UC San Diego

This dissertation sets out to display the entanglements between youth mobilizations, utopian communities, and legal and police interventions in the cities of Shanghai and Paris at certain moments from 1900 to the 1970s. By focusing on spatial mobilizations in both tangible and discursive territories where the logic of juvenescence negotiates with the law and where utopian imaginations wrestle with disillusions, I argue that youth mobilizations and the logic of juvenescence accompanying it have shaped urban spaces in terms of global connectivity, communities, and transgressive spatial experiments, which also draw out collisions between the idea of commons and property law, between globalization and international law, and between the transgressive practice and the police.

Spatially, Shanghai and Paris serve as two major sites to present the rejuvenated and mobilized spaces in transformation as well as their political, intellectual, and cultural interactions. Temporally, this dissertation displays the ever-changing territories of youths and the logic of juvenescence, of law and order, and of revolutions and utopian communities in two periods: 1910s-1930s and the 1960s-1970s. The temporal coordinates of the dissertation cover the imperial and colonial era and the age of global revolution. In each period, Shanghai and Paris are connected by different networks: first by the colonial power of France in Shanghai, then by a shared revolutionary aspiration and global Maoism. On the one hand, it focus on the iconoclastic position of the logic of juvenescence and youths’ innovative mobilization and construction of juvenescent spaces that transgress the existing law and spatial order. On the other hand, it also explores fabulations of utopian communities that have evolved through time and a revisit to the earlier era could help us get a clear picture on how to live together communally and globally.