ABSTRACT
No account of citizenship can ignore the fact that it was originally constituted in order to exclude. Nor can we evade the injustices of inequality that continue to be perpetrated in its name. However, as the previous chapter revealed, people cross the boundaries between acceptance and rejection daily, challenging those exclusions in multifarious ways. While little discussed in the citizenship literature, this uneven field of experience significantly impacts upon attitudes and understandings of the concept and this chapter will move away from process and acquisition to investigate those attitudes in understandings in greater depth. The ‘subjectivity of citizenship’ is an area of empirical and theoretical work that has only recently begun to be appreciated, a neglect that can be put down, in part, to an overwhelming emphasis in literature on activities of the state (Bloemraad 2000). The state determines both the rules of entry into the collective (legal status) and the benefits associated with membership (rights), and many scholars either continue to stress the juridical link between the individual and the state or reduce the concept to a set of rights state-membership bestows (Martiniello 2002). However, as I will argue, the paradigm of Western liberal political logic, from which this bias stems, is not adequate when dealing with the complexities of (postcolonial) political space. Citizenship must also be understood as an ‘instituted subject position’ (Isin 2009: 370), ‘in flux’ (Isin 2008) and always contested.
