Youth and the Social Imagination in Africa: Introduction to Parts 1 and 2

Youth are an increasingly compelling subject for study in Africa, entering into political space in highly complex ways. To pay attention to youth is to pay close attention to the topology of the social landscape—to power and agency; public, national, and domestic spaces and identities, and their articulation and disjunctures; memory, history, and sense of change; globalization and governance; gender and class. In this introduction to the articles in Part 1 (this issue) and Part 2 (October issue), I draw attention to how youth is constructed as a problematic category and how it acts as a "social shifter" engaging the social imagination, to how youth contributes to generational debates and constructions, and to how consideration of youth challenges our thinking about agency.