Postcolonial Civic Identity and Youth (dis)organizing Environment: A Growth into Citizenship Analysis

Raihanah Mohd Mydin,Mohd Muzhafar Idrus,Ruzy Suliza Hashim

doi:10.17576/gema-2020-2002-08

Abstract

The fluid realities of youth in postcolonial nation-states can reflect changing and challenging landscapes. Their engagements with environment, for example, are not only elaborated in social, political, and economical contexts, but also generated through values, beliefs, and identities. This article adds to contemporary debates by positing that discussions on postcolonial civic identities have to be accompanied by youth narratives and their considerations on nature, time, and digital world(s) by taking Malaysian youths as examples. Specifically, it attempts to theorize youth civic identity within postcolonial context(s) by scrutinizing personal narratives that are symbiotically yoked with discourses on ecology and technology. Through administering personal narratives at a suburban district in West Peninsular Malaysia, this paper opens ‘windows’ into what it means for youths to participate in civic projects. Reading these narratives from the lens of growth into citizenship , their wide-ranging experiences in civic affairs can be understood in four ways, namely, recognition, responsibilities, reconciliation, and reciprocity. Two of these emerging themes, recognition and responsibilities, will be discussed in this article. Our attempt at depicting postcolonial civic identity, therefore, is part of a large-scale investigation on civic mindedness that will compel us to reflect on unofficial, continuous accounts of youth reflecting on a sense of belongingness and what the future might bring.

Highlights

One of the many useful postcolonial trajectories is that it presents insights into counternarratives within the changing and challenging spaces of socio-cultural complexities as opposed to a single, ‘hegemonized’ elaboration
This article aims at addressing this issue, with the objective of studying how postcolonial civic identity is revealed across Malaysian youth narratives
What deliberations did these youths describe regarding various forms that inspire them to be more active in their daily civic affairs? What alternatives to these forms were considered? What part of using these forms caused them to feel dissonance? What could be learned, based on these narratives, regarding a general theory of youth postcolonial civic identity? The narratives collected were a part of a larger project at a large, suburban district in West Peninsular Malaysia

Summary

Introduction

One of the many useful postcolonial trajectories is that it presents insights into counternarratives within the changing and challenging spaces of socio-cultural complexities as opposed to a single, ‘hegemonized’ elaboration. This article aims at addressing this issue, with the objective of studying how postcolonial civic identity is revealed across Malaysian youth narratives. The central ‘window’ to understanding these aspects, as we argue, lies in an investigation of youth personal narratives that elaborate the dialogic exchanges between youth and their environment, between technology and ecology. These responses to environment, which are often seen in the context of depicting (non)human world(s), are commonly associated with the a Main & Corresponding author eISSN: 2550-2131 ISSN: 1675-8021. By employing such narrative inquiry, the link between nature and culture and their relations to “global perspectives” can be demonstrated (Roos, 2011, p. 55)

Objectives

Methods

Findings

Conclusion