Race, Place and Globalization: Youth Cultures in a Changing World (review)

Though there is much to recommend it, the content of Anoop Nayak’s new book does not live up to the promise of its cover and ambitious title. The jacket features a headshot photograph of Baljit Balrow, a young Indian-British woman, with a Union Jack painted on her face and wearing a traditional gold hoop in her nose that attaches to a chain and pendant adorning the part of her hair and forehead. This image suggests the complexity of national/ethnic identity for young minorities living in the migratory context of post-colonial Britain. Likewise, the title implies a consideration of such matters applicable to a global, postcolonial youth culture. Yet the bulk of this book concentrates on young white English men in the Newcastle region of Northeastern England. Very little discussion concerns either young women or South Asians and globalization is reduced to economic “deindustrialization” (unemployment) or cultural “Americanization” (style and consumption) which are accepted without examination. Nor is there a broader consideration of global, multicultural interactions among youth cultures as suggested by the title. I wonder if the title and cover were marketing decisions made by the publisher rather than the author. Either way, they are not very representative of the book’s content, and historians of colonialism and its legacy are likely to be disappointed.

The first third of the book “Passing Times” is intended as overture and based principally on secondary material. First, Nayak provides a fifty-year literature review of subcultural studies from the “Chicago School” through the “Birmingham School” and the challenges posed therein by feminism and postmodernism. This discussion is followed by a chapter on the social history of Northeast England in terms of its economy and demography over the twentieth century. The heart of the book, and its scholarly contribution, lies in its second part, “Changing Times,” where the original research is offered in three case studies of subcultural youth groups: the Real Geordies, the Charver Kids, and Wiggers or Wannabes. Nayak positions these groups sequentially along a spectrum according to their local or global identification. Analytically, he interprets them as having localist (Real Geordies), survivalist (Charver Kids), and globalist (Wiggers) tendencies in their subcultural formation.

There is interesting material on the way the Real Geordies “learn to be local” according to a cultural paradigm based on white male skilled industrial labor. Without any work or workplace available to them, the masculinized habits and cultural identity of being a “real” Geordie is displaced to football fandom, the pub, and womanizing. Meanwhile, the rival Charver Kids are defined predominantly by street-crime as an accepted practice that emerges among the young urban poor, the lowest stratum of the English working class who celebrate their ‘underclass’ status through consumptive and cultural practices. Interestingly, Nayak notes that the Charver identity was much more pronounced in the neighborhood than at school. He remarks on the “geographical contingency of subcultural identities that could be ‘toned down’ or ‘played up’ according to time, place, and context” (93). This is potentially very rich material but Nayak doesn’t follow up on a detailed analysis of this process or practice. How do particular groups or individuals alter their behavior, style, identities, language, and so on according to place? Given that Nayak is a scholar of human geography interested in establishing subcultural spatial studies, it is surprising that he does not go further with this by detailing the specific impact of place(s) on particular individuals as they move about and thus demonstrating how subcultural identity is indeed place-bound. These are intriguing ideas and I hope to see this sort of work explored more fully.

Nayak seeks to make a case that subcultural studies have overemphasized race in studying non-whites, thus causing “an over-racialization of visible minorities at the expense of a de-racialization of ethnic majorities” (139). This is surely right and his study of “whiteness” as a varied practice among these English youth is welcome and useful, but the exclusive focus on white youth...