Coming of Age in the “State of Emergency”: Race,Religion,and Political Imagination Among Britain’s Youth of Color

Introduction

Young people in the United Kingdom come of age in a particular moment, when the shrinking of services and social protections is simultaneously accompanied by the expansion of the state’s securitization, manifested through policies of surveillance, detention, incarceration, and deportation. In other words, the austerity state is also a security state, whose violence affects disproportionately minority citizens and noncitizens of color (Bhattacharyya, 2018; Kapoor, 2018).

Research shows, for example, that police violence, “stop and search” practices and high levels of incarceration affect disproportionately Black Britons (see Lammy, 2017). Another category singled out by the state has been British Muslims, criminalized as potential terrorism suspects (Fekete, 2004; Kapoor & Narkowicz, 2017; Kundnani, 2014). The “muscular liberalism,” announced by David Cameron in 2011 in a response to the alleged threat of Muslim radicalization, requires from minorities to prove their national belonging. Young Muslims have been called on to integrate, show their commitment to “British values,” and increase their participation in civil society and public life. This racialized disciplining into “good citizens,” has been accompanied by the punitive measures of antiterrorism legislation, which has put large restrictions on civil liberties in the country (Kapoor, 2018). The government’s antiradicalization program, Prevent (made statutory since 2015 in schools, universities and healthcare), is just one example of extensive monitoring of black and brown youth, as they are believed to undermine national security and social cohesion.

This particular conjuncture of surveillance, suspicion, and criminalization of dissent, paired with the logic of austerity (i.e., withdrawal of state funding and provisions) radically reshapes the spaces and horizons of political activity: of what can be claimed, by whom, and on which terms (Bassel & Emejulu, 2017; Bhattacharyya, 2018). Taking this into consideration, this article aims to reflect on how young activists of color think through racism, austerity, and state violence, and look for frameworks of justice that would address these intersecting structures of oppression. How do those deemed threatening, alienated, and foreign, interpret their condition and constitute themselves as political actors? What are the horizons of their political imagination and their visions of justice? What kind of collectivities do they build? And how do their engagements relate to those of previous generations, in particular, the radical black movements of the 1970s and 1980s?

To answer these questions, this study looks into activist and art-activist collectives, committed to a broad spectrum of often overlapping social justice issues, in which young people of minority and immigrant backgrounds play major roles. The article ponders on a mosaic of struggles and creative forms of resistance: from campaigns at universities to challenge racism inherent in higher education, the campaign of Grime musicians and fans in support of Jeremy Corbyn, to community work of black feminists, and the DIY spaces of Muslim and black art-activists. The research relies on semi-structured interviews, participant observation as well as analysis of material produced by the groups, ranging from books and magazines to blogs and writings available online. I conducted interviews with seven activists of different legal statuses, including both British citizens and noncitizens, who were engaged in issues such as housing, migrant justice, antiwar, antiracism, and youth culture (see list of interviews in the appendix). Besides interviews, I did fieldwork in London, where between January and April 2018, I attended public talks, workshops, and film screenings organized by minority activists. As many of the youth engagements lie at the intersection of art and activism, I studied also their cultural production, analyzing, in particular, the epistemic and political meanings of publications such as OOMK, Daikon, Khidr Collective, British Values, and Skin Deep.

My research underscores the innovative ways through which young activists tackle austerity, racism, and state violence, not only as they confront the state but also as they bypass it, and turn to everyday life, carving out spaces of mutual help, solidarity, and care. Within these various spaces young activists break the silence on Britain’s colonial past and its reverberations in the presence, and emphasize intersectionality of experiences and struggles.

The article proceeds as follows. I begin with a brief overview of the landscape of the crisis in the United Kingdom, and the particular ways in which its racialized logic affects non-white citizens and migrants. If sociological work on generations has been criticized for overlooking the dynamics of class (Murdock & McCron, 1976), I show how generational experiences are also racialized. In this section, I shed light on how young activists of color offer a critical reading of citizenship politics as rooted in exclusionary ideas of belonging and hierarchies of rights. I then move on to show young activists search for other frameworks of dissent and justice. In particular, I highlight how these youths, recognizing the limits of the nation–state, frame their claims in historical, transnational, and intersectional terms. By doing so, they depart from the narrow language of civil rights, and think through an alternative framework of decolonial transformation. Within this paradigm, activists draw connections between struggles at home and abroad, and confront the legacies of colonialism, as they structure inequality in the present.

Linked to this, the following section brings to light minorities’ disillusionment with the state as an interlocutor and a guarantor of equality and justice. I propose the lens of “refusal,” as conceptualized by Audra Simpson (2014), to apprehend the move from a more institutionalized politics of recognition, typical of the older generation, to various engagements that bypass the state and center around self-affirmation, self-care, and self-definition. I discuss these in more detail in the last section, showing how young people turn to spaces of everyday life, but also artistic expression, to seek epistemic justice, autonomy, and to build small-scale communities that respond to the detrimental effects of austerity and state securitization. In the conclusion, I reflect on the horizons of the political imagination among young activists of color in the United Kingdom, summarizing how they reformulate the political to make it meaningful in the current historical conjuncture, as they experience it.

Citizenship in a Security/Austerity State: The Racialized Logic of State Violence

The fragility of British citizenship has been well documented by scholars revealing how the state turns “citizens into migrants” (through deprivation of citizenship and passport stripping) or refuses to grant citizenship at all (Bhambra, 2016, Kapoor, 2018; Kapoor & Narkowicz, 2017). While these practices of exclusion have a long history, they have been used excessively in the context of the War on Terror and the “hostile environment” policy, enforced through the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts, under Theresa May as a Home Secretary.

Speaking at the arts and activism festival, DIY Cultures, Kieran Yates, an activist and journalist, described her generation’s disillusionment with the notion of citizenship: ¹

This idea, as an activist community is to unpick what British citizenship means, to debunk the idea that this is the golden ticket that will keep you safe. For immigrant families like mine, who have come to this country to try and obtain British citizenship, which will stay with you, and sort of “make you British,” actually that is a great lie of our generation, of our contemporary society because UK citizenship can be stripped, it has been stripped, we are seeing this constantly. ( . . . )

In a similar vein, other activists pointed to the inequality of citizenship and racial exclusions on which it relies. Hamja, who is a co-organizer of the aforementioned festival, and had campaigned for several years for his brother’s freedom, described citizenship as “conditional,” coming with different protections and entitlements for different categories of people. Hamja’s brother, accused of “supporting terrorism” had been detained in 2006, held wihtout trial for 6 years and extradited to the United States in 2012, where he was placed in solitary confinement, until he was finally found not guilty. Discussing how his brother was abused and treated differently from white citizens, whose extradition was blocked at the same time, Hamja observed:

My brother . . . he is not really a British citizen. He had to keep apologizing for everything. . . . This conditioning isn’t there for white British citizens. (Int.UK1)

What Hamja’s story tells us is that legal citizenship is not enough to protect from state violence. As the example of his brother makes clear, the boundaries of those who are in the body of the nation, and those whose membership is denied, or not fully recognized, are drawn along racial lines (Virdee & McGeever, 2018). But also, as Hamja inferred in the conversation, the securitization of the state has transformed the whole notion of citizenship: it serves to create grateful and docile subjects, and criminalizes those critical and dissenting (Int.UK1). The recent trial over terror charges of activists who tried to stop a deportation flight, ² or monitoring of Muslim activism prove his point well. Hamja identifies the Prevent policy – that charges public sector workers with duty to report signs of radicalization - as crucial in these processes:

There’s been this level of invasion of state services . . . my friends who are lecturers don’t want to act as if they were part of the police force. Prevent has corrupted the nature of university . . . also it is part of an attack on trade unions rights and the welfare state. Prevent has been also instrumental in corrupting the meaning of citizenship, dissent. . . . It has been instrumental in creating a sell-out class. (Int.UK1)

But just as the racialized state violence affects minority citizens, it also harms disproportionately non-white immigrants. To filter out and dispose of “bad” migrants, the “hostile environment” policy operates through detention and deportation but also through border controls that permeate the spaces of everyday life, from health care and schools, to banks and private housing (de Noronha, 2018). Who is welcomed into the country, and who is to be excluded is tied to race and class, as one migrant rights activist recognized: “It is the black people, the poor people who won’t be let in” (Int.UK4). For this activist, citizenship and migration cannot be seen apart. State reliance on divisive categories of citizens versus migrants, but also good migrants versus bad ones, and legal versus illegal, were discussed as serving to exclude those not considered as part of the body politic, those criminalized, and others not considered worthy of protection and justice.

A woman in Yarl’s Wood immigration detention center, who in February 2018 went on a hunger strike with hundreds of other detainees to protest against the inhumane conditions in which they were held, articulated a similar point, drawing on her own example. In a short post, published on a Detained Voices blog, ³ which gathers voices of detained immigrants, she writes:

I have lived in the UK since the age of 11 and have never left, my life is here, my personality and my norms and values are developed here. I don’t even speak another language. Yet I am viewed as Illegal. And there it is. The reason I don’t have any hope. Both the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister use that word, which I find so hurtful, repeatedly in parliament to try to differentiate between those who deserve justice and those that don’t, those who deserve the hostile environment and those that don’t ( . . . ) I hope some sense of justice can be gained for all.

A critique of the racialized state violence was raised by activists also in the context of austerity. If austerity in the United Kingdom, with the erosion of the welfare state and public cuts, has devastated many lives, communities of color, the unemployed, youth, and women have been among those most affected (Bassel & Emejulu, 2017; O’Hara, 2014). The hardship of the racialized poor is also privatized, seen as a consequence of their own failures and irresponsibility (Shilliam, 2018). Involved in housing struggles, one activist evoked the Grenfell Tower fire as the symbol of austerity’s lethal power, but also state racism: “It is no accident that if you look at names of people who burnt at Grenfell Tower . . . these people are from North Africa, vast majority Muslim, from very specific region . . . ” (Int.UK3)

Going Beyond Civil Right Claims: Toward Decolonial Practice and Principles

There is a long history of antiracist activism in the United Kingdom, mobilized around ideas of civil rights and political recognition (Gilroy, 1987; Kapoor, 2018). Within this framework, minorities make claims to national inclusion as citizens, who demand to be treated as equal, and to have their right to difference recognized. This paradigm of seeking equality through the state seems to be questioned by a new generation of activists in the United Kingdom, who do not necessarily speak as “worthy citizens,” or aspire to a national belonging, which is denied to them. In a context in which whole categories of peoples are dehumanized and criminalized, and whose belonging, irrespective of status, is questioned, activists recognize the limits of civil rights claims, political inclusion, and legal protection as means to bring justice. First, because this mode of politics excludes the most vulnerable; and second, because even for those of minority backgrounds with the right papers, it hinges on negotiating their humanity and being disciplined into a “good national subject.” The frustration with the latter can be discerned in the words of Madani Younis, the director of the Bush Theatre in London. Speaking at an event organized by a Muslim art-activism collective, he confessed with exasperation:

There is a gap in our national consciousness. I don’t want to live a life where someone else thinks they have a moral authority over me, the government has this arrogance to think they have moral authority over the Muslim men and women who live in this country. And I am done with it, you know what I mean, I am done with accepting the idea that somehow I have to barter for my equality. ⁴

The refusal to “barter for my equality”—or proving one’s Britishness—echoes loudly among young activists of color. Questioning the racist foundations and exclusions inherent in the nation–state is not merely about demanding more inclusive citizenship or emphasizing the righteous entitlement of those born in the country. Instead, as one activist involved in open border struggles suggested, radical political solidarity and justice requires an end to dividing people into “bad and good Muslims, legal and illegal migrants, deserving and undeserving, grateful and ungrateful ( . . . )” (Int.UK5). Similarly, another migrant rights activist spoke about the necessity of forging broader coalitions that undo distinctions between “citizens and noncitizens; EU citizens and non-EU nationals” (In.UK4).

The rejection of the notion that rights belong to those deemed “deserving” by the nation–state, signals, among other things, a departure from the politics of respectability. The need for radical transformation of society, but also the ways social movements organize and form alliances, have been increasingly articulated by activists through the idiom of decolonization, understood as an analytical framework, a practice, and a goal. Although the calls for “decolonization” are not exactly new, they have gained resonance since 2015 when the transnational movement for decolonization of the university started to grow, first in South Africa, and then across universities in the United Kingdom. The vocabulary of the movement echoes to some extent the language of academia, where the fields of decolonial and postcolonial studies have gained currency in recent years. These approaches draw attention to the legacy of the colonial past in the present, and bring back to the fore the voices of radical anticolonial and black writers and activists, such as Frantz Fanon, Audre Lorde, Aimé Césaire, Amilcar Cabral, James Baldwin, and W.E.B. Du Bois, to mention just a few.

Their writings, as well as historical struggles for liberation, offer activists’ the language to frame and historicize current systems of oppression. Within the decolonial vision, what has to be challenged is the global structure of white supremacism, racial capitalism that dispossesses and dehumanizes people of color, and eurocentrism that defines legitimate ways of knowing and being. As those are structured by colonial continuities and imperialism, struggles for social justice at home—whether targeting the “hostile environment,” Brexit, or the oppression of Muslims—must address these global formations of power (Int.UK4, Int.UK7). In the words of Kehinde Andrews (2018, p. xi), a black activist scholar involved in the decolonizing struggle at the university: “There is no such a thing as a British problem—the global system produces the national picture of oppression and therefore global links must always be maintained.”

This analysis, which goes beyond the nation–state framework to articulate injustice in historical, transnational, and intersectional terms, differs then from more mainstream strands of antiracism, which focus narrowly on issues of representation and political inclusion.

The new wave of antiracist struggles is also distinctive by its language of intersectionality and overlapping axes of mobilization. Campaigns for decolonization organized at various British universities address a wide spectrum of issues: from exposing universities’ colonial foundations, the racism inherent in knowledge production and racial inequalities that structure the field of higher education, to criticizing the marketization of the university, and discussing reparations for slavery. At the same time students organized protests against Prevent and the privatization of public spaces, and stood in solidarity with cleaning stuff striking at their universities. The impossibility to dissect these struggles was noticed by one student activist:

Decolonization is inseparable from campaigns around the UK to challenge neoliberal policies and assaults on working people ( . . . ). In a way, we see our two goals and spaces of activity as tightly linked: mobilizing the capacity of the university to engage and work with communities facing the brunt of a range of inequalities. (Int.UK6)

While struggles for decolonization oscillate around the political and the material, they have a crucial epistemic dimension. This has been most explicitly articulated in campaigns, such as “Why is my curriculum white?” founded in 2015 at the University College London and followed by similar campaigns at other universities, which initiated a critical discussion not only on the content of the curriculum but also more broadly on the Eurocentric premises of knowledge production and the coloniality of education. The aim thus is not to simply diversify pedagogy, but to provincialize Western/European thought, so that subjugated knowledges from the Global South, but also those produced by social movements, can get equal hearing (Int.UK7). This aspect of decolonization is also at the core of the work of various youth art-activism collectives that have been rapidly growing in the United Kingdom in recent years, and which I address later in the article. They turn to art and cultural production to celebrate their communities—their histories, struggles and knowledges—and by doing so, they attempt to define meanings of “blackness” or “Muslimness” from self-perspectives. As I elaborate in the following sections, “decolonizing” means for them centering their own experiences and terms of speaking, debunking narrow definitions of “Englishness,” but also decentering dominant modes of feminist and white leftist activism, in which particularly women of color feel often marginalized and unwelcomed (Int.UK5; Bassel & Emejulu, 2017).

Politics of Refusal: Turning the Back on the State

Racism, state violence, and austerity have been challenged in recent years through a myriad of ways, ranging from protests against Prevent and colonial statues, to campaigns against police violence and deaths in custody, to a broad range of resistance to border violence, detention, and deportations. Communities of color, often the most vulnerable ones, are at the forefront of these struggles: from hunger strikes of women in Yarl’s Wood detention center to campaigns of precarious migrant cleaning staff working at universities and to organized community efforts to hold the state accountable for the Grenfell Tower fire. Performative protests of a direct action feminist group, Sisters Uncut, such as an occupation of a prison site or a protest at the premiere of the “Suffragettes” film, which seek to draw attention to gendered dimensions of austerity, have attracted particular attention from both the media and scholars.

While protests and campaigning remain an important tool of dissent across generations, I want to highlight how daily practices of self-affirmation, self-care, and assertion of marginalized identities are considered equally important, in particular among the youngest cohorts. These are forms of engagements through which activists do not try to negotiate or make claims on the state; rather they are rooted in everyday life, being “inward-oriented rather than outward-oriented,” as one interviewee described it, and building on relationships that are “person to person,” “day to day” and “micro-scale” (Int.UK2).

While I discuss these prefigurative practices and their meaning in the context of austerity and securitization in the following section, I think they are also important because they speak to some extent to the minorities’ disillusionment with the liberal state as an interlocutor and a guarantor of rights, an attitude highlighted already in the previous sections. Rather than relying on state funding and seeking state recognition, these youths wish to self-define and reclaim their everyday lives, relying on their own resources and carving out spaces of mutual help, solidarity, and care. There is little of “rights-talk” in their vocabulary, and more of a focus on community “healing,” “survival,” and “memory” as important aspects of everyday politics.

Turning one’s back on the state should not be romanticized, as it may mean sometimes acting in line with neoliberal rationality, relying on charity, and crowdfunding campaigns (Maira, 2016). Nevertheless, it marks, to some extent, a departure from the dominant model of engagement between minorities and the state, in which representatives of ethnically/culturally defined groups compete against each other for state funding and attention. This model has been promoted by the state since the late 1980s, in an effort to divide immigrant communities (united until then through the ideology of political blackness) and to co-opt radical antiracist and anticapitalist movements (Kapoor, 2018; Kundnani, 2014; Lentin, 2004; Ramamurthy, 2013). This mode of interpellation, parallels on the other hand, wider socioeconomic transformations occurring at that time, which led to the decline in social justice narratives and demands for redistribution, and the rise of identity-based claims, articulated in the idiom of culture and religion. Altogether as these intertwined processes reshaped the landscape of collective struggles, the antiracist movements moved since the 1990s, “from the streets to the town halls” (Bourne, 2001, as cited in Lentin, 2004, p. 145), where various minority organizations have turned to the state to seek equality, funding, and recognition of their own distinctiveness (Ramamurthy, 2013). Recognition politics has been typical for example for the older generation of Muslim activists, who focus on challenging the demonization of Muslims; providing counternarratives; dealing with questions of inclusion and representation; and demanding their “right to difference” to be recognized (Abbas, 2007).

This “deferential” model of relating to institutional power seems to be largely rejected by young activists, who as hinted earlier do not wish to negotiate their identities and worth, or act as “respectable” citizens. This attitude can be discerned in the speech of Ntokozo Qwabe, a 27-year-old activist from the Rhodes Must Fall, Oxford campaign. When on November 6th, 2015, 250 students gathered in front of Oxford’s Oriel College, calling for the statue of Cecil John Rhodes to be put down, Qwabe addressed the audience as follows:

I do not want to look at the authorities of Oriel because I do not recognize them. I do not recognize people who will not treat me as equal and who will dehumanize me by recognizing a person who violated my people as a diplomat, a businessman, a benefactor and by glorifying him with a statue, therefore saying it identifies with him. Until the statue has fallen, I refuse to recognize Oriel College. I refuse to enter into a space, and this is what I will continue to say no matter how many times Oriel College invites me and others like you, like me, to come and talk behind some boardroom, I will refuse to do so because the terms of the conversation will already be violent. ⁵

Qwabe’s position brings to mind what anthropologist Audra Simpson (2014) has defined as the “politics of refusal.” Writing in the context of the Mohawks’ struggles within the settler colonial state, Simpson theorizes refusal as an alternative to recognition politics. Rather than seeking the state’s validation, refusal is about disengaging from state projects, disavowing cooperation, and questioning the legitimacy of those with the power to recognize:

They deploy [refusal] as a political and ethical stance that stands in contrast to the desire to have one’s distinctiveness as a culture, as a people recognized. Refusal comes with the requirement of having one’s political sovereignty acknowledged and upheld, and raises the question of legitimacy for those who are usually in the position of recognizing: What is their authority to do so? Where does it come from? Who are they to do so? (Simpson, 2014, p. 11)

The refusal to accept the moral legitimacy of the authorities, to be part of the state project of surveillance and border controls, or to act as “good Muslims” and compliant citizens, is central to the ways young activists conceptualize resistance. Accordingly, resistance is also about building community safe spaces, where minority youth can defy the harms of the austerity state, escape surveillance, and reclaim their lives, stories, and ways of being.

