Jean Comaroff

Reflections on Youth, from the Past to the Postcolony

Most often construed as a transhistorical, transcultural category, “youth” has in fact been constructed as a socio-cultural group through the narratives of modernity. However, as ambivalent signifiers, youth reveals much about the modernist narrative of infinite progress. Although excluded from national and post-Fordist economies, they have gained unprecedented autonomy as a social category, being essential to global cultural production and often overwhelming the nation-state through transnational formations such as urban gangs, cyberpunks and soccer armies—all of which, however, participate in mass commodity cultures.