of expressive forms of protest,
yet – as amply evidenced by the Arab Spring – the long-term outcome of
revolutionary mobilisation in which it is often youth who take to the streets
is far from commensurate with their spectacular character. It has been one
of anthropology’s strengths to document the close alliance of political
stability with everyday social institutions – such as family and gender –
just as it has shown the potential subversive character of seemingly every-
day practices in what James Scott called ‘weapons of the weak’ (Scott 1985).
In this special issue, we explore these non-spectacular, everyday institutional
dynamics that serve important social, and in some cases political, functions
for youth, highlighting the potential transformative role of restless youth
populations.

CONTACT Oscar Salemink o.salemink@anthro.ku.dk University of Copenhagen

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
126 O. SALEMINK ET AL.

Over the past decades, the proportion of the world’s youth population
has grown steadily, accounting for 1.8 billion by the end of 2014, according
to UN statistics which define youth as the age cohort between 15 and 24
(but see UNESCO’s definition of youth ‘as a period of transition from the
dependence of childhood to adulthood’s independence’).1 If we would
tentatively accept the age cohort definition, 89% of youth live in the
Global South (Kedmey 2014), where difficulties of providing the new gen-
erations with secure livelihoods are undermining their paths to adulthood. If
we count all children up to the age of 24 as ‘youth’, as many as 40% of the
7 billion global population are negatively affected by inadequate, adverse or
precarious living conditions. In this special issue, we address the global
impact and transformative potential of youth by exploring how they culti-
vate subjectivities that are oriented towards and enacting Utopian futures –
even if their subjectivities and their Utopian imaginations are firmly
grounded in present conditions. We explore this through the comparative
strength of anthropological inquiry, as this allows us to probe the local and
specific enunciations of global dynamics. Global transformations require a
global ethnography that goes beyond ‘local’ and ‘global’ dichotomies and
that stresses the articulation of global characteristics in specific contexts
along economic, political, cultural and environmental lines (Friedman and
Friedman 2008; see also Comaroff and Comaroff 1991; Burawoy et al. 2000;
Smith 1999). The contributions to this special issue seek to explore global
concerns through an ethnographic lens.
Following Margaret Mead in her famous book Coming of Age in Samoa
(Mead 1928), Erik Erikson defined the youth period as a moratorium, an inter-
mediary period in which young people were free to experiment with different
social roles (Erikson 1968). Scholars have since then pointed out that the youth
period differs widely between societies and even within the same social group-
ings (Cole and Durham 2007; Bucholtz and Skapoulli 2009; Vigh 2006). Youth
has been studied as intersecting with other categories like class (Willis 1977),
race (Bucholtz 1999) and gender (Pujolar 2001). The impact of globalisation on
youth cultures has more recently been explored as connected with the ways in
which broader categorisations become fluid in an era of flexible citizenship
(Ong 1999; Cole and Durham 2007; Fong 2011). If we consider UNESCO’s
definition of youth as a period of transition, then we might notice its implicit
liberal assumptions about adulthood as characterised by ‘independence’,
which is often a code word for political and economic agency, structurally
embedded in and predicated on property, wage labour, citizenship and repro-
ductive kin relations. Moving beyond identity thinking dominating youth
studies in the Global North, this special issue looks at youth in the Global
South not as a uniform category, but as subjectivities in the making.
Mary Bucholtz has stated that ‘[t]he most productive view of youth cultures
and youth identities, then, must admit both the ideological reality of
 IDENTITIES: GLOBAL STUDIES IN CULTURE AND POWER 127

