The Promise of Youth Anti-Citizenship

When inclusion into the fold of citizenship is conditioned by a social group’s conceit to ritual violence, humiliation, and exploitation, what can anti-citizenship offer us?
 

The Promise of Youth Anti-citizenship argues that Black youth—and all poor youth of color—have been cast as anti-citizens, disenfranchised from the social, political, and economic mainstream of American life. Instead of asking youth to conform to a larger societal structure undergirded by racial capitalism and antiblackness, the volume’s contributors propose that the collective practice of anti-citizenship opens up a liberatory space for youth to challenge the social order.

The chapters cover an array of topics, including Black youth in the charter school experiment in post-Katrina New Orleans; racial capitalism, the queering of ethnicity, and the 1980s Salvadoran migration to South Central Los Angeles; and the decolonization of classrooms through Palestinian liberation narratives. Through a range of methodological approaches and conceptual interventions, this collection illuminates how youth negotiate and exercise anti-citizenship as either resistance or refusal in response to coercive patriotism, cultural imperialism, and predatory capitalism.

Contributors: Karlyn Adams-Wiggins, Portland State U; Ariana Denise Brazier; Julio Cammarota, U of Arizona; Michael Davis, U of Wisconsin–Madison; Damaris C. Dunn, U of Georgia; Diana Gamez, U of California, Irvine; Rachel F. Gómez, Virginia Commonwealth U; Luma Hasan; Gabriel Rodriguez, Iowa State U; Christopher R. Rogers, U of Pennsylvania; Damien M. Sojoyner, U of California, Irvine.

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Kevin L. Clay is assistant professor of Black studies in education at Rutgers University.

Kevin Lawrence Henry Jr. is assistant professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.