On the subject of
citizenship
Abstracts
Abdelwahab al-Effendi Osman (Westminster)
On Power, Empowerment, Resistance: The Choice between Barbarism and Slavery in the (post)-Colonial Context
Whatever the disagreements over Mamdani’s seminal work, Citizen and Subject, few dispute the importance of the focus it has brought on the issue of the enduring legacy of the colonial state in Africa. The power configurations that enabled the colonial order to sustain itself had also shaped the modern African state, and continues to influence its character and trajectories. For example, the ‘sacredness’ of the colonial borders was not just a principle adopted by the OAU, but a real marker of lines of identity that continued to operate even against the OAU’s own stated principle. The only African states to fragment (Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan), had done so along colonially constructed lines.
However, the enduring impact of the colonial power configurations still remains a mystery. Mamdani’s highlighting the mechanisms that sustained the ‘decentralized despotism’ of indirect rule as a key factor, but this remains only a small part of the picture. The macro-explanations regarding ