Super Girls, Gangstas, Freeters, and Xenomaniacs: Gender and Modernity in Global Youth Culture

7. Xenomania: Globalized and Gendered Discourses of the Nation in Cyprus

147 7 Xenomania Globalized and Gendered Discourses of the Nation in Cyprus miranda christou A typical scene at an urban mall in Nicosia resembles what Augé (1995) terms “a metropolitan non-place” devoid of localized features in favor of now familiar western European and North American styles. Clutching mobile phones, sporting the latest Puma athletic shoes, and pierced in trendiest of places, Greek Cypriot urban youth look much like their peers in any other European capital city.Yet on a different day of the week, these same youthful figures are equally likely to be found marching on the streets. Social scientists often deal with such disparate scenes in the lives of youth as distinct phenomena, focusing upon either the spectacular ubiquity of youth consumerism or the popularity of nationalist movements.My goal in this chapter is to span the conceptual gap between this customary division of disciplinary labor in order to analyze how“youth”is partially constructed through the intersections of discourses on globalization, nationalism, and consumerism. I argue that discourses of young people’s consumer practices —xenomania—reveal gendered constructions of indulgence and national resistance that dominate intergenerational dynamics in Cyprus. This chapter is based on ethnographic material from a study on memory and history in Cyprus where I explored how the educational system in Cyprus handles the issue of the 1974 Turkish invasion and continuing occupation: what kinds of stories students bring from home, what history is taught in schools, and how students, teachers, and parents negotiate their historical responsibility (Christou 2002, 2006, 2007).1 My initial purpose 1. This paper is based on an ethnographic project that focused on the negotiation of memory and history in the Greek Cypriot educational system and the intersections 148 | youth as a symbol of modernity’s contentions was to analyze how young people understand the national problem, and as the study progressed it was obvious that the generational gap was central in constructions of collective memory and history. I use here the concept of youth as a generation not in the strictly biological sense but in Mannheim’s (1952) thesis that a generation is formed through the shared experience of historical and political changes. The older generation of Greek Cypriots has been through the anticolonial struggle in the 1950s and the turbulent years after the 1960 independence and, of course, remembers the events of 1974, whereas the younger generation has experienced the post-1974 semioccupation . These different political experiences along with the changing landscape of economy dictate intergenerational dynamics and, I argue, show that, as in other postcolonial settings, youth are discursively constructed in the intersections of consumption and the nation. The responsibility of maintaining the memory of the occupied part alive is explicitly communicated to the younger generation. Since 1974 schools have been decorated with the phrase “I don’t forget and I struggle,” and almost all national celebrations are linked to the continuing occupation and the new generation’s duty to maintain the memory of those places as well as the desire for return. The “Cyprus Problem” consumes the everyday political, social, and educational life in Cyprus, and no reference to youth by politicians or educators misses the opportunity to emphasize their national responsibility to continue the struggle. For example, in his welcoming letter to all students in September 2004, the minister of education and culture reiterated, “Especially you, the new generation, ought to between school and home narratives. During an intensive four-month ethnography (September–December 2000) I conducted high school classroom observations (of history, Greek language, and citizenship courses) and observations of national celebrations and interacted daily with students and teachers at the school. Apart from the ethnographic material, this paper is also based on fifty-five interviews with students (ages sixteen to eighteen), ten teachers, and eight parents as well as four focus-group discussions with students . All of the student interviews were conducted in the afternoon at student hangouts (mostly cafés) and at the students’ homes when the interviews included the whole family. Analysis of the interview and observation material was based on the method of Critical discourse analysis as it was adapted for the study of national identities by de Cillia, Reisigl, and Wodaket (1999). See also Wodak et al. 2000; and Fairclough 1995. See Christou (2006, 2007) for findings from this project related to the construction of nationalism and national identity in Cyprus. Xenomania | 149 always be at...