categories and the flexibility of identities’ (Bucholtz 2002, 544). The point to
note here is the liminal image of youth as (physically, mentally) ‘no longer
child’ but (politically, economically, kinship-wise) ‘not yet adult’, which makes
it a disjunctive category with regard to societal structures and expectations. In
approaching the societal disjuncture of youth on a global scale, we suggest
combining subjectivity and Utopia as two significant analytical perspectives
that help us dissect how youth are historically situated in, and experience,
their predicaments, and how they respond to, and participate in, collective
efforts for realising Utopian alternatives. Through this double perspective, we
seek to capture both the larger constraints of inter-generational relations and
tensions and the emergent responses to societal challenges. This is a com-
bined dialectic not only of the present, the emergent and the possible, but
also of the articulation of individual and collective endeavours as we analyse
the complex disjunctures and conjunctures forged through global youth
politics. Young people have been disproportionately affected by structural
adjustment, austerity policies and the financial crisis in past decades as well as
by intensified political turmoil, leading to a marked escalation in youth move-
ments, and youth participation in movements across the globe. Such move-
ments have taken the form of political protest, or of less spectacular but
equally radical efforts at pushing the boundaries of normative orders, through
participation in religious conversions and similar projects that marry social
change with personal transformation.
A word is in order on the delimitation of the study to the Global South.
While we are not particularly happy with negative connotations of ‘under-
development’ or ‘failed states’ that easily come to be associated with the
term, our intention here is to focus on areas of the world in which global
inequalities are more deeply entrenched and hence readily visible – even
though similar precarisation of youth cohorts is increasingly visible in
southern European states enacting austerity (Vradis and Dalakoglou,
2011), and among specific – often racialised – categories of youth in
generally better off countries of northern Europe and North America.
Yet, in spite of this simplistic binary of Global North and Global South,
we see these spatial categories as relational – there is no Global North
without a Global South – and hence as historically connected. In different
ways, the case studies we provide – from Nepal, China, Chile, Ecuador,
Egypt and Guinea-Bissau – offer snapshots of youth movements in recent
peripheries and emergent heartlands of expanding global capitalism.
Unlike in the Global North, where youth problems have been spatially
and socially confined and primarily studied in terms of subcultures
(Hebdige 1979), youth movements in the Global South have been differ-
ently disruptive (Richards 1996; Paul 2005), often spearheading violent
anti-systemic politics. Given emerging signs that youth politics in the
affluent North is beginning to change character with growing levels of
128 O. SALEMINK ET AL.

youth poverty and unemployment – see, for instance, the indignados in

Spain (cf. Taibo 2013) – we could assume that the cases offered here will
be relevant for exploring the dynamics of generational politics in coun-
tries where welfare states are beginning to crack.

Youth and Utopia

The individual and collective strategies at play in politically and religiously
inspired Utopias can be understood as ways of imagining, enacting and
embodying what was missing in the past and present. As an in-between
category youth are liminal in Victor Turner’s sense, namely with tenuous
connections to the status quo, and with the creative potential of communitas
(Turner 1969). Less tied to existing structures of domination and subjection,
youth face an unknown future. Sometimes these imaginings assume Utopian
qualities that are at radical variance with an experienced present – either
collectively or individually. Conversely, Utopian movements disproportio-
nately mobilise and recruit youth – having a lesser stake in the status quo –
as the rank and file of such movements. While studies of youth in the Global
North tend to focus on the notion of risk and on the emergence of particular
sub-cultures, studies of youth in the Global South have focused on how
young people navigate an uncertain terrain in their quests to obtain adult-
hood and social standing (Fortes 1984; Durham 2000; Vigh 2006).
The contributions to this special issue analyse how young people in a
variety of contexts in the Global South take part in shaping futures as they
gather in religious, political or cultural movements and seek to challenge
the status quo in a simultaneous quest for and enactment of new Utopias, in
the sense of the term given by Karl Mannheim in the 1920s: ‘Utopias […]
transcend the social situation, for they too orient conduct towards elements
which the situation, in so far as it is realized at the time, does not contain’
(Mannheim 1954, 176; see also Toscano 2010, 92–97). While the six selected
case studies (the Egyptian Resala charity, Young Nepalese Maoists, Chinese
Christian converts, Bissauan aspiring migrants seeking a better life else-
where, precarious Chilean urban youth aspiring for idealised middle-class
lives, Ecuadorian break dancers) cannot serve as ‘models’ of Utopian visions
and practices in any simple sense, we suggest that they uncover dynamics
that are emblematic for the constitution of new forms of subjectivities in
rapidly transforming societies of the Global South.
In state discourses around the world, youth–as a social category between
childhood and adulthood–are often described as being either ‘a risk’ or ‘at risk’,
a potentially dangerous ‘threat’ to be subjected to education, discipline and
social control, or alternatively as victims of precarious and unpredictable
circumstances. At the same time, youth tend to be seen as agents of social
change, as they embody the future of the nation and hence a category of
 IDENTITIES: GLOBAL STUDIES IN CULTURE AND POWER 129

