ABSTRACT
Funk and Wagnell’s definition of a citizen as “a native or naturalized person owing allegiance to, and entitled to protection from, a government” hints at a settled understanding of citizenship that does not grasp the plasticity of the concept, and its ability to illuminate a range of relationships outside the narrow confines of national identity. Quite recently, in response to some of the cultural, social and economic changes evident in the postmodern world, the literature on citizenship has expanded far beyond the purely political realm to reflect the new cultural politics celebrating difference, hybridity, transnationalism, and the associated large fluxes of people and ideas occurring in an age of globalization. 2 I want to argue that, notwithstanding the innovative and mainly interdisciplinary understandings of contemporary citizenship to be found, for instance, in many articles in Citizenship Studies, in essays such as Don Mitchell’s on social justice and the city, and in Craig Calhoun’s edited collection on Habermas and the Public Sphere, 3 expanded conceptions of citizenship can also usefully be sought in earlier phases of the complex cultural project labeled “modernity”. 4
