Citizenship after Orientalism: Transforming Political Theory

296 Pages·2015·3.9 MB·English

by  Engin F. Isin

Citizenship after Orientalism
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Palgrave Studies in Citizenship Transitions
Series editors
Michele Michiletti is Lars Hierta Chair of Political Science at Stockholm University,
Sweden. Ludvig Beckman is Professor of Political Science, Stockholm University,
Sweden. David Owen is Professor of Social and Political Philosophy, University of
Southampton, UK.
The Editorial Board: Keith Banting (Queen’s University, Canada), Rainer Baubock
(European University Institute, Italy), Russell Dalton (University of California at
Irving, USA), Avigail Eisenberg (University of Victoria, Canada), Nancy Fraser (The
New School for Social Research, USA), David Jacobson (University of South Florida,
USA) and Ariadne Vromen (The University of Sydney, Australia).
This series focuses on citizenship transitions encompassing contemporary
transformations of citizenship as institution, status, and practice as well as normative
and explanatory analysis of these transformations and their cultural, social,
economic, and political implications. The series bridges theoretical and empirical
debates on democracy, transnationalism, and citizenship that have been too
insulated from each other. It takes citizenship transitions as its starting point and
studies the status, role, and function of citizenship within contemporary democratic
systems and multi-layered governance structures beyond the state. It aims to add a
broader array of critical, conceptual, normative, and empirical perspectives on the
borders, territories, and political agents of citizenship. It scrutinizes the possibilities
and challenges of citizenship in light of present broad processes of political
fragmentation and pluralization and the ways emerging ideals and expectations of
citizenship are inspired by new social, political, and environmental movements.
Its cross-disciplinary approach intends to capture the transitions of citizenship
from an apparently simple relation between the state and its citizens into a cluster
of complex responsibility claims and practices that raise questions concerning
citizenship borders and obligations, the public-private scope of citizenship, and even
how political actors attempt to and in fact avoid citizenship.
Titles in the series include:
Ludvig Beckman and Eva Erman (editors)
TERRITORIES OF CITIZENSHIP
Costica Dumbrava
NATIONALITY, CITIZENSHIP AND ETHNO-CULTURAL BELONGING
Preferential Membership Policies in Europe
Karin Svedberg Helgesson and Ulrika Mörth (editors)
THE POLITICAL ROLE OF CORPORATE CITIZENS
An Interdisciplinary Approach
Simon McMahon
IMMIGRATION AND CITIZENSHIP IN AN ENLARGED EUROPEAN UNION
The Political Dynamics of Intra-EU Mobility
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Palgrave Studies In Citizenship Transitions series
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9781137479495_txt.indd 4 7/29/15 11:44 AM
Citizenship after Orientalism
Transforming Political Theory
Edited by
Engin Isin
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Introduction, conclusion, selection and editorial matter © Engin Isin 2015
Individual chapters © Respective authors 2015
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
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First published 2015 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
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ISBN: 978–1–137–47949–5
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Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements ix
List of Contributors xiii
1 Transforming Political Theory 1
Engin Isin
Part I Undoing Citizenship 15
2 Abject Choices? Orientalism, Citizenship, and Autonomy 17
Leticia Sabsay
3 Disorienting Austerity: The Indebted Citizen as the New
Soul of Europe 34
Andrea Mura
4 The Imperial Citizen: British India and French Algeria 53
Jack Harrington
5 Haredi Settlers: The Non-Zionist Jewish Settlers
of the West Bank 70
Dana Rubin
Part II Uncovering Citizenship 99
6 Overlapping Sovereignties: Gurus and Citizenship 101
Aya Ikegame
7 Contesting Neo-orientalism: Terrorism Detentions, Migrant
Activism, and the Claim for Justice 120
Iker Barbero
8 Multicultural Society Must Be Defended? 144
Zaki Nahaboo
9 Law, Orientalism, and Citizenship: British-Muslim Family Law 166
Lisa Pilgram
Part III Refiguring Citizenship 187
10 Performing Citizenship: Acts of Writing 189
Alessandra Marino
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viii Contents
11 Haunted Citizens: Of Ghosts, Gang Rapes, and Aˉzaˉdˉı 207
Tara Atluri
12 Foolish Citizens 237
Deena Dajani
13 Citizenship’s Empire 263
Engin Isin
Index 283
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Preface and Acknowledgements
There is a strong sense today that the world we have come to inhabit is on the
cusp of profound transformations. Using one of Michel Foucault’s favourite
phrases, at least in English translation, ‘societies like ours’ – by which he
meant Western and Christian societies, based as they are on the sovereignty
of the nation-state and its inventions of liberty, solidarity, and equality, if
not citizenship and democracy – are contested both from within and out-
side their borders. If we refer to these ‘societies’ more specifically as ‘Euro-
American’, we can understand why the talk of the rise of China, India, and
other societies is so unsettling. In this world of sovereign states, divided into
seemingly discrete societies such as ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’, we may wonder how
it has come to be that ‘our’ societies see themselves as somehow independent
of ‘theirs’. How is it that struggles in Israel and Palestine, Syria, Egypt, Libya,
Sudan, Yemen, not to mention in Afghanistan and Iraq or Venezuela, Argen-
tina, or Brazil are seen as isolated, unrelated, and far from our societies? How
can we imagine that the societies of Euro-America developed independently
when the scramble for colonies – a phrase from the late nineteenth century
when European powers such as Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal,
Spain, and Great Britain sought expansion – is now joined by a new scramble
to protect and secure the borders of Western and Christian societies?
We do not as yet and we may never have a dominant narrative about these
transformations. However we interpret them, our narratives will reflect the
grounds from which we speak – meaning, we speak from both a geographic
location but also a social, cultural, and economic position. To put it another
way, there is no singular or comprehensive perspective from which we can see
these transformations. The world is experienced very differently from Beijing,
Caracas, Kiev, London, Paris, or Ramallah. That is perhaps why Foucault was
always concerned with designating the scope of his studies as ‘societies such as
ours’ or ‘Western and Christian societies’. Foucault’s caution was well intended
yet inevitably misfired. Foucault would have or should have known that delim-
iting ‘ours’ was simultaneously and inescapably creating a relation to ‘theirs’. It
was all very well to focus on societies such as ours, but what if societies such as ours
were made out of ‘societies such as theirs’? The place of societies such as ours in
the world without relations to societies such as theirs can no longer be simply
put as a matter of delimiting the scope of our analysis. Rather, rethinking them
together in their relations has become an urgent scholarly task.
Arguably, this scholarly task was begun with Edward Said’s Orientalism
(1978) and continued apace with the development of postcolonial studies.
We have now a rigorous literature on orientalism, colonialism, and impe-
rialism, and the ways in which societies like ours have been implicated in
ix
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x Preface and Acknowledgements
societies like theirs. Of course, I am aware that I am now using ‘ours’ and
‘theirs’ only playfully since the studies of interwoven trajectories and line-
ages of societies have demonstrated that these are performative statements
rather than constative descriptions. In other words, we are now in a situa-
tion where as critical scholars we can no longer assume that we can study
liberty, solidarity, and equality if not citizenship and democracy as though
they developed independently in societies such as ours with no relations of
domination and oppression to societies such as theirs.
Yet, and curiously, although various concepts of political theory such as
democracy, the state, liberty, and even fraternity have been subjected to
postcolonial critique, citizenship has not received the same attention. To
put it differently, political theories of citizenship proceed either with the
assumption that societies like theirs did not develop citizenship or that soci-
eties like ours were the first to develop it. This book is an invitation to think
differently about this assumption and attend to the interwoven trajectories
and lineages out of which citizenship has been constructed as a living politi-
cal concept and as political subjectivity.
Between January 2010 and April 2015, six postdoctoral researchers, two vis-
iting postdoctoral fellows, and three PhD students have conducted research
on the vexed relationship between citizenship and orientalism at the Open
University as part of the Citizenship after Orientalism (Oecumene) project.
They explored ways of rearticulating or reimagining this relationship. Draw-
ing upon this research, these chapters present a critique of citizenship as
exclusively and even originally a European institution. These chapters docu-
ment research that provides a glimpse of how we might (and must) begin to
think differently about citizenship as political subjectivity. They engage this
task from different but intersecting vantage points. One vantage point is,
of course, critique. Some chapters demonstrate how our dominant political
imaginary masks or conceals that there are different political subjectivities
and that these differences cannot be merely placed on a spectrum of relative
superiority and inferiority. Another vantage point is to illustrate what these
differences are and bring them into our political imaginary. Finally, another
vantage point is to cultivate a different political imaginary with which these
differences are understood.
Citizenship after Orientalism: Transforming Political Theory explores these
vantage points not with reference to the dominant figure of the citizen and
its orientalizing perspective but as a challenge to them. The project’s name,
‘Oecumene’, plays on the unstable etymology of the word, which originally
meant the inhabited world, separating it from ‘another’ world in ancient
Greece. It then acquired a meaning that included other ‘worlds’, finally
standing for the ‘whole’ world. Its adoption is a playful resignification of
this ambiguity concerning what exactly ‘oecumene’ refers to.
The thread that binds these diverse chapters is precisely performing politi-
cal theory in a world without Europe at its centre. But it is not a world
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