people that the state and nation need to invest in, thus raising the stakes of
this ‘at risk category’ of youth. For instance, the Indonesian Revolution
(1945–1948) was to a large extent driven by the Pemuda – the Republic’s
Youth Organisation – especially in the beginning (Anderson 2006), and similar
dynamics were present in the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions (Pringsheim
1962; Duiker 1972). In contemporary China, as people come of age under the –
now relaxed – One Child Policy, the state sees them as paving China’s way into
the First World. These intertwined demographic and political dynamics turn
youth into a particularly productive site for exploring how global changes are
inflected locally and affect communities in myriad ways. Moreover, youth – as a
fluid, not-quite-settled category with tenuous connections to the economic
and political domains – can be used to explore the politically and culturally
inflected desires, which they seek to enact. In Guinea-Bissau, for instance,
young people may join armed civilian groups [aguentas] not so much for
overt political reasons but as a way of escaping the social moratorium of
youth and of achieving adulthood and social standing (Vigh 2006).
In that sense, the relation between youth and Utopia is not solely
characterised by the imagining of an alternative – and better – future, but
as an enactment of that Utopian future in the present. The case studies
presented here all show – albeit in varying ways – how youth already display
behaviour that anticipates an imagined or expected Utopian future.
Mannheim (1954, 176) argued that Utopias ‘are not ideologies in the mea-
sure and in so far as they succeed through counteractivity in transforming
the existing historical reality in accord with their own conceptions’. To the
extent that Utopia is precisely not ‘existing historical reality’, it has the
potential to stir people – especially young people – into action with a
view to realising it. This enactment of a Utopian future simultaneously
involves an embodiment of values that are potentially at odds with prevail-
ing values in society, and thus often materialise a distancing from the ways
of acting and thinking to which they had been exposed as children. That is
to say, the youth under study here are cultivating subjectivities that are
different from the subjectivities they had formed during their childhood.

Youth and subjectivities

This special issue takes the formation of subjectivities during the transitional
youth period as the object of inquiry, in their intersections with larger
societal and political forces. Our understanding of subjectivity is on one
hand inspired by Michel Foucault, who held that – rather than a site of
autonomous intentionality and agency – subjectivities are the product of
complex, historically conditioned processes, which he termed modes of
subjectivation [asujettissement] and which he defined as ‘the way in which
the individual establishes his relation to the rule and recognizes himself as
130 O. SALEMINK ET AL.

