ABSTRACT
Though rooted in histories, intentions, and effects that endure, resistance comes in moments. The moment a teenage White boy in Paul Willis's (1977) canonical Learning to Labour empties his pockets of ID, pulls on gloves, and sets off with fellow lads to break into the school building after hours. Willis says that, by carrying out this kind of “thievery,” the boys challenge authority through well-calculated risk. The moment a South Asian Muslim high-school student in Boston a week after September 11 chooses to write the words “INDIA + MUSLIM” on her bag. It's a gesture that reinforces the girl's analysis linking domestic and imperial warfare and tells us something important about “the nature of dissent at a time of political repression,” according to Sunaina Maira's (2009, p. 208) study of youth, citizenship, and empire. The moment a young woman at a subway station in Oakland, California, uses a digital camera to capture the commotion she hears out on the platform after transit police officers detain a group of young men in the early morning hours of New Year's Day 2009. Despite her own fear and orders to stay back, the passenger keeps rolling as one of the officers, a 27-year-old White man named Johannes Mehserle, shoots and kills a 22-year-old Black man, Oscar Grant, while Grant lies chest-down and unarmed on the platform, hands restrained behind his back.
