Teen Girls’ Resistance and the Disappearing Social in Ghost World

Abstract

Every society creates images and visions of those forces that threaten its identity.² In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the most pressing danger facing the United States appears to come from Muslims and Arab Americans, and other alleged “terrorists.” But the foremost danger facing the United States predates the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center and, in fact, provides a crucial continuity bridging the past and the present. That danger is nothing less than the devaluing of the social and the growing foreclosing of a democratic future that such a devaluing implies. Underlying a refusal of the future is a notion of the social world bereft of ethics, social justice, and any viable notion of democratic public culture.³ But our thinking about the future can harbor impulses and a horizon of expectations that challenge the narrow conceptions of a society dominated by market relations and the transformation of the citizen into a consumer, and also embody those social bonds that entail a responsibility to others, and especially to young people.

Children are the future of any society. If you want to know the future of a society look at the eyes of the children. If you want to maim the future of any society, you simply maim the children. Thus the struggle for the survival of our children is the struggle for the survival of our future. The quantity and quality of that survival is the measurement of the development of our society.

—Ngugi Wa Thiong’O¹