obligated to put it into practice’ (Foucault 1997, 264; see also Kelly 2009).
But this definition leaves space for self-stylisation or self-cultivation, which is
a never-ending process. In that sense, we are inspired by João Biehl et al.
who hold that ‘subjects are themselves unfinished and unfinishable’ (Biehl,
Good, and Kleinman 2007, 15). Moreover, the subjectivation of youth as the
transitional cohort between childhood and adulthood is necessarily unfin-
ished, thus creating a potential for self-cultivation as well as the cultivation
of new forms of sociality and radical change.
The ongoing trajectories of youth enable us to explore the political and
existential elements in social and individual experience of the various
categories of youth in the articles in this special issue. The subjectivities
that we explore point to a field of relationality that extends beyond
experience to the ‘force fields’ (cf. Nuijten 2005) of norms that constitute
the grounds of selfhood. Following Judith Butler’s reading of Foucault, we
approach subjectivity as an ‘ethical agency’ emerging in moral actions of
selves when confronted with an ‘other’ whose presence demands us to
‘give an account’ of ourselves (Butler 2005; see also Foucault 1997). This
Arendtian premise of selfhood as an expression of the spontaneity of the
will (Arendt 1958) combines the personal and the political and highlights
the moral anchoring of subjectivity. These connections have been pio-
neered by Saba Mahmood (2005) and Charles Hirschkind (2006), in their
work on ethical self-fashioning and cultivation of pious subjectivities
among Muslim youth in Egypt.
Whereas the relationship between youth and change has been posed from
the perspective of imagined futures in a number of studies (Durham 2000;
Sharp 2002), this special issue looks specifically at the dialectic between
Utopias and subjectivity; that is to say, between the local emergence of new
visions of alternative futures and people’s active effort at engaging and
enacting these ideas by transforming themselves. Butler speaks of Utopia as
the possibility of hope, as the site of convergence between an ethical self and
the fragility of dialogue ‘where no common ground can be assumed’ (Butler
2005, 21). Pairing Utopia and subjectivity allows us to focus on where the
notions and experiences of the self-intersect with the Utopian imaginations in
politics and in practice: ‘The fundamental dynamic of any Utopian politics’,
explains Frederic Jameson in his Archaeologies of the Future, ‘will therefore
always lie in the dialectic of Identity and Difference, to the degree to which
such a politics aims at imagining, and sometimes even at realizing, a system
radically different from this one’ (Jameson 2005, 4).

Spatial, temporal and social understandings of Utopia

Historically, Utopian visions and movements have had both religious expres-
sions – usually millennial or chiliastic, but also fundamentalist and
 IDENTITIES: GLOBAL STUDIES IN CULTURE AND POWER 131

evangelical – and political forms – vide the various communist, anarchist and
national liberation projects, but one could also see contemporary neoliberal
efforts of re-making state and society along moralising and disciplining
market models as a Utopian project (cf. Gray 1998; Gray 2007). As a con-
sequence, we deliberately investigate and straddle the relationship between
‘the religious’ and ‘the political’ (as a ‘secular’ domain). Talal Asad has
pointed out that the category of religion defined as individual belief
emerged through the politics of modern state formation in Europe (Asad
2003). In the late nineteenth century, colonialism and capitalism spread the
categories of ‘religion’ and ‘the secular’ and the concomitant internal differ-
entiation of societies into distinct ‘domains’, ‘spheres’ or ‘sectors’ – such as
economy, politics, civil society, the private sphere, etc. – to the Global South
(Van der Veer 2001; Masuzawa 2005; DuBois 2009).
Clearly, a bracketing of a clear-cut Eurocentric Enlightenment distinction
between the political and the religious is analytically useful in order to
understand the social dynamics at play when new Utopias are envisioned
and enacted. Inspired by Asad, instead of ‘belief’, we highlight subjectivity as
a deliberate grounding of the self within moral horizons of struggle, one
wherein the notion of Utopia emerges as a concrete alternative to experi-
ences of marginalisation and precarity (e.g. the ‘Direct Democracy’ of the
alter-globalisation movement, see Maeckelbergh 2009). Allegiance to a
political ideology may be just as fervent as the political critique at play
when Chinese youth convert to underground Christianity and imagine ‘The
West’ as safe-haven imbued with possibilities for personal autonomy and
way of escaping the predicament of endless striving, as analysed by Susanne
Bregnbæk in this special issue. The Egyptian charity organisation Resala, as
portrayed in the contribution by Sara Lei Sparre, combines a political
ideology about the desirable organisation of society with an ideal religious
way of life that in their mutual entanglements allow youth to redefine what
it means to be simultaneously Egyptian and pious.
The papers in this special issue present a series of empirical explorations
of how Utopian strategies emerge as part of particular life courses at the
intersection of state, market and religion, and against the backdrop of
societal change. Global disjunctures, and in particular national and interna-
tional differentiations that cut across regions, generations and sanctioned
identities, position young people in complicated situations. They have to
operate without clear routes to political or religious positions, where they
have a hand in shaping the public sphere or even in shaping their personal
life courses. In many cases, the very idea of what it means to be youth is in
flux as young people struggle to respond and find a footing within emer-
gent but confusing orders. The concept of Utopia, then, enables us to
explore how young people, as individuals and as collectivities, imagine,
enact and embody alternatives and in some cases seek to overturn reigning
132 O. SALEMINK ET AL.

