Fear and Intimacy: Citizenship in a Recife Slum,Brazil

In Brazil, citizenship rights and the institutionalisation of citizen participation have advanced significantly under the democratic regime. However, many of the urban poor are still alienated from the state and its legal system. This article argues that, to understand the citizenship of these ‘half-citizens’, it is necessary to take account of an unofficial realm of practices. I show how residents of a slum in Recife interpret and deal with the state project of registered citizenship, which finds its material expression in the compulsory carrying of identity cards. Carrying these cards is surrounded by fear of violent police control. However, obtaining identity cards through informal procedures is associated with a longing for personalised relationships with the police and other state representatives. The relationship of these residents with their identity cards is thus both fearful and affectionate, which allows us to understand their citizenship as a confluence of fear and intimacy.     

Postcoloniality,National Identity,Globalisation and the Simulacra of the Real

The focus of this paper is a famous boys' boarding school in the North Indian city of Dehra Dun. The Doon School was founded in 1935 and was soon hailed by a wide cross section of post-colonial Indian intelligentsia as the site for the production of the ‘modern’ Indian citizen. The discussion below suggests that contemporary social analysis needs to focus on specific sites of the production of the discourses of the nation and citizenship rather than simply announce their dissolution as an ‘inevitable’ by-product of ‘globalisation’; this seems to be the stand taken by certain strands of theorisation in the so-called globalisation debate and in particular versions of cultural studies. I argue that rather than having simply dissolved, the ‘national’ emotion, at least in the Indian context, may have been transformed into the production of ‘post-coloniality’ as a differentiating category to distinguish the ‘progressive’ populations of the nation-state from its ‘backward’ counterparts. I employ Baudrillard's concept of the ‘real’ in order to argue for situated analyses of the contemporary global condition where analyses of the relationship between nation-states and of the asymmetries within them continue to be important political tasks.     

The development of a “privileged underclass,” locating undocumented migrant women and their children in the political economy of Tel Aviv, Israel

In 1991, the Israeli government responded to severe shortages in the low-wage labour force by developing a Foreign Worker Program. Over the next two decades, hundreds of thousands of labour migrants from the Global South were issued work visas that would allow them to live temporarily in Israel. Migrants have since settled, primarily in Tel Aviv, where some have also overstayed their visas, given birth to children, and established ways of living as undocumented residents of Israel’s largest urban centre. In this article, I describe how undocumented migrant women and their Israeli-born children have had a particularly significant impact on the social and political context in which they live. Specifically, I explore how they have come to constitute a “privileged underclass” within the ethnically, geographically, and socio-economically stratified population of the city. While they share dilapidated public spaces and conditions of poverty with their historically marginalized Mizrahi neighbours in the southern part of the city, undocumented women and their children share special events, interpersonal engagements, and processes of “sentimental civics” with the largely wealthy and politically enfranchised Ashkenazi residents of Tel Aviv’s north who are their employers, financial patrons, and supporters of their campaign for citizenship. The development of a “privileged underclass” has thus exacerbated class conflict in Tel Aviv, bringing to the surface the well-established, but long-ignored Mizrahi struggles for recognition, and sowing the seeds for a sometimes violent, yet politically nuanced, anti-migrant mobilization.     

Exposing Silence as Cultural Censorship: A Brazilian Case

In this article I assert that in focusing on salient discourses, contested cultural domains, and public forms of conflict and power, cultural and linguistic anthropologists, and other social scientists, have overlooked the significance of communal forms of silence in shaping the social and political landscape. I argue that such customary silences constitute "cultural censorship," which, unlike state-sponsored censorship, is practiced in the absence of explicit coercion or enforcement. Although practiced by different and opposed groups, cultural censorship tends to be constituted through, and circumscribed by. the political interests of dominant groups. In this article, which is based on ethnographic research in Rio de Janeiro. I analyze a case of cultural censorship by examining the customary silence surrounding the subject of racism in Brazil. By emphasizing the phenomenology of cultural censorship among poor Brazilians of African descent. 1 argue that silence must not be conflated with, and does not preclude the existence of. non-hegemonic consciousness, [silence, cultural censorship, consciousness, Brazil, racism]     

The Order of Men: the Nation and the Metropolitan Imaginary at an Indian Public School

This article is concerned with exploring discursive constructions of Indian post-coloniality and modernity. The analysis focuses upon a fully residential boys school in North India, the Doon School, which has played a historically significant role in the production of a discourse on nationhood and citizenship. Elsewhere, I have argued that the School defines its citizenship project in terms of three main ‘imaginaries’: secularism, rationality, and ‘metropolitanism’. This paper explores the construction of a narrative of the post-colonial nation-state at the School through ‘metropolitanism’.     