Art, Self-Affirmation, and Intergenerational Memories

Art, aesthetics, and activism are often brought together by the youth. On the one hand, art plays an important role in student movements for decolonization, which have a strong aesthetic and performative dimension, relying on visual culture, poetry, and songs, and recognizing art’s crucial role in imagining alternative orders (Nkopo, Madenga, & Chantiluke, 2018). On the other hand, popular youth culture has a political and mobilizing potential on its own, around which movements can be built. This can be best illustrated with the spectacular mobilization of grime artists and their fans in support of Jeremy Corbyn’s electoral campaign. What became the “Grime4 Corbyn” movement, and is said to having significantly contributed to the high electoral turnout among very young people, was initiated by those who a few years previously, in 2011, were blamed for the summer riots and accused of uncivil behavior (Int.UK3). In 2017, they mobilized for the Labour Party’s leader, not through the usual channels of political engagement, but through the spaces of their everyday life and leisure, such as raves, festivals, and parties.

Still some research participants considered cultural, creative expression as having an important political dimension in itself, even when not accompanied by any forms of collective mobilization. Self-published zines by youth collectives, self-defined as black, Muslim, or South East/East Asian have become one of the platforms for youth of color to disrupt dominant narratives and interrogate issues of importance to them, from faith to spirituality, to politics, and activism. The practice of zine-making, in line with a feminist and anarchist reading, was described as inherently subversive because of the zines’ collective, communal, and democratic spirit and nonprofit orientation (Int.UK1, Int. UK2). At the same time, while various art-oriented youth collectives and initiatives among minorities in the United Kingdom are indeed mushrooming, a Muslim feminist artist acknowledged this carries a risk that previously “pragmatic” struggles for social change are replaced by individualized acts of “self-expression”:

maybe they were more practical, they did more tangible things, to understand how the system works and make a change, while we work more with the ideas, we feel like the success of something is just expressing ourselves, less about changing stuff . . .

She suggested that the shift could be understood in generational terms, related not only to changes in lifestyle and opportunities but also realizing that those came on the back of past struggles:

Our parents were struggling to survive and make ends meet, and worked really, really hard. ( . . . ) In my family, for the second generation, we had time to become artists and be more creative, to think about things outside of survival, my parents had just such a high intensity life.

Although prioritization of creativity and self-expression over protest and collective organizing may indeed undermine radical social justice struggles, the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Asserting marginalized identities and insisting on self-definition—in the context where identities and allegiances of the racialized youth are always questioned and policed—were portrayed as a rebellion against being defined from the outside, and spoken over, and as an attempt to produce counterhegemonic, decolonial knowledge from within. For example, at an event about faith and art, held at Tate Modern in London in June 2018, members of a Muslim art-activism group, Khidr Collective, observed that in the context of rampant Islamophobia, most Muslim expression and action is driven by dominant discourses, which force them to justify who they are, and prove what they are not. Refusing to be a mere “reaction to,” as they explained, these young artists and organizers started their zine to be able to look inward and to speak in terms that are not dictated by the outside. The importance of “reclaiming the language,” was in a similar manner emphasized by a member of a Muslim feminist OOMK collective:

We can’t ourselves change the ways Muslims are perceived and we don’t have power or resources to make a parallel Daily Mail. There is this appetite to consume information about Muslims that we can’t counteract; so, instead of trying to counter that, we just need to make our spaces where we can live our lives. ( . . . ) It is about not falling into the trap of having to respond. (Int.UK2)

Another important aspect of artistic practices of youth of color centers around cultivating memories and bringing to the fore what is not officially registered. This means, among other things, commemoration of figures and struggles of the past, or attempts to reconstruct and record quiet histories of ordinary immigrant communities in the United Kingdom. The importance of keeping memories of the radical black movements of the 1970s, of unravelling lost histories of past generations and learning from their struggles, was mentioned by activists, who recognized that their political culture and vocabulary has been to some extent Americanized (Int. UK1, Int.UK7). As one activist observed:

We have a bit of a problem in the UK, our understanding of race, antiracism, social movements around race is all very Americanized. We probably know more about the history of antiracist struggles in the United States than we know about those in the UK ( . . . ) but over the past few years people are much more aware of it. ( . . . ) [There is] more and more willingness and an attempt of younger people to ask the older generations, to learn about their experiences so to try and learn from them and to try to excavate that archive and narrate their history, which is perhaps forgotten especially if we compare to how much we talk about what happens and happened in the U.S. (Int.UK7)

If the cultural production of young people unearths and celebrates the community’s past, it is also meant to serve as an “archive” in itself. Their zines recall young black men killed by the police, discuss strategies of resistance to immigration policies or analyze how poor quality council housing, austerity, everyday racism and government policies like Prevent affect Muslims’ everyday lives. Bringing to the fore lived experiences that are marginalized, or recording debates within movements, they aim to serve as repositories of memories and information, and act as practical guides that facilitate action and resilience.

