Cover not available

Article published In: Youth language at the intersection: From migration to globalization
Edited by Mary Bucholtz and Elena Skapoulli
[Pragmatics 19:1] 2009
► pp. 129–143

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF

Youthful concerns

Movement, belonging and modernity

Open Access logo
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 1 March 2009
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.19.1.07rot
This commentary explores the links between language, modernity, and young people’s movement – within nations and across borders. Given the scope and pace of globalization and transnational migration, this movement has created a good deal of local and national anxiety over how youth are negotiating their rights to belong – in schools, in cities, and in nation-states. The commentary addresses how youth must be understood as specifically modern subjects, in Foucault’s sense of the term, including how they both utilize and trouble the binary categories associated with modernity, the ways that modern young subjects are constructed through discourses of sexuality, and the ways that young people are disciplined in specific social spaces. In addition to the possibility of hybridity and invention suggested by the juxtaposition of family and peer cultural traditions, the commentary asks how new youth styles also involve the disciplining of youthful bodies by institutions, family members, and peers.
References (42)
Alim, H. Samy (2006) Roc the mic right: The language of hip hop culture. New York: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Anderson, Benedict (1983) Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Anzaldúa, Gloria (1987) Borderlands/La Frontera: The new mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Barry, Andrew, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose (1996) Foucault and political reason: Liberalism, neoliberalism and rationalities of government. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo (2003) Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in the United States. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brumberg, Joan Jacobs (1997) The body project: An intimate history of American girls. New York: Random House.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bucholtz, Mary (2002) Youth and cultural practice. Annual Review of Anthropology 311: 525-552. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Coll, Kathleen (2004) Necesidades y problemas: Immigrant latina vernaculars of belonging, coalition, and citizenship in San Francisco, California. Latino Studies 21: 186-209. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff (2000) Millennial capitalism: First thoughts on a second coming. Public Culture 12.2: 291-343. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cruikshank, Barbara (1999) The will to empower: Democratic citizens and other subjects. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope, Sally McConnell-Ginet (1992) Think practically and look locally: Language and gender as community-based practice. Annual Review of Anthropology 211: 461-488. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Enloe, Cynthia (1990) Bananas, beaches and bases: Making feminist sense of international politics. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fischer, Howard (2008) Increased funds for English on fast track. Arizona Daily Star April 10: A1.
Forman, Murray (2005) Straight outta Mogadishu: Prescribed identities and performative practices among Somali youth in North American high schools. In Sunaina Maira & Elisabeth Soep (eds.), Youthscapes: The popular, the national, the global. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 3-22. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel (1973[1971]) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(1977) Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(1978) The history of sexuality. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(1991) Governmentality. In Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, & Peter Miller (eds.), The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, pp. 87-104.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(1993) About the beginning of the hermeneutics of the self: Two lectures at Dartmouth. Political Theory 21.2: 198-227. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gallagher, Charles (2003) Color-blind privilege: The social and political functions of erasing the color line in post race America. Race, Gender and Class 10.4: 22-37.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Handler, Richard (1988) Nationalism and the politics of culture in Quebec. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hill, Jane H. (1999) Language, race, and white public space. American Anthropologist 100.3: 680-689. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. (2008) The everyday language of white racism. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Irvine, Judith T., and Susan Gal (2000) Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In Paul V. Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, pp. 35-83.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lippi-Green, Rosina (1997) English with an accent: Language, ideology, and discrimination in the United States. New York: Routledge.  BoPGoogle Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mendoza-Denton, Norma (2008) Homegirls: Language and cultural practice among Latina youth gangs. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mosse, George L. (1985) Nationalism and sexuality: Respectability and abnormal sexuality in modern Europe. New York: H. Fertig.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Perea, Juan (1998) Death by English. In Richard Delgado & Jean Stefancic (eds.), The Latino/a condition: A critical reader. New York: New York University Press, pp. 583-595.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Perlman, Janice E. (2004) Marginality: From myth to reality in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro: 1969-2002. In Ananya Roy & Nezar Alsayyad (eds.), Urban informality: Transnational perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia. New York: Lexington, pp. 105-146.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Robertson, Roland (1995) Glocalization: Time-space and homogeneity-heterogeneity. In Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, & Roland Robertson (eds.), Global modernities. London: Sage, pp. 25-44. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rose, Nikolas (1996) Inventing ourselves: Psychology, power, and personhood. New York: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(1999a) Powers of freedom: Reframing political thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(1999b) Governing the soul: The shaping of the private self. London: Free Association Books.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rose, Nikolas, and Peter Miller (1992) Political power beyond the state: Problematics of government. British Journal of Sociology 431: 172-205. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rose, Tricia (1994) Black noise: Rap music and black culture in contemporary America. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Roth, Michael S. (1981) Foucault’s “History of the Present.” History and Theory 20.1: 32-46. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Roth-Gordon, Jennifer (2008) Conversational sampling, race trafficking, and invoking the gueto in Brazilian hip hop. In H. Samy Alim, Awad Ibrahim, & Alastair Pennycook (eds.), Global linguistic flows: Hip hop cultures, youth identities, and the politics of language. New York: Routledge, pp. 63-77.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sansone, Livio (2003) Blackness without ethnicity: Constructing race in Brazil. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Spady, James G., H. Samy Alim, and Samir Meghelli, Samir (eds.) (2006) Tha global cipha: Hip hop culture and consciousness. Philadelphia: Black History Museum Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tan, Amy (1995) Mother tongue. In Garrett Hongo (ed.), Under western eyes: Personal essays from Asian America. New York: Anchor Books, pp. 313-320.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tsing, Anna (2000) The global situation. Cultural Anthropology 15.3: 327-360. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt (2005) Friction: An ethnography of global connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Hurst, Ellen
2017. Rural/Urban Dichotomies and Youth Language. In Sociolinguistics in African Contexts [Multilingual Education, 20], ► pp. 209 ff. DOI logo
Warriner, Doris S. & Leisy T. Wyman
2013. Experiences of Simultaneity in Complex Linguistic Ecologies: Implications for Theory, Method, and Practice. International Multilingual Research Journal 7:1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 29 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue