Rights Cultures Subjects And Citizens

This book questions the political logic of foregrounding cultural collectives in a world shaped by globalization and neoliberalization. Throughout the world, it is no longer only individuals, but increasingly collective "cultures" who are made responsible for their own regulation, welfare and enterprise. This appears as a surprising shift from the tenets of classical liberalism which defined the ideal subject of politics as the "unencumbered self"- the free, equal and self-governing individual. The increasing promotion and recognition of cultural rights in international legislation, multiculturalism, and public debates on "culture" as a political problem more generally indicate that culture has become a more central terrain for governance and struggles around rights and citizenship. On the basis of case studies from China, Latin America, and North America, the contributors of this book explore the links between culture, civility, and the politics of citizenship. They argue that official reifications of "culture" in relation to citizenship, and even the recognition of cultural rights, may obey strategies of governance and control, but that citizens may still use new cultural rights and networks, and the legal mechanisms that have been created to protect them, in order to pursue their own agendas of empowerment. This book was originally published as a special issue of Economy and Society.

Bosnian Muslims, East African Masai, Czech-speaking Austrians, North American indigenous peoples, and Jewish immigrants from across Europe—the nineteenth-century British and Habsburg Empires were characterized by incredible cultural and racial-ethnic diversity. Notwithstanding their many differences, both empires faced similar administrative questions as a result: Who was excluded or admitted? What advantages were granted to which groups? And how could diversity be reconciled with demands for national autonomy and democratic participation? In this pioneering study, Benno Gammerl compares Habsburg and British approaches to governing their diverse populations, analyzing imperial formations to reveal the legal and political conditions that fostered heterogeneity.

Focusing on intersecting issues of nation, race, and gender, this volume inaugurates new models for American literary and cultural history. Subjects and Citizens reveals the many ways in which a wide range of canonical and non-canonical writing contends with the most crucial social, political, and literary issues of our past and present. Defining the landscape of the New American literary history, these essays are united by three interrelated concerns: ideas of origin (where does "American literature" begin?), ideas of nation (what does "American literature" mean?), and ideas of race and gender (what does "American literature" include and exclude and how?). Work by writers as diverse as Aphra Behn, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Frances Harper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Bharati Mukherjee, Booker T. Washington, Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, Américo Paredes, and Toni Morrison are discussed from several theoretical perspectives, using a variety of methodologies. Issues of the "frontier" and the "border" as well as those of coloniality and postcoloniality are explored. In each case, these essays emphasize the ideological nature of national identity and, more specifically, the centrality of race and gender to our concept of nationhood. Collected from recent issues of American Literature, with three new essays added, Subjects and Citizens charts the new directions being taken in American literary studies. Contributors. Daniel Cooper Alarcón, Lori Askeland, Stephanie Athey, Nancy Bentley, Lauren Berlant, Michele A. Birnbaum, Kristin Carter-Sanborn, Russ Castronovo, Joan Dayan, Julie Ellison, Sander L. Gilman, Karla F. C. Holloway, Annette Kolodny, Barbara Ladd, Lora Romero, Ramón Saldívar, Maggie Sale, Siobhan Senier, Timothy Sweet, Maurice Wallace, Elizabeth Young

"During the 1870s, 7,000 Mennonites - descendants of Dutch and German Anabaptists - arrived in Canada to settle in the newly created province of Manitoba. While in Europe, they had steadily moved eastward under pressure of persecution and governmental restrictions until they settled in "foreign colonies" in New Russia (Ukraine) in 1789. Generations of living as non-citizen settlers under special arrangements with the ruler had reinforced their separatist understanding of what it meant to live in nonconformity with the world." "Adolf Ens's volume traces the tensions of Mennonites becoming full citizens in the participatory democracy of Canada through the crucial steps of immigration, settlement and naturalization, implementing local municipal government, and becoming part of the public school system. This process was greatly complicated by the outbreak of the First World War and the intolerance it produced toward those who were pacifist, German, and different." "Almost 8,000 of the descendants of this immigrant group left for Latin America in the aftermath of the war, becoming subjects once again. The rest gradually accommodated themselves to being full Canadian citizens."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

`Culture' and `citizenship' are two of the most hotly contested concepts in the social sciences. What are the relationships between them? This book explores the issues of inclusion and exclusion, the market and policy, rights and responsibilities, and the definitions of citizens and non-citizens. Substantive topics investigated in the various chapters include: cultural democracy; intersubjectivity and the unconscious; globalization and the nation state; European citizenship; and the discourses on cultural policy.

This book argues that citizens have a moral right to decide by which criteria they grant migrants citizenship, as well as to control access to their territory in the first place. In developing and defending this argument, it critically engages numerous objections, thus providing the reader with a thorough overview of the current debate on the ethics of immigration and exclusion. The author’s argument is based on a straightforwardly individualist and liberal starting point. One of the rights granted by liberalism is freedom of association, which also comprises the right not to associate with people with whom one does not want to associate. While this is an individual right, it can be exercised collectively like many other individual rights. Thus, people can decide to collectively organize into an association pursuing certain goals; and subject to certain provisos, this gives rise to legitimate claims to space and territory in which they pursue these goals. The author shows that this right is far-reaching and robust, which entails an equally far-reaching and robust right to exclude. Moreover, he demonstrates that large-scale immigration from illiberal cultures tends to severely compromise the way of life, the values, and the institutions of liberal democracies in ways routinely ignored by apologists for multiculturalism. Freedom, Culture, and the Right to Exclude will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in applied ethics, political philosophy, political theory, and law.

Cuba is widely recognized as a major hub of the transatlantic Hispanic and African diasporas throughout the colonial period. Less well known is that during the first half of the twentieth century it was also the center of circum-Caribbean diasporas with over 200,000 immigrants arriving mainly from Jamaica and Haiti. The migration of British West Indians was a critical part of the economic and historical development of the island during the twentieth century as many of them went to work on sugar plantations. Using never-before-consulted oral histories and correspondence, Robert Whitney and Graciela Chailloux Laffita examine this British Caribbean diaspora and chronicle how the immigrants came to Cuba, the living and working conditions they experienced, and how they both contributed to and remained separate from Cuban culture, forging a unique identity that was not just proudly Cuban but also proudly Caribbean.

Cultural citizenship is a recently developed concept in discussions on multicultural society, the media society, consumerism, and political theory. It addresses the various ways in which citizenship is becoming mixed up with culture, either through globalisation processes (involving new cultural identities, immigrations, culture industries) or by increasingly life-style oriented types of action. In the face of these challenges, the good old notion of citizenship seems in need of some assistance. This book takes a fresh look at cultural citizenship by exploring it from political-philosophical angles. It seeks to develop explicitly normative perspectives on the present debates around culture. What do the novel national and global constellations mean with respect to inclusion and exclusion, participation and marginalisation, political rights and ‘mere’ cultural practices? Moreover, this volume’s authors aim to develop notions of cultural citizenship beyond the liberal political paradigm that associates it with ‘cultural rights’, ‘cultural capital’ or the ‘consumer-citizen’. They engage the concept to re-think politics in both its meanings of citizenship practices and governance practices vis-à-vis citizens. The authors address a range of pertinent issues, exploring historical as well as present-day understandings, and theoretical as well as policy applications of the notion of cultural citizenship. This book was originally published as a special issue of Citizenship Studies.