Let me start by paying this book a reader's highest compliment: it made me reconsider things I had taken for granted. All the years frequenting pool halls, internet cafes, city basketball courts and small-town seafood restaurants turned late-night karaoke bars without fully recognizing them for what they were: spaces where youth cultures are created, communicated, experienced. Readers may similarly have failed to attend to the significance of cosplayers congregating outside a movie theatre, convoys of young motor scooter riders or backdrop-hunting selfie takers. We can take solace in the editors’ declaration that this is not an uncommon oversight. If nothing else, this stimulating collection has taught me to recognize and appreciate the significance of quotidian spaces where youth cultures are expressed and shared.
Youth cultural spaces come in many forms. Some are public or commercial, others mobile or virtual. They all possess meaning when it comes to the construction of youth culture. Focusing on spatiality is to examine where youth cultures are created and consumed and to address the question of how different spaces of production and consumption shape the experience of young people's every day cultural practices. The objective of the book “is to provide a complex understanding of youth cultures that young Chinese are creating for themselves” (p. 2) amid the pressures of familial expectations, the rigours of the education system, pressure of the job market, social expectations from the always-on internet and conditioned by political circumscriptions and pervasive governmentalities.
Space can be a tool, a background and an agent in the construction of youth culture. It is often subject to local, regional, national and transnational cultural flows in physical and virtual realms. The ubiquity of connected devices and the merging of physical world and online selves facilitates and requires spatial travel back and forth between public and private, physical and virtual. Public spaces like parks and plazas, commercial spaces like malls and entertainment complexes and residential areas that are often gated or guarded, are subject to governmentalities that have to be negotiated, accommodated or resisted. Space can exhibit fluidity and hybridity, as exemplified by the cultural Sinosphere. Acceptance of space in these terms requires us to look beyond self-assertion and sociability to examine collective spaces not merely as a backdrop but as a crucial component in cultural formation. Paraphrasing Lefebvre, spaces and space production are embedded in power relations, class, gender and ethnicity, thus an understanding of youth culture requires acknowledgement of the spaces where this production takes place.
Chapters in the volume cover major urban areas like Beijing, Urumqi and Chengdu, but also small towns in rural areas. It divides its coverage into “commodified collective spaces” (Hua Bin on cosplay's shift from private homes to commercial spaces like malls; Peng Lei on the spatial commodification of rock music; Jingsi Christina Wu on hip hop in mainstream and underground spaces); “Spaces of sociability” (Adam Yuet Chau on the resourcefulness and vibrancy of eclectic spaces of youth culture production in rural areas [including sites of drinking games that some readers may (not) remember with fondness]; Seio Nakajima on the collective practice of barrage subtitling on video sharing sites; Vanessa Frangville on Uyghur sociability online); “Spaces of social engagement” (Elizabeth Brunner on protests against air pollution; Stijn Deklerck on LGBT activism; Eric Florence on migrant worker collectives); and “Space-time” (Gwennael Gaffric on cyberliterature; Corrado Neri on nostalgia in Han Han's Duckweed; Laura Vermeeren and Jeroen de Kloet on young people's adoption of the ancient art of calligraphy).
The book is impressively coherent for an edited collection, the more so for the interdisciplinary approach on display (disciplines represented include anthropology, art, literature, sociology, media and cultural studies) and an omnivorous approach to theorizing (to the expected conceptual foils of Lefebvre and Foucault add Bey, Bahktin, Bleil and numerous others). Notwithstanding the pleasingly dizzying diversity of case studies, the contributors never lose sight of the central thrust of the project, and the volume adds up to more than the sum of its parts. For that the editors and authors deserve praise for contributing an important new perspective on youth cultures in China.
The volume as a whole, and the excellent summative concluding essay by Lisa Richaud, pose a number of interesting questions. For instance, while it is the case that “youth cultures are not necessarily countercultures” (p. 14), they can still be agents for change and they can “make things happen” even when they do not involve “an unruly, massive occupation of public places or a radical demand for change” (p. 235). But is it possible for youth to tap into its transformative agency in a context where governmentalities “rely on the ‘promotion of happiness’ and other positive affects, often imposed on the actual feelings of Chinese citizens, such as resentment, depression and anger” (p. 244)? If the dominant register of youth culture is “positive energy,” and where the collective expression of negative feelings, for example the ironic nihilism of the sang 丧online subculture, is interpreted as threatening, what effect does such circumscription have on the ability of youth cultures to be performed or asserted in spaces where there is increasingly ubiquitous surveillance?
