INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION IOM International Organization for Migration doi:10.1111/j.l468-2435.2010.00616.x Le Parkour: Urban Street Culture and the Commoditization of Male Youth Expression Scott Stapleton* ** and Susan Terrio* ABSTRACT This article considers the global distribution and commoditization of an extreme sport, Le Parkour, which was popularized by working class Parisian teenagers from the marginalized suburban projects. It examines the transformation of a localized phenomenon associated with the subversive use of urban space into a globalized and dynamic cultural form practiced on the street, in films and theatrical productions and in on-line communities. The authors study the discourses surrounding le parkour - the origin stories, myths, movements, and philosophies of practice that attract followers. Analysis of Le Parkour offers a unique vantage point from which to understand transnational cultural flows, the construction of hybridized identities and the commoditization of youth expression. INTRODUCTION So what is Parkour? Parkour involves a primary function of being human: to move. It is an art which elicits a true warrior spirit and pure action from its practitioners. (TonY ChaN, 2007)1 Parkour (or the art of movement): sporting activity consisting of moving from point A to point B while seeking above all efficiency in surmounting obstacles. This efficiency combines swiftness, economy of motion, and prudence. Parkour is practiced in a natural environment as well as in an urban environment. It is up to the traceur (practitioner of Parkour) to imagine the path he will follow, what obstacles he will surmount based on his skill. (Nairn Bornaz, 2008) My Parkour Story, Chapter 1 Georgetown University, Washington, DC. Note: This manuscript is based on the exemplary original research of Georgetown University student, Scott Stapleton, for a 2005 honours thesis written under the direction of Susan Terrio that won the coveted Jesse A. Mann Medal in the Culture and Politics Program in the School of Foreign Service. Scott Stapleton was killed in a tragic accident in Turkey just weeks before he was to begin graduate work in anthropology at the London School of Economics. All of us who knew Scott as professors or friends deeply mourn the loss of a brilliant and humane young man. ©2010 The Authors International Migration © 2010 IOM International Migration Vol. 50 (6) 2012 ISSN 0020-7985 Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, and 350 Main Street, Maiden, MA 02148, USA. Le Parkour: extreme sport 19 Kato had outrun the government millions of times; it was second nature to him. He jumped from building to building, occasionally landing with a roll when needed. Kato's pursuers were no match for him, and they knew it from the moment they started to chase him. He vaulted over obstacles as the police tried to follow him; the gap between them becoming larger and larger with every movement Kato made. For any object in his way, whether it be a power generator, a railing, or a threatening wall, Kato knew a way to get past it, for he was no mere man. Kato was a traceur, a practitioner of parkour. Parkour is the art of movement, and it wasn't just a hobby; it was his life style. (WhiteNinjaHero, 2009) "Le Parkour," literally translated, means "the course." The sport, also referred to as "urban obstacle-coursing," "freerunning" or "urban climbing," consists of an acrobatic and physically demanding manipulation of the urban landscape. In the late 1980s, two teenagers from the working class Parisian suburb of Lisses, David Belle, the son of white working class parents, and Sebastien Foucan, the son of black Guadeloupan migrants developed the techniques for traversing and climbing urban structures of all kinds from stairwells and walls to rooftops. One of the founders, David Belle, started a group called Yamakasi that grew around Paris. He articulates a philosophy of practice that lauds intense physicality and the freedom of movement in the urban cage. The Yamakasis became increasingly well known for their expressive athleticism, acrobatic techniques, and, what many saw as a subversive resistance to oppressive city space. Parkour began as a localized phenomenon, an extreme sport associated with the racialized housing projects in the Parisian suburbs, the banlieue. It draws on very specific French stereotypes of the "immigrant" delinquent and discourses regarding the low-income projects as lawless zones of anomie, violence, unemployment, and degraded infrastructure (Terrio, 2009). It is no accident that the Yamakasi group was formed in the 1980s. Group members were part of the second generation of youth born to immigrant parents in the late 1960s and early 1970s at a time of major economic restructuring. This was a period of de-industrialization, limited blue-collar work, and a much more difficult job market demanding greater professional credentials and longer schooling. High rates of youth un- or under-employment became a chronic problem for children of working class and immigrant background. Finding and keeping a first full-time job was more difficult for young men of non-European, particularly Maghrebi, ancestry than their French and European immigrant