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9. The Virtual Places of Childhood: Hope and the Micro-Politics of Race at an Inner-City Youth Centre
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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The Virtual Places of Childhood Hope and the Micro-Politics of Race at an Inner-City Youth Centre BONAR BUFFAM In cities across Canada and the United States, recreational youth centres have become politically popular antidotes to the crime, poverty, and hopelessness that are thought to pervade “inner-city,” ghettoized spaces (Kelley 1997). In Edmonton, Alberta, the Eaglewood Community Youth Centre1 was created to combat this “deleterious” influence of the street. This chapter draws on ethnographic fieldwork I undertook there to illustrate how the safe place desired by the centre organizers was intended to act upon and transform the otherwise hopeless futurities of inner-city youth. As centre staff worked to materialize this place of hope, the relations between youth, staff, and the material space of the centre surged with fleeting but effectual images and ideals of what childhood could and should entail. Occasionally, when youth flouted these virtualities, the ecology of affect that composed these relations intensified, registering different material and psychic displacements from and within the space of the centre. On one afternoon during my fieldwork, the relational landscape of the centre was transformed by an argument between two centre staff and a nineyear -old boy named Ricky, who stormed out of the building as one of the staff shouted after him, “… and don’t even think about coming back here for at least two weeks!” Jenny, one of the staff involved in the altercation, explained how the episode began earlier that day after she learned that Ricky had sworn at a cashier at the pawnshop next door. Upon confronting Ricky about his behaviour, the supervisors decided he should write a letter of apology to the cashier or face expulsion from the centre. Suspecting that Ricky could 197 9 198 HOPE not fulfill this task, Jenny insisted she would help him write the letter, an offer he refused by yelling, “Fuck you, bitch! I don’t need your help!” Although swearing was commonplace at the centre, it was rare to hear youth swear directly at staff; yet, in recreating the altercation, Jenny seemed less troubled by Ricky’s aggressive, misogynist language than by his refusal to accept her seemingly benevolent offer of help. In fact, as her narration of the event came to an end, she let go a deep sigh and explained bewilderedly, “It just upsets me when they won’t let me help them help themselves out of all this.” During my fieldwork, I often observed staff discipline or even eject youth for their “misbehaviour” or “lack of respect for others.” These interventions into the place of the centre were typically animated by desires to help youth actualize particular idealizations of childhood, variously imagined by staff as a state of innocence, purity, or, in the case of Jenny, incompetence and dependence. In this chapter I conceive of these idealizations as virtualities of childhood that are neither simply abstract nor illusory. Rather, as they affect different practices of exclusion and displacement, these virtualities of childhood acquire fleeting, immaterial, but effectual presence in the place of the centre. Following Shields (2003), I conceive of these modalities of the virtual as “placeholders for different forms of reality that are not tangible even though they are essential and necessary and productive” (19). Premised on particular desired futures for youth, virtualities of childhood animate the place of childhood sought by centre organizers . Like Hui, who theorizes a distinction between space and place, I differentiate the place of childhood promise sought by the centre staff from the material space of the centre itself, upon which they try to superimpose this desired place.2 As staff worked to open the “present” to the distant, suppressed potential of childhood, their practices of hope transformed the “ecology of affect” through which bodies and objects were related in and to the material space of the centre. Rather than simply defer change to an uncertain future, as accounts of hope often suggest (Anderson and Fenton 2008), these practices of hope affect the surveillance and displacement of perceived attachments to the inner city, which might otherwise endanger the promise of childhood. Following Anderson and Fenton (2008), I attend to how “hopes provisionally emerge from within the sets of relations and encounters that make up processes of hoping” (78). In this vein, I document how practices of hope are imbricated with racial modes of identification that apprehend Aboriginality as a symptom of anachronism and criminality (Blomley 2003; Razack 2002a). Attempts to materialize this place of hope through the centre...