orders, as is brought out in Dan Hirslund’s article on the Maoist youth

movement in Nepal. The protagonists in Hirslund’s study anticipate a differ-
ent, better future society where class distinction is abandoned, but struggle
to reconcile that political project with their own class background.
Following Ernst Bloch, the spirit of Utopia (ou-topos – literally ‘no place’)
encompasses quests for what is missing – a longing for an imagined else-
where at the periphery of our vision where a new life can begin, and that may
have political or religious dimensions (Bloch 1986, 1–17). In spite of the spatial
connotations that are brought out in a literal reading of the term Utopia, in
many understandings, it has a temporal rather than spatial meaning, as a
vision or imagining of a positive future. In Futures Past, Reinhart Koselleck
(2004) argued that from the beginning of the nineteenth century, Europeans
began to orient their desires, aspirations and very ontologies towards the
future rather than towards the past. One of these ‘futurities’ – as he calls
them – concerns the ‘temporalisation of Utopia’ (cf. Koselleck 2002, 84–99). All
contributions to this special issue involve such temporalisations of Utopia,
where only two articles address a convergence of spatial and temporal
dimensions. In Henrik Vigh’s study of aspiring Bissauan migrants, these latter
imagine their blissful future literally elsewhere, namely in Europe. Susanne
Bregnbæk zooms in on young Chinese Christians who imagine a different,
more compassionate and just society as being Christian which oftentimes
overlaps with a desire to migrate to Western, assumedly Christian countries.
In other cases, the temporal understanding of Utopia does not converge
with spatial axes, but is overlaid by a vision of good life in the same place,
albeit ethically different. This can take religious overtones, as in the above-
mentioned contribution by Susanne Bregnbæk, or in Sara Lei Sparre's study
of youth volunteers in the Egyptian, explicitly Islam-inspired, charity Resala.
But the protagonists of two other contributions to this special issue do not
seek to go ‘elsewhere’ or effect a radical political or religious change; rather,
they strive for a more or less Utopian turn in their personal lives. Members of
the breakdance subculture in Quito studied by Maritza Bode Bakker and
Monique Nuijten seek to enact and embody peaceful and equal relations in
their lives – also in terms of gender – through dance, in contradistinction
from what they perceive to be the normal and normative lifestyles in
Ecuador. In comparison, the Utopian ambitions of the protagonists in
Helene Risør and Ignacia Arteaga’s contribution on poor neighbourhood
dwellers in Santiago de Chile are at once more modest and more private, as
they seek to escape their oppressive living conditions by embracing a
(gendered) middle class lifestyle – usually in vain. These contributions
explore the relationship between biography and history in the vexed rela-
tionship between individual lives and collectively or privately imagined
futures, in particular when it takes the form of deliberately enacting the
future in the present, even if this is done on shaky social foundations.
 IDENTITIES: GLOBAL STUDIES IN CULTURE AND POWER 133