counterparts (Tribalat, 1998). Unemployment among youth from these groups who had few or no vocational degrees reached 40-50 per cent (Beaud, 2002). The limited availability of blue-collar work and a shrinking welfare state have left these youth with few choices outside the underground economy. Over this same period, successive governments continued a long-standing territorialized approach to urban crime in state-classified "bad" areas with high concentrations of "immigrant" and foreign populations. They instituted aggressive policing measures involving neighbourhood sweeps and identity checks, created new categories of violent youth crime, and instituted heavier penalties for existing infractions. The results have been more arrests, more prosecutions, more incarceration, longer prison sentences, and more tension between youth and the police (Wacquant, 2004). At a time of intensified surveillance and tighter controls over underprivileged youth populations, it was precisely the transgressive street culture of the Yamakasis that attracted French media attention and set the stage for the transformation of the Parkour into a mainstream international commodity. The creative spontaneity exhibited in a blighted banlieue by youth of Maghrebi, West African, Antillean, and Asian descent caught the eye of French filmmaker, Luc Besson. He offered David Belle and his Parkour buddies roles in his commercial film Taxi 2? Eventually Besson produced a film based on their group entitled Yamakasi, les samourai's des temps modernes. This big-budget action movie tells the story of seven trac-eurs who are heroes to children growing up in the now famously stigmatized suburban cites, ©2010 The Authors. International Migration © 2010 IOM 20 Stapleton and Terrio the French equivalent of the projects. The film constructs the Parkour athletes as heroic rebels who defy bourgeois conventions and challenge corrupt institutions. "They don't believe in the law of gravity and they don't care about the law. Paris' youth idolize them. The police hate them. They are the Yamakasis, modern samurais, warriors in the war against the ghetto's dark and sad reality."3 Like commercial filmmakers, corporate advertisers have also appropriated, commoditized, and sold the Parkour as a critique of modern capitalism's construction of the city. Parkour was the centrepiece of a 2002 Nike ad campaign for the launch of the Presto shoe line. Filmed in a Parisian suburb and mixed with a French voiceover, the ads feature athletes jumping between decrepit buildings, vaulting down project stairwells and soaring over graffiti-covered roof tops. That ad campaign is credited with boosting Nike's sales by nearly $200 million. Since then Parkour has become a constantly changing form of global popular culture that attracts predominantly young men. They form online communities featuring dozens of performance videos, maintain message boards for new and veteran practitioners, and participate in Parkour festivals and competitions staged around the world. At the same time, high brow cultural arbiters such as documentary filmmakers have also focused on the Parkour. The documentary Jump London (2003) punctuates action shots of the Parkour traceurs with the analyses of new theorists of youth "subcultures." Here the traceur is also depicted as a heroic street bandit untainted by capitalist society; he produces a critique of space through his unique production of space. The Parkour has become a "new art form" for the stage in which appreciation of the sport as a creatively subversive activity is a means of producing distinction and lends itself to the aesthetic 4 gaze. The global reach of the Parkour has increased the spatial, cognitive, and social distances between the practitioners of the sport, the producers of Parkour as a cultural commodity, and the consumers of it in films, festivals, and theatre. Knowledge about the practice and culture of Parkour "has technical, mythological, and evaluative components" and is susceptible to manipulation as the intensity and distance of its global flow increases (Appadurai, 1986: 41). Filmmakers, corporations, and the practitioners themselves exploit these complex flows to construct elaborate mythologies about the sport and its community of practice. A form of youth expression and identity is invented and marketed, bought and sold, invested and withdrawn by the local creators, global corporations, mainstream consumers, and youth around the world who imitate the Parkour as a sport and a trend. In this article we examine the discourses surrounding the Parkour - the origin stories, myths, movements, and philosophies of practice that inspire youth like those quoted above. A study of the Parkour phenomenon from the perspective of traceurs and culture brokers like filmmakers, academics, and advertisers offers a unique vantage point from which to understand transnational cultural flows, the construction of hybridized identities, the corn-modi tization of youth expression, and public performance in contested public spaces. It centres on the cultural production of a group of youth widely associated with crisis and trouble. We begin with the traceur narratives before discussing Parkour in film and advertising and the value it has