IMPERIAL FEELINGS

Youth Culture, Citizenship, and Globalization

 Learning outcomes:

 To understand the major concept of youth culture

 To analyze the terms of youth culture, citizenship, globalization
 To understand the effect of MUSLIM IMMIGRANT YOUTH AND CULTURAL
CITIZENSHIP AFTER 9/11
 INTRODUCTION

 Youth culture is often taken to be the exemplary manifestation of

globalization, a testament to its possibilities and excesses,
highlighting the deep anxieties and desires it evokes.
 This binarism of globalization’s meanings, of course, is a gross
oversimplification of the complex effects of transnational flows of
culture, capital, media, and labor, but images of youth culture
represent the tensions associated with the economic and social shifts
of late capitalism.
 YOUTH CULTURE
 Youth Culture refers to the cultural practice of members of this age
group by which they express their identities and demonstrate their
sense of belonging to a particular group of young people.

CITIZENSHIP
 Citizenship is an allegiance of person to a state. Each state
determines the conditions under which it will recognize persons as
its citizens, and the conditions under which that status will be
withdrawn. Recognition by a state as a citizen generally carries with
it recognition of civil, political, and social rights which are not
afforded to non-citizens.
 GLOBALIZATION

 Globalization is the word used to describe the growing

interdependence of the world’s economies, cultures, and
populations, brought about by cross-border trade in goods
and services, technology, and flows of investment, people,
and information
 WHY THE BARRICADES?

 Youth, or at least, young activists, seem to be ever present at the barricades of

anti–World Trade Organization (WTO).
 Issues of youth culture seep into studies of globalization by way of their attention
to popular culture, media, and cultural change, but there is much less focus
directly on youth, and particularly on the ways young people themselves
understand or grapple with globalization.
 Globalization theorists need to pay more careful attention to youth studies and
include them not just as examples of other processes but as areas that contain
their own processes of responding to or even creating globalized culture.
 THEORIZING YOUTH CULTURE

 The theoretical framework that pioneered an incisive analysis of the

ideological construction of youth as a social category, and of the
cultural productions of youth themselves as responses to a particular
social and historical context, is that of the Birmingham school of
subculture theorists.
 Youthscape suggests a site that is not just geographic or temporal
but social and political as well, a “place” that is bound up with
questions of power and materiality
 MUSLIM IMMIGRANT YOUTH
AND CULTURAL CITIZENSHIP AFTER
9/11
 Many South Asian Americans, Arab Americans, and Muslim Americans,
or individuals who appeared “Muslim,” have been victims of physical
assaults and racial profiling.
 The South Asian immigrant student population at the high school is
predominantly working to lower middle class.
 The majority of the Indian immigrant youth are from Muslim families,
most from Gujarat, and several of them are actually related to one
another, as their families have immigrated as part of an ongoing chain
migration.
 CULTURAL CITIZENSHIP
 Citizenship has traditionally been thought of in political, economic,
and civic terms, but increasingly, analyses focus on the notion of
cultural citizenship as multiethnic societies are forced to confront
questions of difference that undergird social inequity.
 Cultural citizenship-cultural belonging in the nation, or the cultural
dimensions of citizenship more broadly~is a critical issue for
immigrant communities and minority groups, for the rights and
obligations of civic citizenship are mediated by race, ethnicity,
gender, and sexuality (Berlant 1997; T. Miller 2001; Rosaldo
1997), as well as by religion.
 FLEXIBLE CITIZENSHIP
 Research suggests that these South Asian immigrant youth are living a new
kind of transnational adolescence, increasingly common among what are
called “transmigrants” (Glick Schiller and Fouron 2001, p. 3), due to the
international division of labor that forces immigrant youth to cross national
borders—with or sometimes without their families— as economic or political
refugees. Nina Glick Schiller and Georges Fouron, in their brilliant
ethnography of long-distance nationalism, make the subtle distinction between
transnational migrants and “transborder citizens” who cross national borders
but “do so in the name of only one nation” (2001, p. 25).
 DISSENTING CITIZENSHIP

 The perspective of Muslim immigrant youth is very much rooted in

their identities as Muslims, who are targeted as such by the state,
and also sheds light on U.S. national policy as a manifestation of
imperial policy at this moment.
 the critique goes beyond the debate between liberal and
conservative appraisals of cosmopolitanism’s possibilities because it
raises an issue that is not emphasized enough by these critics: that of
cosmopolitanism and, related, of globalization, as an imperial
feeling.