Missing: Youth, Citizenship, and Empire after 9/11 by Sunaina Marr Maira

American Ethnologist Volume 37 Number 4 November 2010 The chapter “Generation X: Anthropology in a Media Saturated World” provides the most extended example of subjects situated within relations of power pursuing projects and being thwarted along the way. Ortner starts by complicating the notion of what constitutes “Generation X.” In contrast to media representations that homogenize (and, indeed, construct) this generation and represent them as slackers, Ortner distinguishes between lower-middle-class Gen Xers and upper-middle-class ones and understands each as subjects struggling with the on- the-ground reality of U.S. economic decline in the 1970s. As the neoliberal policies of the 1980s pulled the middle class further and further apart, lower-middle-class women and men whose “project” was to class climb became frustrated, depressed, and enraged as upper-middle-class Gen Xers became insecure and fearful, even terrorized, as their desire to maintain their parents’ class standing became more and more allusive. Although Ortner’s insights into Gen Xers are com- pelling, it is a shame that she does not provide the kind of context that she champions in her chapter “Resistance and the Problem of Academic Refusal,” which critiques the fail- ure to aspire to “thickness” and “density” in ethnographic representations. Ortner is especially concerned with the “thinness” of studies of resistance, which she argues, ironi- cally, sanitize politics by focusing primarily on relations be- tween dominant and dominated to the exclusion of other sites of tension. Neither do these studies, she claims, suf- ficiently explore the cultural richness of groups nor of the subjectivities of the actors involved in such struggles. Al- though Ortner does explore the tension between upper middle-class Gen Xers and their parents, suggesting that the media representation of the slacker is a reflection of parental anxieties, her analysis relies on others people’s writings and on slight interview data, providing us with lit- tle sense of the intersubjective context within which ac- tors’ intentions, desires, fears, and projects are enacted, thwarted, or achieved. Nor, bewilderingly, does she provide a rich picture of the practices that construct and propel their projects. However, when “Generation X” is taken together with “Reading America: Preliminary Notes on Class and Cul- ture” and “Identities: The Hidden Life of Class,” what does emerge is a vivid picture of the ideological formation of “class” in U.S. popular and scholarly discourses and its sub- mersion within other categories of identity. She shows how naturalizing class by emblazoning it on raced, ethnicized, or gendered bodies renders it invisible as the source of social and economic inequalities. It also has real consequences for lived experiences, as when, for example, working-class women, seen as more aligned with middle-class values, pressure their husbands toward middle-class respectabil- ity, creating tensions in their marriage, or when African Americans who, despite high-status jobs, see themselves as lower class. Ortner is masterful at locating connections between currents in contemporary social theory and at teasing out their similarities and differences, their limitations and po- tential. Anthropology and Social Theory is a highly valuable text, an accessible reckoning with some of social theory’s most fundamental but slippery and problematic concepts. It will be a welcomed read for scholars who also continue to wrestle with issues of subjectivity, agency, and power, and for students seeking a map to the theoretical strug- gles that will likely continue to vex anthropology in the 21st century. Missing: Youth, Citizenship, and Empire after 9/11. Sunaina Marr Maira. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. 336 pp. KAREN LEONARD University of California, Irvine Sunaina Maira has written a passionate, politically engaged, and ambitious book, one ostensibly based on ethnographic work with South Asian Muslim youth after 9/11 in a New England urban high school. Maira combines three strands or modes of writing: narratives about and by the youth; analysis based on her fieldwork and theoretical and political ideas; and accounts of her own involvement in community and political issues relevant to questions of youth, citizen- ship, and empire (p. 36). Of these strands, the second dom- inates. Thus, the first substantive chapter lays our Maira’s analysis of U.S. empire “to highlight the importance of this framework for research on a range of issues related to citi- zenship, culture, and politics in this historical moment, and to reinsert an approach into the study of youth and immi- gration that has long gone missing” (p. 36). Her discussions of politics and theory are well written and wide ranging. She proposes new concepts or new phrases to capture themes she attributes to the student interviews: imperial feelings, cultural citizenship, transnational citizenship, polycultural- ism, and dissenting citizenship. Maira has used pseudonyms for the town and high school that she studied in 2002–03 with a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation and the help of three research assistants. Her appendix on methods specifies interviews with 38 high school students and 29 adults, chiefly par- ents, schoolteachers, and staff; Indian, Pakistani, and Mus- lim community leaders; and a few employees in govern- ment youth programs. Narratives from 14 of the 38 students interviewed are reproduced, two students appearing five times each (a Romeo and Juliet duo) and the others once