This collection offers a postcolonial critique of the ostensible superiority or originality of ‘Western’ political theory and one of its fundamental concepts, ‘citizenship’. The chapters analyse the undoing, uncovering, and reinventing of citizenship as a way of investigating citizenship as political subjectivity. If it has now become very difficult to imagine citizenship merely as nationality or membership in the nation-state, this is at least in part because of the anticolonial struggles and the project of reimagining citizenship after orientalism that they precipitated. If it has become difficult to sustain the orientalist assumption, the question arises; how do we investigate citizenship as political subjectivity after orientalism?
This book was originally published as a special issue of Citizenship Studies.
1. Citizenship after orientalism: an unfinished project Engin F. Isin 2. Orientalism, political subjectivity and the birth of citizenship between 1780 and 1830 Jack Harrington 3. Subverting orientalism: political subjectivity in Edmund Burke’s India and liberal multiculturalism Zaki Nahaboo 4. The emergence of the other sexual citizen: orientalism and the modernisation of sexuality Leticia Sabsay 5. Orientalising environmental citizenship: climate change, migration and the potentiality of race Andrew Baldwin 6. The creation of Palestinian citizenship under an international mandate: legislation, discourses and practices, 1918-1925 Lauren Banko 7. Chinese citizenship ‘after orientalism’: academic narratives on internal migrants in China Malgorzata Jakimów 8. Telling tales, performing justice: the political subject of the Hikaya Deena Dajani 9. Mathas, gurus and citizenship: the state and communities in colonial India Aya Ikegame 10. ‘The cost of dams’: acts of writing as resistance in postcolonial India Alessandra Marino 11. The prerogative of the brave: Hijras and sexual citizenship after orientalism Tara Atluri 12. Transnational spirituality, invented ethnicity and performances of citizenship in Trinidad Gabrielle Jamela Hosein 13. Orientalising citizenship: the legitimation of immigration regimes in the European Union Iker Barbero 14. British-Muslim family law and citizenship Lisa Pilgram 15. The body politic of dissent: the paperless and the indignant Parvati Nair 16. Migrants as activist citizens in Italy: understanding the new cycle of struggles Federico Oliveri 17. Politicizing camps: forging transgressive citizenships in and through transit Kim Rygiel 18. Playing with citizenship: NSK and Janez Janša S.E. Wilmer 19. The heterogeneous world of the citizen Ranabir Samaddar
Biography
Engin Isin is Professor of Citizenship at The Open University, UK. Engin is the author of Cities Without Citizens (1992), Being Political (2002) and Citizens Without Frontiers (2012). He has edited with Greg Nielsen, Acts of Citizenship (2008) and with Michael Saward, Enacting European Citizenship (2013).
