Youth and the social imagination in Africa: Introduction

Abstract

Youth are an increasingly compelling subject for study in Africa, entering into political space in highly complex ways. To pay attention to youth is to pay close attention to the topology of the social landscape — to power and agency; public, national and domestic spaces and identities, and their articulation and disjuntures; memory, history, and sense of change; globalization and governance; gender and class. In this introduction I draw attention to how youth is constructed as a problematic category and how it acts as a “social shifter” engaging the social imagination, to how youth contributes to generational debates and constructions, and to how considerations of youth challenges our thinking about agency.