ABSTRACT
This chapter offers reflections on my understanding of postcolonial citizenship. It does this, firstly, by engaging postcolonial citizenship alongside conceptions of multicultural citizenship. Multicultural citizenship remains a vital framework for thinking about contemporary cultural diversity. However, it has come under critique for purportedly placing too much emphasis on difference at the expense of commonality. Postcolonial citizenship allows a more purposeful reading of how difference-related politics are inseparable from ideas of political community. Moreover, in foregrounding national identity and culture as sites of contestation, it enables us to approach nation from a bottom-up perspective rather than – as many multiculturalists are wont to do – a top-down one. This underscores the interpretative value of postcolonial citizenship in countries without official policies of multiculturalism. Secondly, the chapter considers postcolonial citizenship in relation to contemporary postcolonialism. Postcolonial citizenship is not a consensual or cumulative process, and the current surge in populist nationalisms is arguably one response to the increased political and cultural visibility of minorities and its concordant unsettling of hegemonic national imaginaries. Nonetheless, paying attention to the ways in which ideas of nation change with multicultural politics assists postcolonial theorists to develop more analytically nuanced and politically productive understandings of these developments.