acquired through economic, political, and social exchanges. PARKOUR AS PRACTICE AND COMMUNITY The Parkour is a physically demanding sport grounded in public performances - both live and virtual. Traceurs assert themselves through distinctive moves and embody a unique form of identity expression. The jumps and rolls that make up a performance are, to quote Judith Butler, "critical [components] not only of [their] subject formation but of the ongoing politi- © 2010 The Authors. International Migration © 2010 IOM Le Parkour: extreme sport 21 cal contestation and reformulation of the subject as well" (Butler, 1993: 125). The discourses surrounding the Parkour on internet blogs and in action footage emphasize a form of embodied practice: the conditioning; the extended and lonely apprenticeship involving discipline, endurance and willpower; and the mastery of specific techniques. This process allows the traceur to surmount obstacles freely chosen by him. In a 2006 short film by Julie Angel, footage centres on a space "particularly suited to training in the middle of nowhere" with connecting walls, a low ceiling and numerous railings. Here emphasis is on the control and precision of the traceurs who display the "agility of monkey men."5 In another short filmed in 2008 by Jake Harris, the traceur describes his challenge as a particular jump across rooftops: "Ever since I started I've wanted to do this. People said I couldn't but I did not listen. It hasn't been easy but it's what I luv. This one moment I've dreamt about over and over." The climax shows the traceur soar in slow motion across a wide chasm separating two buildings.6 The velocity of global flows and the time-space compression of the postmodern condition are evident in Parkour narratives. Both the past and the future become part of a present which is organized around the practice of the sport. It demands years of serious training and the devotion to keeping fit. This is the testimonial of one practitioner: "Four years in my past I am watching a Frenchman doing something I have only seen once before in my life. Someone on my television screen is jumping across roofs. 18 months in my future is telling me to keep going."7 Within a community formed around Parkour, authenticity and prestige are established through control of certain types of knowledge and skill. Parkour skill and an accompanying style work to distinguish individuals from each other and from other more conventional sports such as gymnastics or soccer. Performances display hierarchies of skill and differentiate wanna-be newcomers from tested veterans. One common technique for claiming inclusion to the Parkour movement is to situate one's trajectory within the origin stories and philosophies of the founders, David Belle or Sebastien Foucan.8 The ultimate proof of membership within any community of practice is to display physical prowess. To do so in challenging conditions such as in freezing rain, on slippery pavement or in tight spaces confers a special kind of cultural capital (Edwardes, 2008). The globalization of Parkour has made the constantly circulating knowledge about its practice more uniform, available, and, paradoxically, more tightly controlled. The very openness of the movement has produced the need to standardize and to codify the terminology and techniques that define and authenticate it. Many associations now publish taxonomies of common moves in French and English: Roulade (Parkour roll), Saut du Chat (Kong vault), Saut du bras (cat jump) and Passe muraille (wall pass).9 Claims relating to the height of jumps or the invention of new moves are hotly debated. For example, one traceur strongly objected to the description of a 20-foot jump used in the My Parkour Story quoted above as unrealistic (ruzkin, 2009). Parkour brings together young men in ways that confirm and challenge Dick Hebdige's notion of a subculture (Hebdige, 1979). Parkour communities qualify as a subculture because the performances are represented as a political response to oppressive historical conditions and a particular social problem: life in the degraded internal colonies of French cites. Their expressive project was a counter-hegemonic activity. Parkour was and is understood as a political act that pits practitioners against larger capitalistic forces. One young traceur wrote a long essay analyzing the transformative effects of Parkour: "Traceurs respect the law but violate norms that govern movement in public space, they defy the rules, upset conventions, and by leaving designated pathways, invent their own." Their appropriation of public space serves to reshape it. The traceur is a subversive who works against urban development that excludes "undesirables" such as the young, the poor and the homeless through the privatiza- ©2010 The Authors. International Migration © 2010 IOM 22 Stapleton and Terrio tion of formerly public spaces. Parkour practitioners strategically occupy parts of the urban landscape in spontaneous and innovative ways. They upset the established order by claiming a "free and non-commercial relationship to public space" (Bornaz, 2008). The expressive style of traceurs is also evident in a philosophy of practice that emphasizes individual freedom, self-awareness, and