Ethnographic perspectives from the Global South

Divergent Utopian visions inspire strategies, whereby young people come
together in transient communities to catch – imagine, anticipate, enact,
embody – a fleeting future and in this way to assume a sense of minimum
control over their life trajectories, if only momentarily. In ‘Utopias of youth:
politics of class in Maoist post-revolutionary mobilisation’, Dan Hirslund
traces the changing role of youth in the Maoist political programme in
Nepal. The guerrilla army transformed into a political party after 2006 and
with their shift to parliamentary politics and a new focus on urban mobilisa-
tion, they were confronting a different class landscape of youth than during
the rural war. Hirslund follows two protagonists who are very differently
positioned in the urban class landscape and differently engaged with – and
disengaged from – the Utopian project of building a New Nepal, in the post-
revolutionary context. Inspired by Gramsci’s subaltern politics as well as
Harvey’s dialectical Utopianism, Hirslund dissects the ways that changing
urban class and political configurations affected youth – as a category, a site
of political mobilisation, and subject position intersected by ethnic, caste
and class differences. He shows how against the backdrop of competing
visions of the post-war transition across the political landscape, youth has
emerged as a frequent trope for concretising political change at the same
time as it relocates the struggle of politics onto the individual subjectivity of
young, aspiring activists.
The Maoist project was political but decidedly Utopian, as it sought to
transform Nepal into a new and better country, without the class, caste and
ethnic divisions that plagued it. Similar Utopian visions emerged during the
2011 Arab Spring that – albeit briefly – promised better, freer and more
democratic futures for a number of North African and Middle East countries.
Few of these promises materialised, and in Libya, Egypt and Syria Utopian
politics quickly morphed into dystopian realities marked by civil war and
political oppression. In ‘Experimenting with alternative futures in Cairo:
Young Muslim volunteers between God and the nation’, Sara Lei Sparre
situates her research subjects at the intersection of political and religious
projects. Her research subjects are pious middle-class Egyptian youth who
translate their religious inspiration into societal engagement as volunteers
of a large Muslim charity, seeking to do good and – in so doing – forge a
better nation, governed by Islamic compassion. Before the Tahrir moment,
their project was at once political and non-political: it was political, because
it envisaged a better nation as a corollary of embodied and enacted piety
and compassion, and it was non-political because it was not directed at the
state in any way. The Tahrir Square events mobilised these engaged youth
into more explicit political action targeting state power, but subsequent
events – the election victory of the Muslim Brotherhood and the military
134 O. SALEMINK ET AL.

coup by General Sisi – created deep divisions in Egyptian society. Sparre

argues that through the events before, during and after the Tahrir moment,
the young Muslim volunteers cultivated a specific political subjectivity,
inspired by commitment to a religious and moral Utopian project that
found expression in the non-secular nationalism of the Tahrir moment.
Another religiously inspired Utopia – of Christianity in and out of China – is
proposed by Susanne Bregnbæk in ‘In search of the heart of a heartless world:
Chinese youth, house-church Christianity and the longing for foreign Utopias’.
Bregnbæk offers close-up ethnographic portraits of young Chinese Christians in
Beijing and sometimes overseas. She argues that conversion to Christianity is
connected with a desire for a life away from the competition and materialism
that her interlocutors associated with Communist-but-postsocialist China.
Christian house churches, then, seem like a warm and caring alternative to the
harshness of everyday life. Conversion to Christianity, however, is risky and
evokes the sense of persecution. The negative perception of China’s
Christianity by the authorities led some of Bregnbæk’s interlocutors to want to
flee China for the West – the presumed Christian countries. Over the last decades,
there has been a steady trickle of migration from the Chinese mainland to
America and Europe, often of Chinese Christians who search for their Utopian
space outside the mainland of China. In other words, whereas Bregnbæk’s young
Chinese Christian interlocutors harbour an Utopian hope temporally projected in
the future, they add a spatial element to their search for Utopia by fantasising
and sometimes living out their dream of a better, religiously fulfilling life outside
of China’s borders in the present. She points to how Utopia remains illusive, since
the attainment of a new life goes hand in hand with loss of primary bonds.
This spatial imagining of Utopia as – literally – elsewhere is the theme of
Henrik Vigh’s ‘Displaced Utopia: on marginalisation, migration and emplace-
ment in Bissau’, which marries a temporal vision of Utopia in the future with the
enactment of Utopia in the present in the form of migration, whereby Utopian
visions of, and hopes for, the future inform practices and subjectivities in the
present. Vigh describes his Bissauan informants as stuck in motion – motile yet
struggling merely to survive. The article illuminates how this experience of
persistent marginality spurs a prospective positioning of the self, as aspiring
migrants construct visions of future scenarios where positive personhood can
be gained and subjectivity anchored; that is, futures that afford social being and
moral worth. The article argues that such a positioning takes two shapes. While
it may take the form of a social imaginary of better times – as a contingent
prolongation of the present into an imagined better future – it equally works
through fantasy as a detachment from one’s present predicament and an
envisaging of one’s self in a Utopian world imagined elsewhere, i.e. Europe.
But it is not always necessary, possible or desirable to migrate when
seeking to enact Utopia in the present. In their contribution ‘“When breaking
you make your soul dance” Utopian aspirations and subjective
 IDENTITIES: GLOBAL STUDIES IN CULTURE AND POWER 135

