Indigeneity, Citizenship and the State


Book Description

Whatever be the definition of 'indigenous' vis-a-vis 'indigeneity', and however concensual it might be, both these terms have been inferred, applied and questioned in multifarious ways. The concept indigeneity in Asia has transformed considerably, over a period of time. With the rise in the indigeneity movement and large-scale migration, citizenship within national borders is challenged, and the borders in question are also contested. This book chronicles the discernible strains on the questions of indegeneity, citizenship, identity, and border making in the Northeast India. The issues pertaining to indigeneity, citizenship, and state, are also a reminder of the residues of colonial doings that have had a colossal impact till this day. Through empirical evidence backed by theoretical underpinnings, each essay in the book demonstrates the diversity of approaches that can be used to interrogate the debate on indegeneity, citizenship, the state, and opens the conversation on Northeast India. This book is co-published with Aakar Books. Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Bhutan)




The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship


Book Description

Contrary to predictions that it would become increasingly redundant in a globalizing world, citizenship is back with a vengeance. The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship brings together leading experts in law, philosophy, political science, economics, sociology, and geography to provide a multidisciplinary, comparative discussion of different dimensions of citizenship: as legal status and political membership; as rights and obligations; as identity and belonging; as civic virtues and practices of engagement; and as a discourse of political and social equality or responsibility for a common good. The contributors engage with some of the oldest normative and substantive quandaries in the literature, dilemmas that have renewed salience in today's political climate. As well as setting an agenda for future theoretical and empirical explorations, this Handbook explores the state of citizenship today in an accessible and engaging manner that will appeal to a wide academic and non-academic audience. Chapters highlight variations in citizenship regimes practiced in different countries, from immigrant states to 'non-western' contexts, from settler societies to newly independent states, attentive to both migrants and those who never cross an international border. Topics include the 'selling' of citizenship, multilevel citizenship, in-between statuses, citizenship laws, post-colonial citizenship, the impact of technological change on citizenship, and other cutting-edge issues. This Handbook is the major reference work for those engaged with citizenship from a legal, political, and cultural perspective. Written by the most knowledgeable senior and emerging scholars in their fields, this comprehensive volume offers state-of-the-art analyses of the main challenges and prospects of citizenship in today's world of increased migration and globalization. Special emphasis is put on the question of whether inclusive and egalitarian citizenship can provide political legitimacy in a turbulent world of exploding social inequality and resurgent populism.




Indigeneity: A Politics of Potential


Book Description

This book presents the first comprehensive use of political theory to explain indigenous politics, assessing the ways in which indigenous and liberal political theories interact in order to consider the practical policy implications of the indigenous right to self-determination. Dominic O'Sullivan here reveals indigeneity's concern for political relationships, agendas, and ideas beyond ethnic minorities' basic claim to liberal recognition, and he draws out the ways that indigeneity's local geopolitical focus, underpinned by global developments in law and political theory, can make it a movement of forward-looking, transformational politics.




Native and National in Brazil


Book Description

How do the lives of indigenous peoples relate to the romanticized role of "Indians" in Brazilian history, politics, and cultural production? Native and National in Brazil charts this enigmatic relationship from the sixteenth century to the present, focusing on the consolidation of the dominant national imaginary in the postindependence period and highlighting Native peoples' ongoing work to decolonize it. Engaging issues ranging from sovereignty, citizenship, and national security to the revolutionary potential of art, sustainable development, and the gendering of ethnic differences, Tracy Devine Guzman argues that the tensions between popular renderings of "Indianness" and lived indigenous experience are critical to the unfolding of Brazilian nationalism, on the one hand, and the growth of the Brazilian indigenous movement, on the other. Devine Guzmán suggests that the "indigenous question" now posed by Brazilian indigenous peoples themselves-how to be Native and national at the same time-can help us to rethink national belonging in accordance with the protection of human rights, the promotion of social justice, and the consolidation of democratic governance for indigenous and nonindigenous citizens alike.




Making Indigenous Citizens


Book Description

Taking on existing interpretations of "Peruvian exceptionalism," this book presents a multi-sited ethnographic exploration of the local and transnational articulations of indigenous movements, multicultural development policies, and indigenous citizenship in Peru.




Constitutive Visions


Book Description

In Constitutive Visions, Christa Olson presents the rhetorical history of republican Ecuador as punctuated by repeated arguments over national identity. Those arguments—as they advanced theories of citizenship, popular sovereignty, and republican modernity—struggled to reconcile the presence of Ecuador’s large indigenous population with the dominance of a white-mestizo minority. Even as indigenous people were excluded from civic life, images of them proliferated in speeches, periodicals, and artworks during Ecuador’s long process of nation formation. Tracing how that contradiction illuminates the textures of national-identity formation, Constitutive Visions places petitions from indigenous laborers alongside oil paintings, overlays woodblock illustrations with legislative debates, and analyzes Ecuador’s nineteen constitutions in light of landscape painting. Taken together, these juxtapositions make sense of the contradictions that sustained and unsettled the postcolonial nation-state.




Indigeneity and Nation


Book Description

Part of the series Key Concepts in Indigenous Studies, this book focuses on the concepts that recur in any discussion of nature, culture and society among the indigenous. The book, the third in a five-volume series, deals with the two key concepts of indigeneity and nation of indigenous people from all the continents of the world. With contributions from renowned scholars, activists and experts across the globe, it looks at issues and ideas of indigeneity, nationhood, nationality, State, identity, selfhood, constitutionalism, and citizenship in Africa, North America, New Zealand, Pacific Islands and Oceania, India, and Southeast Asia from philosophical, cultural, historical and literary points of view. Bringing together academic insights and experiences from the ground, this unique book with its wide coverage will serve as a comprehensive guide for students, teachers and scholars of indigenous studies. It will be essential reading for those in social and cultural anthropology, tribal studies, sociology and social exclusion studies, politics, religion and theology, cultural studies, literary and postcolonial studies, Third World and Global South studies, as well as activists working with indigenous communities.




Our Sacred Maíz Is Our Mother


Book Description

Weaving archival records, ancient maps and narratives, and the wisdom of the elders, Roberto Cintli Rodriguez offers compelling evidence that maíz is the historical connector between Indigenous peoples of this continent. Rodriguez brings together the wisdom of scholars and elders to show how maíz/corn connects the peoples of the Americas.




Limits to Decolonization


Book Description

Penelope Anthias’s Limits to Decolonization addresses one of the most important issues in contemporary indigenous politics: struggles for territory. Based on the experience of thirty-six Guaraní communities in the Bolivian Chaco, Anthias reveals how two decades of indigenous mapping and land titling have failed to reverse a historical trajectory of indigenous dispossession in the Bolivian lowlands. Through an ethnographic account of the "limits" the Guaraní have encountered over the course of their territorial claim—from state boundaries to landowner opposition to hydrocarbon development—Anthias raises critical questions about the role of maps and land titles in indigenous struggles for self-determination. Anthias argues that these unresolved territorial claims are shaping the contours of an era of "post-neoliberal" politics in Bolivia. Limits to Decolonization reveals the surprising ways in which indigenous peoples are reframing their territorial projects in the context of this hydrocarbon state and drawing on their experiences of the limits of state recognition. The tensions of Bolivia’s "process of change" are revealed, as Limits to Decolonization rethinks current debates on cultural rights, resource politics, and Latin American leftist states. In sum, Anthias reveals the creative and pragmatic ways in which indigenous peoples contest and work within the limits of postcolonial rule in pursuit of their own visions of territorial autonomy.




Home Rule


Book Description

In Home Rule Nandita Sharma traces the historical formation and political separation of Natives and Migrants from the nineteenth century to the present to theorize the portrayal of Migrants as “colonial invaders.” The imperial-state category of Native, initially a mark of colonized status, has been revitalized in what Sharma terms the Postcolonial New World Order of nation-states. Under postcolonial rule, claims to autochthony—being the Native “people of a place”—are mobilized to define true national belonging. Consequently, Migrants—the quintessential “people out of place”—increasingly face exclusion, expulsion, or even extermination. This turn to autochthony has led to a hardening of nationalism(s). Criteria for political membership have shrunk, immigration controls have intensified, all while practices of expropriation and exploitation have expanded. Such politics exemplify the postcolonial politics of national sovereignty, a politics that Sharma sees as containing our dreams of decolonization. Home Rule rejects nationalisms and calls for the dissolution of the ruling categories of Native and Migrant so we can build a common, worldly place where our fundamental liberty to stay and move is realized.