ABSTRACT
Shing Lu, an immigrant girl from China, offers a window of illumination into some of the social relations which frame youth classifications of the legitimate and illegitimate subject in the late-modern Canadian city. The means by which these classifications are reasserted, reclaimed and maintained are through the forms of bricolage or pastiche young people piece together where signifiers from the margins (e.g. the ‘immigrant’) are incorporated into elements of a dominant national narrative (e.g. respect, hard work) which function to evade the wider problematic of race in relation to youth legitimacy and belonging. In this chapter, we look more closely at some of the hidden dimensions of racialization which unfold and overlap in the form of moral claims constantly circulating in the cultural ordinary of youth subcultural and post-subcultural practice. In the previous chapter, we sought to reveal how reconfigurations of spatiality and young people’s urban imaginaries both in and out of school impact upon social relations and the associated ‘psychic costs’ at
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the level of youth cultural practice. A close ethnographic encounter with these social relations exposed the power of gender, home and spatiality – as particularly weighty class signifiers – to modify the ways in which young people performed their cultural activities, engaged in peer rivalry and narrated their experiences of exclusion. These narrations appear to be tied to the ways that social class and race relations are linked to tastes, style and forms of gendered affiliation, all part of a wider classification system upon which young people draw in the justification of cultural actions and in the attribution of meaning to particular youth groupings. In particular, such attributions can be seen to be authorized through the operation of language games and the re-appropriation of compulsory heterosexuality in and through the spaces where young people reside. Against this background, the corridor and the neighbourhood emerged – not unsurprisingly – as a site ‘fraught with competition, negotiation and accommodation occurring on multiple and intersecting planes’ (Stahl, 1999: 3). In the authorization of particular ideas of selfhood in the corridor as well as on the street, we can witness both traditional and new youth cultural patterns co-existing. But in both cases – the established and the novel – the youth subcultural dimension of positionality, symbolic power and class protection retained a dominating presence. Subcultural style is always designed in part to make ‘noise’ essential to the success of the group, most often through a discourse of gender and social class, with the racial categories of Thug and Gangsta expressing the post-war ‘phantom history of race relations’ (Hebdige, 1979). Here then we move beyond the authorized language of city streets to showcase the ways in which new patterns of race relations emerge and are ‘deposited’ upon what Stahl (1999) has called the already ‘loaded surface’ of working-class youth cultures living at the urban fringe, in circumstances of unprecedented national security and moral anxiety directed particularly towards low-income young people. Intimations of the scale and direction of these anxieties may be seen in their dissemination through the agencies of an increasingly sophisticated and globalized visual, electronic and print media (e.g. Levi & Wall, 2004; Lyon, 2004; Mason, 2004). The folk ‘agents’ of the accelerating threat which is presumed to be levelled at the ‘West’ in this moment are portrayed as typically living on the fringe – both literally and metaphorically – of global cities. It is with the complex currents of this late-modern context in mind that we now move forward to address wider questions about youth cultures, particularly as they interface with late-modern forms of politically driven morality associated with migration patterns and circulating perceptions of the ‘global city’. The questions we ask here are: How have wider media discourses of terror associated with low income groups shifted the character of everyday youth racism, and impinged upon daily patterns of youth cultural activity? How might we understand the character, as well
as the dimensions, of the consuming combination of suspicion and dread seen to be posed by post-9/11 low-income urban youth? How might we begin to comprehend, at the level of the everyday, the new geographies of difference and the novel strategies by which young people endeavour to respond to such anxieties in terms of youth subcultural and post-subcultural practice? And how do patterns of race relations, inherited through distinctive migration patterns in particular spaces, influence the expression of the complex concerns of the contemporary urban city? In effect, these key questions speak to the pervasive issue that informs the entire book, which is to say: How might we witness, through the lens of youth culture itself, the social construction of difference, both in and through place? The primary empirical reference point for this chapter is the Vancouver site (Beacon Park), as the research here was undertaken in a post-9/11 context. By contrast, the Toronto work, begun in 1999 and not completed until the immediate aftermath of 9/11, will serve as a point of temporal and spatial comparison with the Vancouver setting.
