Michael Willard – författare

Leading cultural critics on the lasting contributions of American youth on culture and social hierarchiesAmerica has long been fascinated by youth and its cultural expressions. The notion of "youth" has played a central role in processes of social reproduction and historical change throughout the twentieth century. But when we turn a critical eye to youth culture, we too often focus on youth as a passive and unchanging concept.In Generations of Youth, Joe Austin and Michael Willard have brought together leading cultural critics from history, sociology, and cultural studies to explore the cultural expressions of twentieth-century youth. The contributors to the volume explore diverse popular culture practices such as Chicano rock-and-roll dancing; the Boy Scouts and heroism; 'zines and community; Native American boxing; African American hip-hop; fan clubs and femininity; Malcolm X's zoot suit; Filipino McIntosh suits; lesbian, bisexual, and gay Internet culture; Chicano lowriding; skateboarding and the production of urban space; graffiti and spatial mobility; Native American pow wows; and post-punk, Generation X, and downward mobility. Generations of Youth considers the ways in which young people's autonomy and "youth" itself is produced in negotiation with adult authority and institutions of socialization.The definitive volume on American youth cultures past and present, Generations of Youth traces the central ways in which historical meanings and experiences of youth intersect with other axes of the U.S. social hierarchy. We learn how race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, class, and space intersect to affect our notions of youth and youth's notions of itself. Essays focus on the ways in which young people have appropriated and created cultural forms, practices, and social ideologies that are connected to changes in consumer and labor markets, to economies of prestige, and to received social hierarchies and traditions.Contributors to the volume include Victoria Getis, Jay Mechling, Mary Odem, John Bloom, Georganne Scheiner, Paula Fass, Linda N. España-Maram, Robin D. G. Kelley, Matt Garcia, James T. Sears, Beth Bailey, Ernesto Chàvez, Jeffrey Rangel, Ryan Moore, Kyra Gaunt, Robert Walser, William Wei, Susan Willis, David Roediger, Joanne Addison and Michelle Comstock, Rachel Buff, George Lipsitz, Brenda Bright, Stanley Aronowitz, and Steve Duncombe.

"Most of the contributions strongly project the authors' perceptions of the role of race on their subjects, and essays should elicit lively discussions in the classroom."—CHOICEFrederick Douglass liked to say of West Indian boxer Peter Jackson that "Peter is doing a great deal with his fists to solve the Negro question." His comment reflects the possibilities for social transformation that he saw in the emerging modern sports culture. Indeed, as the twentieth century developed, sports have become an important cultural terrain over which various racial groups have contested, defined, and represented their racial, national, and inter-ethnic identities.Sports Matters brings critical attention to the centrality of race within the politics and pleasures of the massive sports culture that developed in the U.S. during the past century and a half. The contributors collected here address such issues as popular representations of blacks in sports. They consider baseball—from Nisei players in Oregon to Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles. And they look at the use of warrior imagery in representations of Native American athletes and the evolution of black expressive style within basketball.Sports Matters challenges our presumptions about sports, illuminating in the process the complexities of race and gender as they relate to popular culture.Contributors include Amy Bass, John Bloom, Annie Gilbert Coleman, Gena Caponi, Montye Fuse, Randy Hanson, Michiko Hase, George Lipsitz, Keith Miller, Sharon O'Brien, Connie Razza, Sam Regalado, Greg Rodriguez, Julio Rodriguez, Michael Willard, and Henry Yu.