a particular state of mind as much as physical prowess. A description of the 2008 Parkour Generation International Seminar held in London is illustrative: "What sets Parkour apart is how it shapes the spirit of the individual, how it liberates the mind, and brings new vision and perspective on one's self and one's environment. Part of that spirit is firmly centred in fun and enjoyment but another part is rooted in self-reliance, determination and discipline. In facing what is and overcoming it through harmony and adaptation" (Edwardes, 2008). Parkour also challenges Hebdige's construction of alternate identities within subcultures like the British Bowie-ites (Hebdige, 1979). The causal links between oppressive historical circumstances and political acts of dissent are less pronounced in Parkour as a global phenomenon. Parkour communities start from locally situated individuals but are constituted and reproduced in global spaces - the web, blogs, YouTube, and international competitions. Class, ethnic, racial or national affiliations are notably absent from contributors to blogs, web sites and message boards. Online contributors frequently adopt user names that correspond to their imagined social lives and identities such as heroic rebels or urban warriors. Even those who provide real names rarely give additional information that would permit others to locate them in geographical, generational, class or political terms. Rather, Parkour practitioners form part of unstable, shifting groupings that create and consume different styles through the sport.10 Movements like Parkour do not trap individuals into a fixed sense of the self but offer temporary and fluctuating roles for the individual to play. Rather than the objective structures and internalized dispositions that produce the habitus, Parkour affiliations are more like free-floating systems of attachment and de-attachment without a coherent centre (Bourdieu, 1984). PARKOUR AS A GLOBAL COMMODITY In contrast to the narratives of individual freedom and accomplishment that stress Parkour as an activity that is untainted by commercialism, in fact its very existence as a global phenomenon stems from its appropriation and commoditization by corporate marketers and elite tastemakers. Many film clips that reproduce the Parkour values of freedom and self-expression in resonant public spaces such as the 13 th arrondissement in Paris are funded by corporate sponsors seeking to promote products such as Canon video cameras.11 Large corporations such as Adidas, Nike and Canon finance video shoots and international competitions, maintain web sites, and provide lucrative sponsorship deals. Urbanfreeflow.com, a British website, provides tips for budding traceurs and is a sales kit for youth who have discovered Parkour. It offers regional message boards to connect local enthusiasts and includes a "hotspots" section disclosing the best places to practice Parkour in different cities. The image of Parkour is linked to taste as an expression of power where cultural producers constantly work to legitimate and authenticate their preferences. This is a hierarchical process that involves powerful cultural tastemakers such as filmmakers and advertising executives and peripheral "subcultural" tastemakers who appropriate and manipulate the dominant discourse on youth expression. This activity is not a dialectical revolt against the mainstream so much as competition within a global cultural economy. "Legitimate" styles as well as "coun-tercultural" ones are part of the same field of cultural production. © 2010 The Authors. International Migration © 2010 IOM Le Parkour: extreme sport 23 Bourdieu's concept of the "aesthetic distancing" of elite tastemakers is relevant for understanding the packaging and marketing of Parkour to the mainstream through ads, films, videos, and theatre. The aesthete appropriates one of the objects of popular taste, introduces a distance, a gap - the measure of his distinction vis-a-vis "first degree" perception - by displacing the interest from the content and the characters to the form and artistic effects (Bour-dieu, 1984). The process by which the Parkour is selected and turned into movies and commercials is a distancing from the original content of its work. The aesthetic appreciation of the movement is used to sell shoes and clothing not the factual histories of the athletes. At the same time, this legitimation of the Parkour in mass media can confer status among practitioners. Their consumption of certain branded sports clothing, shoes, and music distinguishes them from other forms of cultural expression. Despite the narrative opposition to the mainstream, Parkour practitioners function within the bounds of class-based societies. By creating standards used to distinguish Parkour from martial arts and gymnastics, the practitioners do attempt to create a specific social position and their own cultural hierarchy. Product reviews, popular on Parkour web sites, distinguish cool from undesirable apparel, a phenomenon that positions Parkour within a larger popular discourse on sports fashion. The production and distribution of print and electronic media related to Parkour add a layer of complexity to this analysis. The films and ads about