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  • Rethinking Street Culture:Enacting Youthful Defiance?
  • Angela Dwyer (bio)
Ilan, Jonathan. Understanding Street Culture: Poverty, Crime, Youth and Cool. Palgrave MacMillan, 2015. 216 pp. $50.00 pb. ISBN 9781137028587.

In Understanding Street Culture, Jonathan Ilan analyzes one of the key areas of future concern for young people: how they engage in street culture and the links between street cultural practices and disparate forms of marginality, criminalization, poverty, transgression, and consumerism. Chapter 1 begins with an inquiry into street culture as concept and mode of theorization. The author contends that it is not "a form of 'resistance', but rather a posture of defiance" (21). The precise differences between these terms is not very clear, given that the definitions themselves tend to imply one another (resistance meaning refusal to comply and defiance meaning open resistance and disobedience). In the conclusion, however, Ilan does hint at how thinking about street culture as defiance is a more suitable conceptualization than resistance, which ought to be "reserved for phenomena more overtly political in nature," suggesting that "street culture generally channels the defiance of exclusion as opposed to practical action towards altering configurations of power" (174). Ilan's analysis does not, however, elucidate precisely how defiance may be less political. Importantly, street culture is reconceptualized "as a spectrum running from stronger to weaker variants that ultimately provides a similar scheme for understanding the world" (23).

Chapter 2 moves on to map research dedicated to unpacking street culture, from its very early origins in the youth subcultural theorizations of Albert Cohen, Howard Becker, and Paul Willis in the 1950s to 1970s, through to more contemporary cultural criminologies. This at times reads as a "who's-who" of malestream (Bernard) street cultural theorizing, with surprisingly limited reference to [End Page 129] feminist theorizations of youth street cultural activities (Carrington and Pereira, Chesney-Lind and Irwin, Sharpe), meaning that particular understandings of street culture are privileged throughout the text, while young women's narratives about issues like street culture and violence are marginalized.

Subsequent chapters, beginning with chapter 3, look at the importance of a "spectrum-based" approach to street culture through an examination of the intersection between street cultural activities and class, gender, and ethnicity. Here, Ilan mentions the important work focused on the experiences of young women (Miller). Chapter 4 addresses issues of space, territory, and gangs, and argues for the importance of moving away from the loaded terminology around "gangs" and toward more nuanced ways of thinking about these youth group formations, i.e., in terms of "street cultural discourse" (61). As Ilan points out, this could potentially dissolve the loadedness of gang terminologies and replace it with terms such as "the fluid youth petty-offending group" or "the provisionally structured territorial and entrepreneurial drug-selling group," or perhaps "the criminally and politically active street cultural institution" (81). These options are all far more nuanced and captivating because they allow some overlap, and they avoid essentializing youth group formations as inherently problematic and necessarily criminal. Chapters 5 and 6 then examine the nexus between street culture, crime, and cool. Ilan demonstrates the links between "material deprivation," "social marginalization," and criminal activities, but he does so without intimating the level of seriousness of these links for those who lack the material resources and cultural capital that enable class mobility. Ilan shows how these links between street culture and crime become a commodity in chapter 6, and how this is literally embodied by the young people involved, which includes "the embodiment of violent potential" (106). The focus on the body here is exciting. Very few academic texts explore how young bodies are worked with, and put to work, across a range of different street cultural contexts, be it in licit and/or illicit ways, and in ways that produce specific pathways. In chapter 7, Ilan links street culture and globalization, pointing out how street culture marginalizes and excludes by creating conditions through which young people "can obtain the material means for survival" (133). Chapter 8 unpacks the notions of resistance and defiance in street culture, with the core importance of a move away from politically motivated resistance and toward broad defiance This shift singly references the experience of...

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