Self-Care and Prefiguration

The tendency among activists of color to create their own spaces for creative expression is not surprising in a context in which their dissent is controlled and easily criminalized. Governmental programs like Prevent have had a significant impact on containing civil dissent, in particular among the Muslim youth. As an activist involved in decolonizing campaigns at the university remarked, Prevent is:

making certain kind of activism very difficult for Muslim students, like activism on Palestine. Increasing number of Muslim students are feeling very hesitant about engaging in this sort of issues because one of the signs they look for, as a sign of radicalization, is Palestine activism, which is insane. Which shows you what they perhaps are really trying to do. (Int.UK7)

However, building community spaces was also discussed as inherently political: it is about empowerment and carving out spaces of solidarity, which rely on small-scale exchanges, care, and reciprocity. The vision of black feminists, such as Audre Lorde, who famously claimed that “without community there is no liberation,” resonates profoundly here. Within this approach, practiced in particular by intersectional feminists, the idea of self-care and creating autonomous spaces is emphasized as an important act of resistance, in particular in the context where the state has withdrawn from its welfare responsibilities. For example, a member of Sisters Uncut collective, which combines direct action with grassroots community work, described the creation of spaces where women can meet, socialize, and cook together as “the most radical actions we’ve taken.” She explained the logic of these spaces as follows:

They expose (and respond to) the absence of community contact we all feel in this neoliberal austerity-stricken society. As part of this collective, I feel I am part of a resistance to the government’s austerity agenda. (Archer, 2018)

Other initiatives, although more ephemeral, were also framed as defying the logic of neoliberalism and austerity, where what is communal is shut down and less and less available. An artist from OOMK collective described, for example, how holding a printing press open to the public once a week,

feeds into the idea of making means of production more accessible: new people can start making stuff. And it is also about making public space free, looking at the politics of space and how expensive everything is in London . . . and just having 1 day a week when anyone can come and work for 5 hours, you don’t need to buy coffee or tea or anything, you can sit there and work. (Int.UK2)

Against the backdrop of commodification, in which human relations work according to the logic of the market (Brown, 2015), the ethos of DIY and autonomy is particularly cherished by the youth. Interestingly, whereas the DIY scene in the United Kingdom, stemming from the anarchist, feminist, and punk movements, has been traditionally predominantly white and secular, in recent years there has been a growing number of initiatives organized by, and giving a central place to, communities of faith and color. Dissatisfied with the world which celebrates professionalization, individual success and competition, as one respondent discussed it, the DIY spaces, and events, such as small print workshops, festivals, and zine fairs, are meant to create nonutilitarian spaces and relations, driven by friendship, exchanges, and care (Int.UK1). These events have an important prefigurative dimension, as they try to enact alternative ways of being together and acting with each other, creating an inclusive platform for diverse voices (Int.UK1): the DIY spaces created by young people are meant to allow for personal encounters, exchanges, and cooperation. As such, they also respond to the loneliness and isolation generated, among other things, by the neoliberal culture of individualization, social media, and the disappearance of public spaces. An organizer of the DIY Cultures festival described it astutely as “a space where people are meant to be living,” and an antidote to the “dead space” created by the Internet (Int.UK2).

Radical Political Imagination Today: Concluding Thoughts

It is sometimes argued that, once radical and socialist, the politics of black and brown communities in the United Kingdom has been coopted by the logic of neoliberalism and replaced by narrow identity and faith-based politics (Ramamurthy, 2013). A. Sivanandan, one of the key thinkers of the radical antiracist and anti-imperialist movements of the 1970s, worried before his death that the new generation of activists had forgotten about the legacy of previous struggles, fuelled by the ideology of “political blackness” (Srilangarajah, 2018). According to Paul Gilroy, a distinguished British scholar of race and postcolonialism, the spread of Internet-based activism manifests in a “poverty of imagination,” whereby young activists in the United Kingdom copy too easily the vocabulary of American campus politics, and borrow unreflexively from the American antiracist movement rooted in a different experience (Bechler & Gilroy, 2016).