youth expression are commodities produced, circulated, and exchanged for profit and yet their appeal exploits and depends on the anti-establishment discourse surrounding the trend. One of the most important features of commodity exchange is the inter-subjective knowledge about an object's production and use. The social life of commodities emphasizes the idiosyncracies of objects rather than the simple production/consumption pattern. Parkour does not have a given value; rather its value is created by individuals who exchange stories, clips, and advice on it (Appadurai, 1986). Knowledge about a commodity's use, production or proper consumption frequently determines its flow. This relationship is critical for understanding the popularity of Parkour. It develops in the French banlieue but is popularized by bourgeois Nike and Adidas consumers and film audiences. Middle and upper classes are separated from its site of production - the projects - so both the site and the practitioners are mythologized to fit an identity that will sell. The phenomenon is valued and consumed in the mainstream for different reasons than the athletes who started it. Knowledge is a turnstile that facilitates the flow of commodity and opens up unanticipated paths. PARKOUR IN VISUAL AND ELECTRONIC MEDIA The Nike-Parkour campaign, the Luc Besson film, and the Jump London documentary are case studies in the commoditization of youth expressions and groups. A key aspect of the Nike ad campaign is the exclusivity of the product and its desirability. The spectacular physical performances foregrounded in the ads create a distance between the consumers in the ad and the viewers in part by placing the sport in an unfamiliar landscape with characters and settings that are extra-cultural. The deliberate blending of the local and the global is a significant aspect of the media representation of different forms of youth expression. The big budget film Yomakasi and the Nike ads both portray the Parkour traceurs in heroic terms as popular bandits. Whereas the Nike commercials focus on the commoditization of the Parkour to sell shoes, the feature film uses narrative to commoditize Parkour identity. The film's mythologized narrative helps to alienate the viewer from the white, wealthy filmmaker and the corporate production company. ©2010 The Authors. International Migration © 2010 IOM 24 Stapleton and Terrio Yamakasi's formal presentation of Parkour works with its strong narrative structure to create a distinctive Parkour persona. The movie's opening takes place in a dark underground tunnel system. Parkour athletes flood in and plan an unidentified run. The Yamakasi are distinctly non-white youth - three are black, two are North African, and two are Asian. The setting is a high rise building in the banlieue and the sound track cuts in with ghetto rap.12 The camera centres on the traceurs, their young fans, and the spatial context. The cultural interactions created in film productions such as this can only be understood because of the imaginative work of widely dispersed viewers. In the global cultural economy the imagination is no longer a fantasy, an escape or an elite pastime but a field of social practices and an active form of negotiation (Appadurai, 1996: 31). In the film, as in electronic media, complex histories are condensed and the past is transformed into a synchronic warehouse of cultural scenarios to be mined as appropriate (Appadurai, 1996: 32). The Yamakasi film is targeted toward a mainstream French audience as demonstrated in its marketing campaign. Yet the film relies on localized understandings of the Parisian banlieue as well as ethnicity and class. Yamakasi heroes struggle with greedy white surgeons and reckless swat teams. Yamakasi street justice is pitted against the bureaucratic state apparatus. The youth burglarize the doctors' homes and fence the stolen property to pay for the expensive heart transplant needed by one of their own. This Robin Hood banditry depends on an opposition between marginalized populations and privileged elites and creates identification with the Yamakasi given the abusive authority of the elites. The widespread stereotyping of "immigrant" banlieue populations becomes a selling point when attached to the film's rebel narrative and awesome physical moves. Though the film inverts much of the negative French discourses on banlieue delinquents, the Yamakasi nonetheless exist as transgressive outsiders to the mainstream. Their Parkour look includes high tech shoes, baggy clothing, and MP3 players. Their music of choice is gangsta rap and they steal to level the ethnic and class playing field. They are valorized as heroes but remain "Other." The distinctive locality - both the Parisian working class suburbs and the wealthy inner city neighbourhood - becomes a fetish that disguises the globally dispersed forces that actually drive the production process (Appadurai, 1996: 42). This fetishization of the local is a significant aspect of the global cultural economy and is something that affects the film's exchange value. In contrast to this fictional portrayal of the Parkour, the Jump London documentary dedicates itself to an authentic picture of the movement. The film was produced to appear as a television special on Britain's Channel 4. The documentary is designed to open the unique urban sport to the London city landscape. The film's producers contacted municipal authorities regarding famous London landmarks like the Globe Theatre, the Tate Modern, and Trafalgar Square and asked permission to film Parkour runs at these sites. Though Jump London is linked to the commercials and the film by producing and disseminating certain mythologies of Parkour, the documentary commoditizes the sport in its own distinct ways. Structurally the film is divided into three acts: the first tells the story of Parkour, with location shots of Lisses, the birthplace of the sport, the second is shot in London in preparation for the final segment, and the third consists of a twenty-minute montage of the traceurs performing runs at different landmarks. Parkour action scenes hold the film together and are inter-cut with critical commentaries, three of which are particularly salient. Filmed on location in Lisses, in the first sequence the director uses flashback images of children practicing basic Parkour moves as a visual representation of the sport's beginnings. After one such sequence, the film cuts to an interview with the city's mayor. He represents state authority and affirms that Parkour is a dangerous and transgressive activity. His comments are followed immediately by a scene of black Lisses school children watching in admiration as Parkour leader, Sebastien Foucan traverses the railing of a bridge. This portrayal of Parkour © 2010 The Authors. International Migration © 2010 IOM Le Parkour: extreme sport 25 as an oppositional sport, set in a racial frame, affirms the sport's extreme character. Non-white participants serve to authenticate Parkour's subversive, even outlaw character. Secondly, the film features a segment where traceurs hang out with soccer celebrity Robert Pires. He comments that Parkour "is an escape, a way out for those in urban areas." His commentary highlights the socio-economic significance of the sport and affirms Parkour's consumer value as well as its banlieue roots. Finally, we meet Iain Borden, theorist on youth sports subculture. He asserts that skateboarding and Parkour are innovative approaches to the city that resist the pervasive capitalistic urbanism in London and other global cities. All three of these commentaries demonstrate the way in which the documentary constantly positions itself in relation to cultural and political discourses. It invites the viewer to place the Parkour within familiar frameworks. Since there is no presupposed social position for a youth trend like Parkour, the film actively works to manufacture one. The documentary maps the Parkour movement onto the London cityscape in ways that produce a unique view of the city. By using landmarks in atypical ways, Parkour athletes redefine the ways we look at space. The film further accents the distinctiveness of the Parkour by juxtaposing the fluid acrobatic performances with jarring time-lapse images of office workers moving through space. By contrasting Parkour with a stultifying bourgeois routine, the athletes create a particular brand. The Jump London documentary offers scripts of possible lives. Viewers are familiarized with a possible lifestyle, complete with a ready-made, radical ethos that can be appropriated and emulated. Moreover, Parkour is an activity through which teenagers and young men connect with one another, away from parents and other authority figures. At the same time, this subcultural preference including products, look, and life style is a kind of inculcation into a consumerist mentality. Walking on K Street in Georgetown in 2005, one of the authors, Scott Stapleton, ran into a group of 20 white teenagers with Parkour tee shirts running and jumping off ledges. When he asked about how they knew about the Parkour, they said they saw the Jump London documentary on the Learning Channel. They "googled" the sport, found urbanfreeflow.com and formed a regional group. When Stapleton asked to talk to them, they directed him to the regional message board on the website. CONCLUSION Subcultural theory's emphasis on stylistic resistance to oppressive social conditions is an outmoded interpretive framework for understanding youth expression. The narrow emphasis of the Hebdige school's romanticist vision of youth subculture conceals an important aspect of youth expression: the transnational production, circulation, and consumption of trends. Commodity and performativity theory work to better explain how visual media construct different forms of Parkour identity in dialogue with practitioners. Electronic media and films devoted to Parkour position the sport on the global cultural map. Nonetheless, the athletes' performance enables them to move in and out of a bounded position. The story presented in video clips, films and ads is a familiar twist on various social scripts in contrast to the athlete's movement which is unique. The sport's social and economic value was not created by its founders in the French banlieue but by exchange processes between international producers and consumers. Nonetheless, the expertise and histories of the Parkour founders is a privileged discourse of knowledge that