Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com
10 Political Communication in a New Era
Edited by Gadi Wolfsfeld and Philippe Maarek
11 Writers Houses and the Making of Memory
Edited by Harald Hendrix
12 Autism and Representation
Edited by Mark Osteen
13 American Icons
The Genesis of a National Visual Language
Benedikt Feldges
14 The Practice of Public Art
Edited by Cameron Cartiere and Shelly Willis
15 Film and Television After DVD
Edited by James Bennett and Tom Brown
16 The Places and Spaces of Fashion, 18002007
Edited by John Potvin
17 Communicating in the Third Space
Edited by Karin Ikas and Gerhard Wagner
18 Deconstruction After 9/11
Martin McQuillan
19 The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero
Edited by Angela Ndalianis
20 Mobile Technologies
From Telecommunications to Media
Edited by Gerard Goggin and Larissa Hjorth
21 Dynamics and Performativity of Imagination
The Image between the Visible and the Invisible
Edited by Bernd Huppauf and Christoph Wulf
22 Cities, Citizens, and Technologies
Urban Life and Postmodernity
Paula Geyh
23 Trauma and Media
Theories, Histories, and Images Allen Meek
24 Letters, Postcards, Email
Technologies of Presence
Esther Milne
25 International Journalism and Democracy
Civic Engagement Models from Around the World
Edited by Angela Romano
26 Aesthetic Practices and Politics in Media, Music, and Art
Performing Migration
Edited by Roco G. Davis, Dorothea Fischer-Hornung, and Johanna C. Kardux
27 Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body
Cassandra Jackson
28 Cognitive Poetics and Cultural Memory
Russian Literary Mnemonics
Mikhail Gronas
29 Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory
Brett Ashley Kaplan
30 Emotion, Genre, and Justice in Film and Television
E. Deidre Pribram
31 Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies
Matthew Rubery
32 The Adaptation Industry
The Cultural Economy of Literary Adaptation
Simone Murray
33 Branding Post-Communist Nations
Marketizing National Identities in the New Europe
Edited by Nadia Kaneva
34 Science Fiction Film, Television, and Adaptation
Across the Screens
Edited by J. P. Telotte and Gerald Duchovnay
35 Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet
Olga Goriunova
36 Queer Representation, Visibility, and Race in American Film and Television
Melanie E.S. Kohnen
37 Artificial Culture
Identity, Technology, and Bodies
Tama Leaver
38 Global Perspectives on Tarzan From King of the Jungle to International Icon
Edited by Annette Wannamaker and Michelle Ann Abate
39 Studying Mobile Media
Cultural Technologies, Mobile Communication, and the iPhone
Edited by Larissa Hjorth, Jean Burgess, and Ingrid Richardson
40 Sport Beyond Television
The Internet, Digital Media and the Rise of Networked Media Sport
Brett Hutchins and David Rowe
41 Cultural Technologies
The Shaping of Culture in Media and Society
Edited by Gran Bolin
42 Pornography and Violence
The Politics of Sex, Gender, and Aggression in Pornographic Fantasy
Natalie J. Purcell
43 Ambiguities of Activism
Alter-Globalism and the Imperatives of Speed
Ingrid M. Hoofd
44 Generation X Goes Global
Mapping a Youth Culture in Motion
Edited by Christine Henseler
First published 2013
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the UK
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
2013 Taylor & Francis
The right of Christine Henseler to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Generation X goes global : mapping a youth culture in motion / edited by Christine Henseler.
p. cm. (Routledge research in cultural and media studies ; 44)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Generation X. 2. Youth. 3. YouthSocial conditions. 4. Culture. 5. Popular culture. I. Henseler, Christine, 1969
HQ799.5.G458 2012
305.235dc23
2012010913
ISBN13: 978-0-415-69944-0 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-203-10021-9 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by IBT Global.
includes material from Beijing Bastards: Century's End Rock Scenes and China's Generation X originally published in the work: Metro Movies: Cinematic Urbanism in Post-Mao China by Harry H. Kuoshu; Copyright (c) 2011 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinoise University, reproduced by permission of the publisher.
Printed and bound in the United States of America on sustainably sourced paper by IBT Global.
Foreword
American X: The Ironic History of a Generation
Dan Leidl
THE BEGINNING
In a year when the United States beat the Russians in Olympic hockey, The Empire Strikes Back and Pac-Man were released, Henry Hill was arrested on drug possession, and John Lennon was inexplicably shot outside the Dakota by the Catcher in the Rye-wielding Mark David Chapman, I, among lesser fanfare, began first grade in a rural town in northern New Jersey. In September of 1980 my father snapped a photo before a yellow bus stopped aside our driveway and enveloped me into a life of education, effort, and structured achievement. Holding my Porky Pig satchel against my chest, I smiled. Blue eyed with brown mopped hair, a face of enthusiastic anticipationcoy, proud, excited, prepared.
In that photo I stand innocent and hopeful, an archetype of youthful idealism. Yet beyond the image, beyond the archetype lies something even more universal, a unifying facet of childhood connecting those Americans who were born in the early sixties through 1979. In that photo, within that beautiful exuberance that once beamed so brightly, lies the challenge of a generation. A challenge so muddled and amorphous that many of us rail to simply articulate and understand it, let alone attack and overcome it. A challenge so personal that it's difficult to separate individual shortcomings from large-scale social upheaval. A challenge so consistent with the human struggle that we're apt to dismiss our generational urges as human foibles, inclined to plant our frustrations in the soil of Shakespeare over Wes Anderson. In that photo lies the reflection of a struggle shared by our generation, the struggle to reconcile our adult world with the promise of our childhoodaccept what we've become in light of what we thought we would be. Succinctly put, we're rapt to make sense of a world that exists in stark contrast to the world we once thought we would occupy.