transformation in breakdance’, Maritza Bode Bakker and Monique Nuijten

describe a situation where young adults in Quito (Ecuador) build a Utopian
subculture by adopting a ‘lifestyle of difference’ from what they perceive
and experience as conservative and discriminatory values in mainstream
society, including their gendered family expectations. The article follows a
group of break dancers who cultivate their bodies and minds through dance
in public spaces, in a move away from the everyday violence of gang-
infested neighbourhoods. Their dance becomes at once an expression of
protest against everyday violence and oppression on one hand and a call for
respect of life in the streets on the other hand. Through dance, the crew
members deliberately turn themselves into ‘agentive bodies’ that enact and
embody an Utopian counterculture and cultivate new, positive subjectivities
that seek to overcome localised experiences of marginalisation, depression
and machismo. In other words, rather than temporally projecting a Utopian
vision into a distant future or spatially imagining Utopia as elsewhere, these
b-boys and b-girls create, enact and embody a Utopian counterculture that
is socially distinct from everyday life in the neighbourhood.
This endeavour of envisioning and enacting a distinct Utopian sphere is
brought closer to home in another contribution from Latin America. In
‘Disjunctive belongings and the Utopia of intimacy: violence, love and friend-
ship among poor urban youth in neoliberal Chile’, Helene Risør and M. Ignacia
Arteaga describe the fraught efforts by poor youth in a poor urban neigh-
bourhood of Santiago de Chile to enact a vision of Utopian life in the intimate
sphere, informed by middle-class notions of the good life. In theorising
intimacy as Utopian, Risør and Arteaga draw on Berlant’s (2011) understand-
ing of intimacy as a normative, yet Utopian, affective promise that allows for
imagining possibilities of a good life. In addition, this normative class-inflected
promise is clearly connected with practices of belonging and citizenship in
the post-Pinochet, neoliberalised Chilean polity and economy. Risør and
Arteaga argue that this sense of belonging is disjunctive, meaning that they
do not match state and middle-class expectations of proper citizenship even if
they inhabit the nation state. Like the b-boys and b-girls in Quito, the young
adults in this paper seek to enact a different life away from the depression of
their neighbourhood, and to cultivate gendered subjectivities matching the
middle-class lifestyle that they seek to emulate. Unlike the break dance crew,
however, they hardly manage to hold on to this idealised, Utopian lifestyle, as
they cannot shield their intimate relations from the depression, violence and
poverty of the neighbourhood.

Youth and Utopia in the Global South

The six contributions to this special issue of Identities shed new light on
debates of gender, class, ethnicity and citizenship by proposing youth as a
136 O. SALEMINK ET AL.