affects the trajectory of the Parkour phenomenon in the global cultural economy. The presentation of the Parkour in electronic media is a way of socially grounding the sport. Parkour is an intensely subversive use of city space. This re-use and re-formulation is exactly the kind of activity that constitutes viable resistance to dominant discourses and practices (Butler, 1993). The ©2010 The Authors. International Migration © 2010 IOM 26 Stapleton and Terrio legitimacy of the movement serves to alter mainstream perceptions of immigrant delinquents. Global cultural flows amplify Parkour's performativity. Youth around the world interpret Parkour in their own way and reinforce their identities as they re-use city spaces. As Parkour is linked to a variety of contextually specific social and political discourses at the site of production and reception, it remains sutured to DVD sales, athletic shoes, and MP3 players. The market may facilitate the integration of previously disenfranchised social groups but that integration and visibility comes at a price. Capitalism's infinite capacity to make the subversive spectacle an ordinary and consumable commodity may limit the possibility of any true stylistic resistance to the economic status quo. NOTES 1. All French translations are the authors'. 2. Taxi 2 is the sequel to Taxi, a highly successful series of French films written by Luc Besson. The film's commercial achievement is evidenced by the fact that Hollywood took notice and Besson's screenplay was adapted for the US in a film starring Queen Latifah and Jimmy Fallon (also produced by Besson). 3. Plot summary for the film Yamakasi, http://imdb.com.title/tt0267129/plotsummary. accessed February 2005. 4. See the review of the 2008 theatre production, Get a Grip-L'Art du Deplacement, staged in Australia. Using a fusion of live performance, film and music, the local Arts House was transformed into "an urban streetscape" in which "five young men dressed in modest street wear leap from the high scaffolding to the hard floor." www.theatre.asn.au/theatre_reviews/review_trace_ele-ments_get_a_grip_lart_du_deplacement. 5. www.youtube.com/watch7v = WkHPQPozDRs&NR = 1 6. www.youtube/watch?v = MbC9HOQX8Qc&feature = channel. 7. www.parkourgenerations.com/blog/2009/06/75-with-apologies-to-alan-moore.php. 8. See for example, "David Belle et le Parcours, Une Histoire de famille," 9 April 2008, TonY-ChaN, http://parkour.net/David-Belle-Parcours-une-histoire-de-famille-t649.html 9. See two examples, one from France and the other from the US: Jerome Lebret, "Vocabulaire du parkour, definition des mots utilises sur ce site," 8 November 2007, http://parkour.net/Vocabu-laire-parkour-t90.html and Pacific Northwest Parkour Association, "Parkour Terminology," 2008, http:// pnwpa.com/resources/parkourterminology .php. 10. French sociologist Michel Maffesoli offers another revision to the Hebdige concept of subculture through his focus on fluid micro groups in The Time of the Tribes, London: Sage, 1996. 11. See the video clip, Parkour in District 13, Stephane Vignoux, www.canon-europe.com/freecoding-youcan. 12. The movie featured original music by French gangsta rapper DJ Spank and Joey Starr of the well-known French rap group, NTM. REFERENCES Appadurai, A. (Ed.) 1986 The Social Life of Things, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. Appadurai, A. 1996 Modernity at Large, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Beaud, S. 2002 80% au bac. Et apres?\..Les enfants de la democratization scolaire, La Decouverte, Paris. Borden, I. 2002 Skateboarding, Space and the City, Berg, New York. © 2010 The Authors. International Migration © 2010 IOM Le Parkour: extreme sport 27 Bornaz, N. 2008 11 March, http://parkour.net/Parkour-art-de-subvertir-rapport-a-l-espace-pub- t361/html. Bourdieu, P. 1984 Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Butler, J. 1993 "Performativity's social magic", in C. Calhoun, et al. (Eds.), Bourdieu's Critical Perspectives, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. ChaN, T. 2007 16 November, http://parkour.net/L-apprentissage-Parkour-tl26.html. Christie, M. (Director) Jump London. Edwardes, D. 2008 "Parkour Generations International Seminar 2008", http://www.parkourgenerations.com/arti-cles.php. Hebdige, D. 1979 Subcultures, the meaning of style, Methuen, London. Ruzkin 2009 Blog, accessed 3 July 2009, http://urbanfreeflow.yuku.com/topic/9892/t/My- Parkour-Story.html. Terrio, S. J. 2009 Judging Mohammed. Juvenile Delinquency, Immigration and Exclusion at the Paris Palace of Justice, Stanford University Press, Stanford. Tribalat, M. 1998 "Integration des jeunes d'origine etrangere", in I. Thery (Ed.), Couple, Tiliation et Parente au-jourd'hui, Editions Odile Jacob, Paris: 271-303. Wacquant, L. 2004 "Comment sortir du piege securitaire?" Contradictions, 22: 120-133. WhiteNinjaHero 2009 21 June, http://urbanfreeflow.yuku.eom/topic/9892/t/My-Parkour-Story.html. Zeitoun, A. (Director) 2001 Yamakasi: les samourais des temps modernes, Europa. ©2010 The Authors. International Migration © 2010 IOM Copyright of International Migration is the property of Wiley-B lackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. 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