One late evening, in December 2018, I was tired but also in a giddy mood. I had just been offered a new job and I was taking the evening off to chill and chat with Lola, a new friend, in my hotel room in Ibadan. While we were talking about her future plans and potential opportunities for graduate school in Canada, we segued into a discussion about youth in Nigeria, broadly, and in Ibadan, specifically. I told Lola that one of the things that I’d been trying to figure out was a new research project – I explained that I was interested in questioning what ‘decent’ work meant, particularly in the context of generating employment for youth. My concerns about ‘decent’ work led her to bring up examples of some of her colleagues in the banking world. Lola’s story about “Mary” particularly stayed with me. Lola’s manager had given Mary’s phone number to a potential wealthy client who had expressed interest in Mary. The potential client tried unsuccessfully to ‘befriend’ Mary and engage in a sexual relationship with her. Mary refused. And in turn, the potential client was no longer interested in bringing his business to the bank. Mary was consequently belittled by her manager in front of other colleagues and she faced other forms of ostracization that made the work environment very unpleasant for her. However, Mary did not quit the job. She endured the bad treatment. She had social obligations – people in her network who needed her to remain salaried.
We kept on talking about the contemporary pressures youth faced in relation to socioeconomic insecurity. I mentioned to Lola that having my son with me in Ibadan, a few months prior, had forced me to relate with the city differently because I had to find spaces for him to hang out and with food he likes. I noted that one of the things that really perplexed me was the large number of youth that I found in some consumption spaces in Ibadan – like Domino’s Pizza, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Coldstone Creamery, Ventura Mall, etc. because I thought that things in these spaces were expensive. For example, I paid more for ice cream and pizza in Ibadan than I do in Canada. And if I thought it was expensive, given my access to Canadian dollars, then it must be very expensive for some of the youth, especially given the devaluation of the naira and what the statistics were telling me about under/unemployment. She chuckled a little at how out of touch I was – she informed me that some people were looking for “aristos” and connected people (e.g., someone who could help secure stable employment) in these spaces. She detailed the steps taken by some people she knew, and those she heard about second-hand, to use these social spaces as ‘mobilees’ (a term coined by Tracey Skelton, 2013). Some youth went on a strict financial diet – eating very little- until they had a decent amount of money to go spend in these spaces (as participating in consumption was a key part of access to the spaces). And it is while participating, that they hope to meet someone – lover or friend – who will help make their lives better. But they had to first “package” in order to attract other middle-class people (my eyes have since been open to several Nollywood films that depicts people engaged in “fake life”). She then told me about her friend, “Tayo”, who called her one day to tell her that she’s about to go invest her last naira in the consumption of ice cream at Coldstone Creamery. Unfortunately, after waiting for a few hours, Tayo had to leave. She had not been successful in meeting someone. Although upset, Tayo was still hopeful, she called Lola and told her: “someone will eventually pay for this ice cream for me”. We both laughed and perhaps secretly admired her tenacity and hope, even if potentially unwise. To this day, I still wonder about the current rate of return of Tayo’s investments. After returning to Canada, I knew without a doubt that I had finally found what I wanted my next research project to be about. Of course, I had to dig into the literature to see what was already there. Lisa Adkin’s explanation of investor subjectivity as cultivating an investor relation to the self by continuous investments in the present all in the promise of returns in the future especially resonated with me. As well, the literature on the connections between immaterial labour and neoliberalism provided me with the insights that I needed to frame my research.
Meanwhile, my engagement with the scholarship on youth and the urban in Africa revealed that scholars have emphasized the need to: 1) understand how African youths (re)produce urban space (for leisure) as a way to orient their lives socially and materially in the absence of productive work (Langevang, 2008) and 2) explore how youth engage in livelihood struggles and also (re)create spaces for leisure and entertainment (Omotoso, 2012). However, the major focus of this scholarship is on youth transformation of informal spaces and urban streets, and on how youth (re)produce space in contexts of inadequate facilities (Bourdillon & Sangare, 2012). Thus, an underexplored area is how youth (re)produce formal consumer spaces, particularly those intended for elite consumption, as social spaces of inclusion and upward mobility. I decided to combine the scholarship on labour and leisure to investigate how youth invest in affective labour to project themselves into the future in new elite consumer spaces that emerged through urban restructuring. I am particularly interested in how marginalized youths deploy affective labour as a form of place-making practice to transform the capitalist space that was not meant for them into a space of possibility.
By March 2019, I started to share the inspiration for my research project, with much eagerness, with some of my colleagues. (Can you blame me? It had been almost ten years since I started a new research project of my own). Two of my colleagues reined in my excitement a little, particularly when the following became my mantra: “When there’s no social justice, when inequity abounds, malls and global chain eateries are ironically viewed as having potential to level the playing field.” They reminded me to keep my critiques of capitalism and neoliberalism in the foreground. And this was also when Lauren Berlant’s work on cruel optimism was recommended to me. I read the book and related articles and noticed that Tayo’s experience was a perfect example of cruel optimism: Tayo periodically deprives herself of food (and most likely nutritious food), so she could save money to spend in spaces that buttress the neoliberal economy in hopes that she will meet someone who would help her become middle-class. Food deprivation is not good for the body – arguably, it’s a form of punishment. But this punishment that Tayo continues to inflict on her body is justified because she dreams of upward social mobility. However, there’s no guarantee that this dream will come to pass (as illustrated by her frequent disappointments) – this is the cruel optimism of capitalism/neoliberal restructuring.
Cruel Optimism has definitely given me some food for thought and increased my curiosity around whether there’s a point when youth recognize and name this optimism as cruel. And if so, what do they do?