Introduction: youth, subjectivity and Utopia – ethnographic perspectives from the Global South

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 collectively 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.

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 everyday 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.

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 generations 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 cultivate 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 intermediary 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 groupings (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 reproductive 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 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 combined 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 movements, and youth participation in movements across the globe. Such movements 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 ‘underdevelopment’ 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 differently 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 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 countries 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 disproportionately 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 adulthood 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 elsewhere, 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 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 measure 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 prevailing 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 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 unfinished, 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 pioneered 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 expressions – usually millennial or chiliastic, but also fundamentalist and 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 consequence, 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 differentiation 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 experiences 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 international 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 emergent 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 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 different, 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 elsewhere 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 relationship 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.

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 mobilisation, 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 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 emplacement 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 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 friendship among poor urban youth in neoliberal Chile’, Helene Risør and M. Ignacia Arteaga describe the fraught efforts by poor youth in a poor urban neighbourhood 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) understanding 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 generational, age set and social category on its own – not apart from, but intersected and inflected by these other dimensions. What makes the category 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 consequence 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 distinction 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 conditions 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 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 oftentimes 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 historians 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.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. UNESCO defines youth ‘as a period of transition from the dependence of childhood 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 sustainable development’ (http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/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).