generational, age set and social category on its own – not apart from, but
intersected and inflected by these other dimensions. What makes the cate-
gory of youth a fertile site of studying processes of social change, resistance
and subjectivity is this temporal quality: having come out of childhood with
its notions of dependency, youth have not yet settled socially and do not yet
quite belong to society, but for that very reason are forward-looking rather
than backward-looking, as elder generations are wont to do. This is not to say
that elder generations have no vision of a future, but more often than not that
future is imagined as the future of their offspring, and hence a direct con-
sequence of their already established social situation. Temporally speaking,
youth have little to look back to, and live their lives in the present oriented by
the futurities that Reinhart Koselleck (2004) theorised – futurities which may
offer the lure of Utopian qualities or the abhorrence of dystopian collapse. As
the papers in this special issue abundantly show, in their future orientation,
youth often seek to enact the Utopian vision that they envision through
embodiment and by cultivating the subjectivities they desire to become.
That said, thinkers like Bloch (1986), Karl Mannheim (1954) and Fredric
Jameson (2005) remind us that Utopia is envisioned in contradistinction with
a present which often does not meet the expectations of many young adults.
Youth in the Global South are exposed to Utopian visions – either home-grown
or from ’elsewhere’ – that contrast markedly with their everyday experience in
growing up and claiming a place in society. One could argue that the distinc-
tion between Global South and Global North is becoming obsolete, but the life
experiences of youth from Nepal, Egypt, China, Bissau, Ecuador and Chile as
described in this volume are often painful and harrowing. The historical condi-
tions in which these youths find themselves propel them to imagine a different,
better life which – given the vast distance between their life worlds and their
hopes for the future – often acquires Utopian qualities, as brought out in the
articles. Simultaneously, however, these very conditions hold them back when
seeking to enact these Utopian futures – even if they move great distances to
escape these conditions, as pointed out in the contributions by Vigh on
Bissauan militia and by Bregnbæk on Chinese Christians.
This special issue shows how subjectivities are informed not only by the
past in Foucauldian terms (cf. Foucault 2007) but by futurities which may
assume Utopian qualities that are markedly different from present conditions.
The temporal and social in-between-ness of youth creates a tension between
what is and what is desired. In the resulting gap, youth seek to cultivate their
genealogically ‘inherited’ subjectivities in order to match, embody and enact
their Utopias. It is this very instability and fluidity, which make youth a
category whose dreams and actions allow us a peek into an as yet unrealised
future – a category of potential, possibility and hope. This forward-looking
enactment of expectations of the future make youth into global actors who
may remain relatively invisible, like the protagonists in the papers in this
 IDENTITIES: GLOBAL STUDIES IN CULTURE AND POWER 137

special issue of Identities, or who might become highly visible as the transient
foci of global media attention – like the ISIS or YPG fighters in Syria and Iraq,
or the refugees crossing the Mediterranean in unseaworthy ships. On the one
hand, youth emerge as ‘world-makers’, who threaten to unravel the powerful
networks of nation states. On the other hand, there is the ever-looming
prospect of failure, as in instances when efforts fall short and turn out to be
a pipe-dream, or when they end up reinforcing, rather than challenging, the
status quo that they sought to change for the better.
As youth emerge as political actors onto the world stage, they are
confronted with their own historically informed subjectivities as well as
with societal expectations that shape the ways in which their highly
diverse quests for new Utopias are played out, and which all too often
turn into disappointing new realities or even dystopian nightmares. The
contributions to this special issue on ‘Youth, subjectivity and Utopia’ show
that youth are important social and political actors in movements of all
stripes in the Global South, and that their motivation stems from often-
times Utopian visions and expectations of a better future for themselves.
While politicians, activists and other social leaders would be ill-advised to
disregard the power of these Utopian visions, social scientists and histor-
ians would do well to look not just at the past to understand present
predicaments of youth, but to extend their temporal scope and take their
Utopian futurities into view.

Note
1. UNESCO defines youth ‘as a period of transition from the dependence of child-
hood to adulthood’s independence’ and ‘a more fluid category than a fixed age-
group’. For official UN definitions, statistics and policies, see https://www.un.
org/development/desa/youth/ as well as ‘Youth population trends and sustain-
able development’ (http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/pub
lications/pdf/popfacts/PopFacts_2015-1.pdf, accessed 1 May 2016) and UNFPA,
‘State of the World Population 2015: Shelter from the storm’ (http://www.unfpa.
org/swop, accessed 2 May 2016). For UNESCO’s more fluid approach, see http://
www.unesco.org/new/en/social-and-human-sciences/themes/youth/youth-
definition/ (accessed 30 April 2016).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID
Susanne Bregnbæk http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3505-8088
138 O. SALEMINK ET AL.

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