Citizenship, migration and formations of class in urban France

This paper is an exploration of the configurations of citizenship that prevail in Paris, a globalizing city where the processes of capitalist change and transnational migration converge. I will focus on the ways that different class segments of its migrant population exercise citizenship in a context in which the ideologies of belonging and membership are being redrawn under the demands of neoliberal transformation. My argument is that efforts made to rework models of citizenship under neoliberalism contribute not only to the realignments of class, but they also galvanise ethnic divisions and sentiments of nativism in France and more broadly in Europe. In making this argument, I draw on the notion of citizenship regime to focus attention on the political, economic and ideological forces that condition the orientations of the state, policies and citizenry in the context of crises and change under capitalism while also problematizing the state capital nexus in relation to the formation of subjects as citizens. This article is a continuation of a larger scholarly project that seeks to explore the ways in which the analytical paradigms of political economy advance our understanding of the different dimensions of migration and capitalist change.     

Mestizaje and Law Making in Indigenous Identity Formation in Northeastern Brazil: "After the Conflict Came the History"

In this article, I explore issues of authenticity, legal discourse, and local requirements of belonging by considering the recent surge of indigenous recognitions in northeastern Brazil. I investigate how race and ethnicity are implicated in the recognition process in Brazil on the basis of an analysis of a successful struggle for indigenous identity and access to land by a group of mixed-race, visibly, African-descended rural workers. I propose that the debate over mestizaje (ethnoracial and cultural mixing) in the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America can be reconfigured and clarified by broadening it to include such Brazilian experiences. I argue that the interaction between two processes—law making and indigenous identity formation—is crucial to understanding how the notion of "mixed heritage" is both reinforced and disentangled. As such, this article is an illustration of the role of legal discourse in the constitution of indigenous identities and it introduces northeastern Brazil into the global discussion of law, indigenous rights, and claims to citizenship.     

Acts and practices of citizenship: Muslim women’s activism in the UK

Drawing on the growing literature on Muslim women’s activism, this paper explores grammars of action that frame political mobilizations of Muslim women in the UK. By taking a broad view of political activism, we identify acts and practices of citizenship through which Muslim women activists engage with, reinterpret and challenge social norms. The article critically engages with dominant readings of post-migration minorities’ political mobilization through the lens of citizenship regimes and draws attention to more processual and agency-centred perspectives on citizenship. We focus on two salient themes that Bristol-based Muslim activists were concerned with: mobilizing against violence against women, manifested in the anti-FGM campaign by Integrate Bristol, and attempts to re-negotiate the terms of participation in religious spaces, manifested in claims for more inclusive mosques. In both instances, mobilization was not confined to the local community or national level, but supported by and embedded in related transnational struggles.     

Free speech and civil discourse: producing expats,locals, and migrants in the UAE English‐language blogosphere

This article examines the production of belonging and exclusion on a popular English‐language blog in the United Arab Emirates. The UAE, and particularly the emirate of Dubai, has a large majority foreign resident population, which has little to no access to official citizenship. However, I argue that foreign residents narrate and perform belonging on various scales, including through the production of on‐line ‘publics’. As I explore in this article, the differences between citizens and non‐citizens are not simply imported into on‐line spaces, but on‐line spaces and the interactions within them are constitutive of differentiated resident identities. In particular, I explore how the UAE English‐language blogosphere is a space for state criticism, assertions of belonging, and interactions by and between groups of people that are not readily available in the rigidly divided social and geographical spaces of Dubai. The ability for citizens and non‐citizens to interact in these on‐line forums makes the UAE blogosphere a space where assumptions about differences between citizens, expatriates, and migrants that circulate in off‐line discourses and technologies of governance are both negotiated and rehearsed by group members and administrators.     

