Transnational Histories of Youth in the Twentieth Century ed. by Richard Ivan Jobs and David F. Pomfret (review)

Mixing two innovative fields of research does not automatically ensure good scholarship. Yet in the case of Transnational Histories of Youth in the Twentieth Century, a collection of essays edited by Richard Ivan Jobs and David M. Pomfret, the result commands admiration. Jobs and Pomfret have teamed up with ten authors from eight countries to investigate how youth—both as a gendered concept and as a social formation—emerged as an engine of twentieth-century processes of globalization. Not wedded to Eurocentric narratives or Western perspectives, the essays unfold a dynamic and complex panorama of a variety of transnational circuits and their impact on young people’s lives and relationships while also stressing youth’s agency in different forums of cross-border socialization.

Following a logically structured and theoretically insightful introduction, the first section, entitled “Activities,” focuses on youthful explorations of transnationality within the frameworks of organized youth and adult-supervised leisure. Sayaka Chatani’s chapter shows how, in the early twentieth century, young Japanese peasants imagined and forged long-distance ties with rural youths in other countries. Elena Jackson Albarrán offers a rare glimpse of the Boy Scouts beyond the Anglo-American world, contending that Mexican youths who joined the movement were struggling to refute the stereotype of Mexican society as backward. A similar pattern of appropriation and resistance becomes visible in Jialin Christina Wu’s piece on Girl Guiding in colonial and postcolonial Malaya. Finally, Heather Ellis rescues from oblivion a group of young British scientists and their engagement with Marxist internationalism in the 1930s and early 1940s.

The second section, “Mobilities,” traces the cross-border movements of young people seeking opportunities for leisure, work, political activism, and resettlement in foreign lands. Focusing on the French connections of Vietnamese youths who traveled to Europe in the interwar years, Pomfret demonstrates how these journeys gave sharper contours to the idea of Vietnam as a “nation-in-waiting.” Jobs’s chapter looks at the extent to which itinerant youths in Western Europe after 1945 operated as emissaries of reconciliation and embodiments of a postwar democratic Europe. Valeria Manzano takes the reader to South America during the revolutionary sixties, when politicized young men and women from Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile drew from the experience of travel a new sense of Latin American indigeneity. Andrew Ivaska’s chapter probes how the “global sixties” simultaneously widened and constricted the realms of self-actualizing for young people living in or crossing through Dar es Salaam.

The third section addresses the elusive but seminal subject of “Identities.” Adriana M. Brodsky unearths the multiple loyalties of Sephardi youth in Argentina and Israel, showing that their spheres of belonging transcended monolithic categories of faith, nationhood, and diasporic tradition. The flow and adaptation of youth cultures across the Iron Curtain is the topic of Juliane Fürst’s chapter, which details the attempts of Soviet youths to emulate their Western peers in defiance of state regulations. Fabio Lanza reinforces the notion of youth as a fluid and globally contested idea in examining how the Tiananmen Square incident of 1989 evolved from a local protest event to a global media phenomenon. The last chapter, by Paul A. Silverstein, uses the example of Franco-Maghrebi youth music, a hybrid musical movement that blends French and North African elements, to illuminate the power of youthful patterns of musical production and consumption to generate transnational political solidarities.

For all its accomplishments, the volume suffers from a few minor inconsistencies. The editors’ statement that youth has garnered less scholarly attention as a globalizing force than childhood is a bit overblown, particularly in light of the rich historical literature on transnational student protest, which the editors acknowledge. Also, as valuable as the book’s focus on voluntary forms of youth transnationalism is, the involuntary border crossings of young people in the period under investigation warranted greater attention. None of the chapters...