The Promise of Youth Anti-Citizenship

"The introduction and many of the chapters are rich in theoretical conceptualization of anti-citizenship and nuanced analysis of youth rebellion not simply as a result of their age or race, but rather as agentic outright rejection of the social confines of belonging."—Teachers College Record

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 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; the notion of decolonizing classrooms through Palestinian liberation narratives; and more. Through a range of methodological approaches and conceptual interventions, this collection illuminates how youth negotiate and exercise anti-citizenship as forms of either resistance or refusal in response to coercive patriotism, cultural imperialism, and predatory capitalism.

Contributors: Karlyn Adams-Wiggins, Portland State U; Ariana 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.

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.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction. Predatory Inclusion in American Democracy: Youth and the Imperative of Anti-citizenship

Kevin L. Clay

Part I. And the Children Will Lead Them: Youth Fugitivity as Anti-citizenship Pedagogy

1. Black Youth Refusing: Drapetomania and Neoliberal Education in Post-Katrina New Orleans

Kevin Lawrence Henry Jr.

2. Radicalizing Black Child Play, Conspiring in the Familiar Zones

Ariana Brazier

3. Radical Black Joy Is Citizenship

Damaris C. Dunn 

Part II. Seeing the Invisible: On Youth Anti-citizenship and the Struggle for the (Under)Commons

4. Coloniality and Antiblack Racism in Black Adolescent Girls’ Lived Experiences

Karlyn Adams-Wiggins

5. Queering the Citizen? Exposing the Myths of Racial Capital Fantasies

Diana Gamez and Damien M. Sojoyner

6. Black Youth Organizing for the Destruction of Schooling, the Citizen, and the World

Michael Davis

7. We Have Nothing Left to Prove, Yet a Whole New World to Accomplish

Christopher R. Rogers

Part III. “Who Do You Love, Are You for Sure?” Rejecting Citizenship’s Assimilations

8. Reclaiming the “Mexican Problem”: Chicano Youth, Agency, and the Rearticulation of Citizenship

Rachel F. Gómez and Julio Cammarota

9. Unsettling the “Good Citizen:” How Narratives of Palestinian Liberation Threatened a Liberal School

Luma Hasan

10. Enacting Identities of Resistance in Suburban Schools: Latinx Youth and the Possibilities of Anti-citizenship

Gabriel Rodriguez

Contributors

Index

Palestinian Teacher’s Travails