Nationalism and Belonging in India,Pakistan and South Central Asia: Some Comparative Observations

The criteria invoked in the definition of national identity are commonly derived from contexts other than those of the nation-state itself—most notably those of territoriality, language/culture, kinship/descent and religion. It therefore follows that in seeking to understand the kind of identity or belongingness invoked in a particular instance of national ideology it is necessary to explore not only the kind of nation-state envisaged, but also those non-national forms of belonging or community from which the national ideology may itself be historically derived. In this paper I seek to develop this argument by comparing some of the principal forms of nationalism found in India, Pakistan and Central Asia. I pay particular attention to the importance of the concept qawm, which in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere in Central Asia, is used to refer to a wide variety of groups to which people owe allegiance. Such usages alert us to the important fact that the nation, as ‘imagined community’, may have its origins as a political movement among sentiments and allegiances which draw on pre-modern social arrangements and are in tension with ‘nationalist’ exclusivism. Even when the nation (as nation-state) has been secured, so-called ‘nationalist’ revivalism, while taking the nation for granted, may in fact appeal to sentiments of a different kind.     

Forced disappearance in an era of globalization: biopolitics, shadow networks, and imagined worlds

In this article, I argue that the practice of forced disappearance of persons on the part of paramilitary groups has become linked to specific processes of globalization. Global flows related to biopolitics, global crime networks, and dehumanizing imaginations reproduced by mass media together constitute a driving force behind forced disappearances. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Colombian city of Medellín, I analyze how these global flows interact with local armed actors, helping create a climate conducive to forced disappearance. These mechanisms in Colombia show similarities to those in some African and Asian countries. Gaining insight into the mechanisms behind forced disappearance may help prevent it from occurring in the future. Enhancing social inclusion of residents, unraveling the transnational crime networks in which perpetrators are involved, and disseminating rehumanizing images of victims all contribute to curbing the practice of forced disappearance.     

Rural indebtedness in North‐Eastern Nepal part I: The ethnography and its implications*

This paper discusses ideas about ‘the nation’ and ‘the people’ expressed by residents of a low‐income district in the city of Salvador, capital of the state of Bahia, Brazil. The analysis relates positive and negative evaluations of national identity to a dialectic of hegemony and resistance. It focuses on gender and race in the local making or negating of nationalism, concluding that constitutive discourses and practices must be understood in relation to social inequality and the class structure.     

Domesticating Islam: exploring academic knowledge production on Islam and Muslims in European societies

The attacks on the Twin Towers in New York in September 2001 and subsequent events not only ignited a ‘war on terror’, but also marked a crucial change in the policies on integration of migrants of Islamic background in Europe. Most countries departed from integration policies based on some sort of recognition of cultural diversity and emphasized national culture as the only legitimate format for citizenship. The result is a strengthening of a frame of governance with the aim to regulate Islamic practices and to mould outlooks, institutional settings and legal arrangements into the nation-state format. This has been referred to as the ‘domestication of Islam’. One of the consequences is the narrowing down of research agendas and academic knowledge production. In this article I explore this process and address important fields of study that tend to be neglected in the study of Islam in Europe.     

Metropolitanism and the Transformation of Urban Space in Nineteenth-Century Colonial Metropoles

In this paper, I argue that the nineteenth-century movement of "metropolitanism" was a transnational attempt to rebuild and re-imagine cities in a bourgeois image and through a capitalist process of investment. This movement began with the attempt by wealthy residents of imperial metropoles to remake their cities in ways that created greater social distance between themselves and their colonies—both external and internal. I explore how a discourse with specific urban content can engender a movement that revolutionizes people's view of the city. The analysis points toward a revitalization of this movement in the present moment of global transformations, suggesting that the reshaping of urban social organization and urban institutions through transnational processes is not new. [urban, metropolitanism, colonialism, housing, architecture]     

The Difference that Diaspora Makes: Thinking through the Anthropology of Immigrant Education in the United States

In this article, I examine the possibility of a productive dialogue between diaspora studies and the anthropology of immigrant education in the United States. Arguing that their respective views on the nation-state is a key source for their different orientations toward migrant social and cultural worlds, I nevertheless argue that an engagement between these two fields of study will yield more critical understandings of nationalism, the category of the "immigrant," and multiculturalism within both these areas of scholarship.     

Blood ties: migrations,state transnationalism and automatic nationality

I propose contributing to the general understanding of the intricate relationship between nationality, citizenship and international migrations, focusing on the linkage or reincorporation policies of migrant-sending countries. Specifically, I will analyse a key change to the system for allocating Bolivian nationality by the Plurinational State of Bolivia and related measures during the presidency of Evo Morales, that is, the introduction of automatic jus sanguinis to maintain ties with emigrants. The automatic application of jus sanguinis abroad has theoretical implications on two different levels. One is the relationship between nationality and citizenship, specifically, that of the possible emancipation of citizenship from nationality. In this regard, the case I present reveals mechanisms that work in the opposite direction, binding citizenship to nationality. The second level is that of the potential expansion of ethno-nationalist or racialized conceptions of nationality.     

Ethnic diversity,segregation and the social cohesion of neighbourhoods in London

The question of whether and how ethnic diversity affects the social cohesion of communities has become an increasingly prominent and contested topic of academic and political debate. In this paper we focus on a single city: London. As possibly the most ethnically diverse conurbation on the planet, London serves as a particularly suitable test-bed for theories about the effects of ethnic heterogeneity on prosocial attitudes. We find neighbourhood ethnic diversity in London to be positively related to the perceived social cohesion of neighbourhood residents, once the level of economic deprivation is accounted for. Ethnic segregation within neighbourhoods, on the other hand, is associated with lower levels of perceived social cohesion. Both effects are strongly moderated by the age of individual residents: diversity has a positive effect on social cohesion for young people but this effect dissipates in older age groups; the reverse pattern is found for ethnic segregation.     

Transnationalism reloaded: the historical trajectory of a concept

In this commentary, I discuss the importance of Portes, Guarnizo and Landolt’s article, focusing on three specific points. First, I argue that this 1999 article represented a turning point in transnational migration studies, in that it made it possible to address important weaknesses in this field of study. Second, I reflect on the article’s lack of reference to the nation-state and its power to shape transnational fields. Third, I argue that the cumulative knowledge gained over the last two decades – triggered in part by the claims of this 1999 article – have been steadily integrated into this field of investigation, rendering possible important theoretical alterations. These insights have made possible a shift towards a new stance, a transnational perspective whose specific epistemology makes it possible to develop explanatory frameworks for current transformation processes and to revise social theory more generally.     

Remaking Body Politics: Dilemmas Over Female Fatness as Symbolic Capital in Two Rural Tuareg Communities

This essay explores nuanced, debated and changing meanings of female fatness as a bodily aesthetic ideal in rural Tuareg communities in northern Niger and Mali. I compare two communities—one where nomadic herding, of longstanding importance among the Tuareg, remains prevalent, and intermarriage is rare between aristocratic and formerly servile persons, and the other where residents have become more settled in hamlets, now garden, and where intermarriage between social categories is frequent. Both communities have experienced conflict with colonial and postcolonial nation-states, but the more nomadic herders have had especially tense relations with French colonial and postcolonial state regimes. Although many oasis residents express greater ambivalence toward female fatness, these communities do not express neatly polarized attitudes but admire it to varying degrees, for different reasons, and attach different meanings to it from their experience of different double-binds over achieving it. Fundamental to understanding these meanings, I argue, are psychosocial dilemmas arising from historical change and regional variation affecting power relationships between persons of aristocratic and those of servile origins, between husbands and wives and between nomadic herders and the nation-state. More broadly, these data show the importance of reversals of power in symbolic capital and suggest more nuanced processes surrounding body politics.     

Entrepreneurship and interracial dynamics: a case study of self-employed Africans and Chinese in Guangzhou,China

ABSTRACT

Guangzhou is the most popular gateway city for African migration to China. Unlike stereotypical international migrants, Africans in Guangzhou are predominantly self-made entrepreneurs, doing business face-to-face with Chinese entrepreneurs who are mostly internal migrants with truncated citizenship rights. African-Chinese encounters in local markets and residential neighbourhoods offer a rare opportunity for studying interracial dynamics beyond the classic black-white dichotomy and traditional paradigm of ethnic entrepreneurship. In this paper, we draw from in-depth interviews and field observations to examine how interacting social forces shape interracial relations and mobility pathways for migrant entrepreneurs in an emerging city of opportunities. Our analyses suggest that interactions between African and Chinese entrepreneurs are economically interdependent and socioculturally contentious processes, and that these processes shape a myriad of intersecting identities and create room for cooperation that transcends race, class, and migrant status. We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings.