The Postcolonial Citizen

The twentieth century has witnessed the rise of a large population of postcolonial intellectual migrants «willingly» arriving from formerly colonized countries into the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada to pursue intellectual goals. Embedded in this movement from the formerly colonized spaces into the West is the vexed question of dislocation and displacement for these intellectual subjects. The Postcolonial Citizen traces how such modes of (un)belonging are represented within literary and cultural space and how migrancy, and in particular the postcolonial «intellectual» migrant, is symbolically and philosophically understood as a cultural icon of displacement in the West. Using literary texts, autobiographical narrative of displacement, and cultural criticism, this book treats the cultural reception of intellectual migrancy (particularly within America) as both an uneasy and ambiguous condition. What is timely about this book's treatment of migrancy is the current threat imposed on postcolonial writers and scholars in the United States post-9/11. The book examines and exposes the consequences of intellectually intervening into democratic ideals after the rise of the «national security state» - giving the migrant sensibility of dislocation a socio-political dimension. Thus, in dealing with the cultural reception of migrancy, The Postcolonial Citizen clearly marks the shift between pre- and post-9/11 migrant subjectivity and particularly addresses how the «third world» intellectual migrant has become synonymous with the voice of dissent and threat to the established democratic order in the United States.

This book examines claims for recognition of cultural difference from immigrant and Indigenous minorities, highlighting the ways in which they intersect with ideas of national community. Busbridge argues that there is an important, albeit under-explored, relationship between nation and multicultural politics of recognition. Drawing on the Australian context, the book explores how nation features as a productive, if somewhat ambivalent, discursive resource in contemporary Muslim and Aboriginal struggles to be recognised. In demanding recognition, minorities enter into the business of ‘making the nation’ by positing alternative conceptions of national identity, culture and belonging that are more attentive to their differences and claims. This dynamic is engaged as an expression of ‘postcolonial citizenship’. Postcolonial citizenship is imagined in terms of the ways in which minority groups actualise multicultural realities through rewriting ideas of national community. It underlines the critical importance of revising the power relations that deem some groups ‘more national’ and others less so – and which, in Western multicultural societies, are typically tied to notions of the ‘West’ and its ‘others’. This book is an important conceptual, theoretical and political intervention that brings postcolonialism and multiculturalism into dialogue on the increasingly potent issues of nation and national identity. It will be of great interest to scholars and students of sociology, politics, postcolonial studies, culture, identity and nation.

Contrary to predictions that it would become increasingly redundant in a globalizing world, citizenship is back with a vengeance. The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship brings together leading experts in law, philosophy, political science, economics, sociology, and geography to provide a multidisciplinary, comparative discussion of different dimensions of citizenship: as legal status and political membership; as rights and obligations; as identity and belonging; as civic virtues and practices of engagement; and as a discourse of political and social equality or responsibility for a common good. The contributors engage with some of the oldest normative and substantive quandaries in the literature, dilemmas that have renewed salience in today's political climate. As well as setting an agenda for future theoretical and empirical explorations, this Handbook explores the state of citizenship today in an accessible and engaging manner that will appeal to a wide academic and non-academic audience. Chapters highlight variations in citizenship regimes practiced in different countries, from immigrant states to 'non-western' contexts, from settler societies to newly independent states, attentive to both migrants and those who never cross an international border. Topics include the 'selling' of citizenship, multilevel citizenship, in-between statuses, citizenship laws, post-colonial citizenship, the impact of technological change on citizenship, and other cutting-edge issues. This Handbook is the major reference work for those engaged with citizenship from a legal, political, and cultural perspective. Written by the most knowledgeable senior and emerging scholars in their fields, this comprehensive volume offers state-of-the-art analyses of the main challenges and prospects of citizenship in today's world of increased migration and globalization. Special emphasis is put on the question of whether inclusive and egalitarian citizenship can provide political legitimacy in a turbulent world of exploding social inequality and resurgent populism.

This volume bridges the gap between contemporary theoretical debates and educational policies and practices. It applies postcolonial theory as a framework of analysis that attempts to engage with and go beyond essentialism, ethno- and euro-centrisms through a critical examination of contemporary case studies and conceptual issues. From a transdisciplinary and post-colonial perspective, this book offers critiques of notions of development, progress, humanism, culture, representation, identity, and education. It also examines the implications of these critiques in terms of pedagogical approaches, social relations and possible future interventions.

9/11 and its aftermath have shown that our ideas about what constitutes sovereign power lag dangerously behind the burgeoning claims to rights and recognition within and across national boundaries. New configurations of sovereignty are at the heart of political and cultural transformations globally. Sovereign Bodies shifts the debate on sovereign power away from territoriality and external recognition of state power, toward the shaping of sovereign power through the exercise of violence over human bodies and populations. In this volume, sovereign power, whether exercised by a nation-state or by a local despotic power or community, is understood and scrutinized as something tentative and unstable whose efficacy depends less on formal rules than on repeated acts of violence. Following the editors' introduction are fourteen essays by leading scholars from around the globe that analyze cultural meanings of sovereign power and violence, as well as practices of citizenship and belonging--in South Africa, Peru, India, Mexico, Cyprus, Norway, and also among transnational Chinese and Indian populations. Sovereign Bodies enriches our understanding of power and sovereignty in the postcolonial world and in "the West" while opening new conceptual fields in the anthropology of politics. The contributors are Ana María Alonso, Lars Buur, Partha Chatterjee, Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Oivind Fuglerud, Thomas Blom Hansen, Barry Hindess, Steffen Jensen, Achille Mbembe, Aihwa Ong, Finn Stepputat, Simon Turner, Peter van der Veer, and Yael Navaro-Yashin.

An engaging, innovative history of Brazil's black and indigenous people that redefines our understanding of slavery, citizenship, and national identity. This book focuses on the interconnected histories of black and indigenous people on Brazil's Atlantic frontier, and makes a case for the frontier as a key space that defined the boundaries and limitations of Brazilian citizenship.

This book examines the history of state formation in postcolonial Indonesia by starting with the death of Jan Djong, an activist and a former village head in the little town of Maumere. It historicizes contemporary debates on citizenship in the postcolonial world. Citizenship has been called the “organizing principle of state-society relations in modern states”. Democratization is today most intense in the non-Western, post-colonial world. Yet “real” citizenship seems largely absent there. Only a few rights-claiming, autonomous, and individualistic citizens celebrated in mainstream literature exist in post-colonial countries. In reflecting on one concrete story to examine the core dilemmas facing the study of citizenship in postcolonial settings, this book challenges ethnocentricity found within current scholarly work on citizenship in Europe and North America and addresses issues of institutional fragility, political violence, as well as legitimacy and aspirations to freedom in non-Western cultures.

This book uncovers the contradictions and convergences of racism, decolonisation, migration and living international relations that were shaped by the shift from colonialism to postcolonialism and from nationalism to transnationalism between the 1950s and the present. It takes up the story of Nicholaos Charalambou Kanaris, a colonial migrant to the UK from Cyprus, as a reflection on how the everyday lives of minor figures offer an unexplored window into international relations. The research uncovers and offers insight into the complexities and messiness of everyday life and of (trans)national identities as they are lived and have been lived at the heart of imperial, colonial and postcolonial systems and processes. The innovative methodological approach adopts memoirs gathered through a series of life-narrative interviews and is guided by theories of minor transnationalism that look to foreground horizontal relations between minor figures. Various themes of international relations are examined through the lens of Nicholaos’ story and his family life, including colonialism, geopolitics, citizenship, security, migration and transnationalism. Examining how these themes play out in everyday life permits his practice and lived experience to theorise the international politics of colonialism, migration and citizenship. This book argues that Politics and International Relations can benefit from a transnational approach and offers a method of theory-in-practice for exploring the everyday experience of transnationalism, through the methodology of life-narrative and memoir.