Replacing Citizenship

This book uses an ethnographic study of one gay community's responses to AIDS to illustrate a radical democratic understanding of citizenship in contemporary society. Analyzing specific forms of AIDS organizing and activism in Vancouver, British Columbia from ACT UP to visiting buddy programs Brown explores the alternative spaces of political action that have formed in locations where state, civil society, and family overlap. Instead of the traditional view of citizenship as a formal, unchanging relationship between individual and state, he proposes that citizenship is more productively discerned in everyday acts and in the actual places where we live our lives. An important contribution to queer theory and theories of radical democracy, the book brings abstract concepts down to earth with its nuanced portrait of the survival strategies of a community under siege. Honorable Mention, Myers Outstanding Book Awards

Although America is unquestionably a nation of immigrants, its immigration policies have inspired more questions than consensus on who should be admitted and what the path to citizenship should be. In Americans in Waiting, Hiroshi Motomura looks to a forgotten part of our past to show how, for over 150 years, immigration was assumed to be a transition to citizenship, with immigrants essentially being treated as future citizens--Americans in waiting. Challenging current conceptions, the author deftly uncovers how this view, once so central to law and policy, has all but vanished. Motomura explains how America could create a more unified society by recovering this lost history and by giving immigrants more, but at the same time asking more of them. A timely, panoramic chronicle of immigration and citizenship in the United States, Americans in Waiting offers new ideas and a fresh perspective on current debates.

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The essays in this volume are drawn from the tenth anniversary conference of the Center for the Study of Citizenship at Wayne State University, whose theme, “The Meaning of Citizenship,” provided an opportunity to reflect on a decade of study in the field. In an academic area where definitions are dynamic and multidisciplinary, editors Richard Marback and Marc W. Kruman have assembled fifteen contributors to show some of the rich nuances of membership in a political community. The Meaning of Citizenship addresses four dimensions of citizenship: the differentiation of citizenship in theory and practice, the proper horizon of citizenship, the character of civic bonds, and the resolution of conflicting civic and personal obligations. Contributors answer these questions from varying disciplinary perspectives, including ethnography, history, and literary analysis. Essays also consider the relevance of these questions in a number of specific regions, from Africa to the Caribbean, Middle East, Europe, and the United States. By identifying the meaning of citizenship in terms of geographic specificity and historical trajectory, the essays in this volume argue as a whole for a cross-disciplinary approach to the issues of inclusion and exclusion that are generated through any assertion of what citizenship means. The four primary concerns taken up by the contributors to this volume are as timely as they are timeless. Scholars of history, political science, sociology, and citizenship studies will appreciate this conversation about the full meaning of citizenship.

Citizenship implies exclusion of non-members. Migrations, processes and policies of first admission and incorporation of ethnically and culturally diverse newcomers are among the most hotly contested political issues, especially in a world of gross inequalities. This comparative and interdisciplinary collection sees distinguished moral and political philosophers, historians, sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists from America, Australia and Europe criticize existing institutions and increasingly restrictive policies and look for alternatives more in line with principles and constitutions of liberal democratic welfare states.

This book argues that basing citizenship on singular and individual membership in a nation-state is no longer adequate, since the nation-state model itself is being severely eroded. It examines issues of citizenship and difference in the Asia-Pacific region.

This book offers an examination into the meanings of citizenship in the contemporary world, and trends that are forcing a rethinking of the concept in today’s nation-states.