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Let's imagine that we live in the future and that the revolution happened in the first half of the twenty-first century in the United States. Do you think that it could be a better situation than that of the . . . past? Yes or no, we can't make predictions.
-Antonio Negri, Goodbye Mr. Socialism, 22-23
I.
In M. T. Anderson's Feed (2002), Nancy Farmer's The House of the Scorpion (2002), and Pete Hautman's Rash (2006), adolescent protagonists attempt to create a better situation for themselves in their imagined twenty-first-century landscapes, despite the marginalized conditions they live under as global consumers and producers. They stage the following acts of resistance: in Feed, teenage Violet stops buying goods in her commodity-driven society; in The House of the Scorpion, the main character Matt hopes to destroy a major drug cartel's opium fields; and in Rash, the adolescent protagonist Bo flees the country. While Antonio Negri tells us that we cannot make predictions about the results of revolution, these authors have predicted a future that still requires a revolution in order to create a better situation. Feed, The House of the Scorpion, and Rash represent dystopian futures rendered through a variety of technologies, including bio-warfare, cloning, the introduction of computer software into the human body, and the use of surveillance systems and medications to regulate human emotion. These futures of the twenty-first century share specific conditions: global capitalism through the expansion of the marketplace, excess of commodities, the waste product (or the obsolete commodity), the commodification of the body, destruction of natural resources, and a media-saturated culture. Given the dehumanizing representations of the marketplace and the commodification of the individual in these texts, the authors articulate a revolution in a speculative future that is no better than present-day conditions. As youth subjects are also defined by and controlled through these conditions, their agency becomes necessary in order to realize the better future Negri asks his readers to imagine in Goodbye Mr. Socialism. When read through the work of Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (scholars who address how capitalism dilutes personal freedoms, identity, and culture), these texts offer formulas for resistance through the youth subject, whether the character acts in isolation from her peers...