Everyday Lives of Black, Racialised Young Women in Interwar British Youth Penal Reform: Battleground Modernity

• In Event: EHC-WG Panel 6: Youth Justice in Historical Criminology

Abstract

Battleground Modernity is a Palgrave book project mapping how racism and racialisation shaped Black, British young women’s everyday Interwar experiences of surveillance and exclusion. Interwar British penal reform purportedly repudiated punishment for youth, while prioritising rehabilitation. Scholars, including Garland, deem Interwar criminological inquiry significant for understanding genealogies of youth, while race-blind (denoting racial erasure). Other scholars, including Phillips and Parmar, encourage historicisation of contemporary race matters. Established critical traditions, like deviance invention, supports Garland and Colleagues. Deviance invention traditions enable critical genealogies, mapping competing conceptions of youth, amid Interwar reforms. Deviance invention exposed reformers overseeing the inauguration of youth justice, as more than benevolent, implicating reformers in rationalising surveillance and penalty into the everyday lives of economically and politically oppressed youth: reformers were deemed affluent, authoritarians powerfully imposing their morality on oppressed families. My project takes a cultural studies approach to Black, racialised young women’s omission from Interwar criminological inquiry. Employing a mixed methodology, I draw on Liverpool and Cardiff as case studies, two port cities where Britain’s Black populations historically resided. Other materials come from London’s Black Cultural Archives, Cardiff’s Glamorgan Archives, and Liverpool’s City Archives, each hosting photos and other forms of cultural representations of Black young women’s everyday lives. Interwar cultural commentators like Waugh (Vile Bodies) and Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and the Damned) mapped the moral panics devastating Interwar youth’s everyday lives, observing the amplified scrutiny and consequences that the increasingly autonomous upper-class youth encountered. These youth were deemed The Lost Generation, denoting their supposed threat to social stability. Similar, simultaneous periodic moral panics for Black, racialised youth remain unassessed. The project, therefore, explores racially specific criminological concerns: criminology’s typical exclusion of women, in general, and racialised young women, in particular; and criminology’s de-historicisation of racialised young women’s contemporary concerns, despite canonical commitment to representation and historicisation.

Author

• Esmorie Jacqueline Miller, Lancaster University