Young activists, however, are not oblivious to, and to some extent share, these critiques, as this article has shown. Issues like the Americanization of youth political cultural, and the risks that heavy reliance on social media and identity politics carry for social justice struggles, are acknowledged and critically addressed within the movements. Similarly, the necessity to unearth the tradition of past struggles, and to learn from older activists, is increasingly recognized among young people, to which their work of commemoration and building archives can attest. At the same time, young activists of minority backgrounds understand astutely that the historical conjuncture in which they come of age differs dramatically from that of their parents and grandparents, and so past models cannot be simply copied. This comes to the fore in the heated debates around the concept of “political blackness,” which in the 1970s and 1980s united the Caribbean and South East Asian communities in a common, class-based struggle against racism and capitalism. Today, the notion of political blackness is rejected by many young activists as inadequate in the current context, where various minority groups suffer from forms of oppression particular to them, but also where anti-black racism comes from non-white communities (Int.UK7).

If young activists today have different political vocabularies (oftentimes influenced by academic theories) than previous generations, it can be partially explained by the different attachments they have to the country. Unlike their parents and grandparents, who did not feel that Britain was their home, those born in the United Kingdom acknowledge that their expectations and sense of entitlement have changed. In the words of one of them:

For my parents’ generation racism and hardship was like a given, whereas now we feel outraged. We could have grown up at the same time as our classmates and we should be treated the same, there is not this sense “oh well, it is their country.” (Int.UK2)

This may help explain why young black Britons and British Muslims unapologetically assert their difference, and rather than calling for inclusion and recognition, challenge the inequality of citizenship. In this vein, they rethink the terms of nationhood from below, focusing on its silences, erasures, and exclusions, urging us to ask: What is omitted from the official accounts of British history? Who counts as part of the nation? Which ways of being are British, and which are forever estranged? Behind these questions lies a clearly articulated assertion, that Great Britain today is still haunted by its colonial and imperial past. Confronting these legacies is indispensable to complete the unfinished project of decolonization.

If there has indeed been a turn to identity politics, this does not mean that calls for economic redistribution have been abandoned, or that young people try to build bounded communities, understood in narrow ethnic or religious terms. As the examples discussed throughout the article suggest, there is an attempt to draw connections and build broader alliances. The notion of solidarity and intersectionality of struggles seems to guide many of these engagements, whether within inclusive autonomous and DIY spaces, or in the cross-class and cross-race campaigns against detention, deportation, and exploitation of migrant workers.

At the same time, as this research underscores, youth today is eager to find new political vocabularies and to redefine what activism means, and how and where politics can be practiced. What becomes evident is the search for political engagement that moves beyond traditional, hierarchical and formulaic “left echo-chambers,” as one activist put it, to move toward politics which is creative, inclusive, and based on friendship, care and fun. The membership of groups tends to be fluid, and the engagements transitory. But breaking away from the rigidity of traditional organizations may also be read as an attempt to reclaim politics from the class of “professional” activists, and make it more accessible for ordinary people. As an organizer of the Grime4Corbyn campaign put it:

you can just trust people, you don’t need to be educated to PhD level in critical theory, people can be trusted and people are incredibly politically astute. You can have really interesting political conversations with people who don’t necessarily see themselves as political. (Int.UK3)

Feminist and DIY spaces seek moreover to counter the alienating tendencies of much left-wing activism, where only certain voices are heard, or where issues of race and gender are rarely addressed (Int.UK1, 2, 4, 5). The move “inward” differs significantly from the radical organizing of the 1970s and 1980s, when racism was fought on the streets.

Carving out spaces of reciprocity and self-help signals that the politics of minority youth is often more about practices and everyday life than statements and claim making. Issues such as healing, survival, self-care, and commemoration all come to play as important aspects of resistance not only to the logic of austerity but also securitization and racism. As this article has shown, by looking inward, young racialized activists turn their back on the state: refusing to be coopted, they also show little faith in the state as a guarantor of justice, and undermine the state’s presumed authority to fold their lives into an official narrative of threat and alienation.