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Paper short abstract

This presentation discusses the conception of "Pikinité" as a 'self-revaluation-standard' of male juveniles of their urban quarter, and "global citizenship", comprehending their unbending yearning to be part of a globalized consumer culture.

Paper long abstract

Based on my own ethnographic fieldwork in Pikine, an urban area within the Dakar region of Senegal (Sept. 2011 - Mai 2012), I shall address issues related to discursive conceptions of urbanity and global citizenship among young male Pikinois.

'Licking at the shop-window', as the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe calls it, many juveniles of Pikine are confined to a painful position between desired participation in urban life-worlds and its exclusion. In the premise that Dakar is like a visual day-to-day experience (luxurious hotels, large villas, expensive cars, chic restaurants, trendy nightclubs and casinos), young Pikinois have started to construct a counter-discourse to draw value on their marginalized urban quarter within Pikine.

When globalization is translated more or less in its absence, meaning a conversion into exclusion from participation in urban processes and if only a few opportunities remain for youth to shape modernity, how is "global citizenship" then negotiated? This presentation discusses the conception of "Pikinité" as a 'self-revaluation-standard' of male juveniles of their urban quarter, and "global citizenship", comprehending their unbending yearning to be part of a globalized consumer culture, while being trapped in a moral economy between individual aspirations and aspirations for the community.