Negotiating Blackness

Abstract

This article explores the experiences of young British people with African and Caribbean heritage during a volunteer tourism trip to Zimbabwe. It gives an ethnographic account of how racialized identifications and geographies surfacedand were negotiated -through emotional encounters and embodied performances. Young volunteers contended with the racialized imaginaries of charity that painfully positioned their blackness as 'mis-fitting' in the performances of virtue central to volunteer tourism. However, they performed their blackness in ways that asserted value, variously invoking a proud 'authentic' bond with 'Africa' and forging connections around diasporic African cool. Volunteers' claims of authentic 'Africanness' often problematically homogenized Africa, but celebratory affects around transnational popular culture contained possibilities for disrupting denigrating hierarchies. This account illustrates the potential for youth studies to engage further with the 'more-than-representational' ways in which racialized difference comes into force, but that this approach can and should sharpen our analysis of enduring racialized prejudices.

Following the ‘hype’: The role of leisure practices during ‘homeland’ visits in transnational youth's way of relating to Ghana

“…This created a sense of familiarity and signals the need to recognize the interconnectedness between localities and people that young people can experience during ‘homeland’ visits (Graf, 2017 ). Furthermore, the vast presence of young diasporans beyond their own peer group and the vital and affective power of transnational youth cultural objects (Cheung, 2016 , p. 250) fostered feelings of emotional solidarity. For example, the collective experience of doing the same dance moves to their favourite music and attending festivals together (Lulle et al., 2017 ) triggered a massive stimulation of the senses and emotions.…”

From London to Grenada and Back Again: Youth Exchange Geographies and the Grenadian Revolution, 1979‐1983

“…Though research here often focuses on how international volunteering and volunteer tourism sustain established imaginaries of development and promotes global citizenship, recent critical contributions have revealed how “South‐South” volunteering (Baillie Smith et al. 2017) and volunteer tourism by Black young people (Cheung Judge 2016) obfuscate and destabilise Eurocentric hierarchies. In education, research on young people’s educational mobility has revealed the “increasingly globalised nature of education” that foreign exchange, study abroad and international student mobility in higher and further education all produce and reflect (Holloway and Jöns 2012:485).…”

“…Where dominant notions of young people’s agency are understood to include inherently positive forms of action such as “resourcefulness, [or] resistance to hegemony and domination” (Bordonaro and Payne 2012:367), other interpolations focus on “negative” or “ambiguous” forms of agency that subvert morally positive goals (Bordonaro and Payne 2012; Jeffrey 2012). Elsewhere, Cheung Judge (2016) has shown the boundedness of particular types of young people’s agency, noting how Black young people’s blackness collides with and disrupts dominant volunteer tourism imaginaries predicated on the value of being white, while Griffiths (2017) questions whether participants’ resistance to models of global citizenship imposed upon them during British government‐funded International Citizen Service programmes should or should not be understood as agentic. This study asks how articulations of young people’s agency in youth exchanges by Black young people relate to or differ from these ideas, arguing that agency can also be occluded by processes of fun, violence or boredom (Verkaaik 2004).…”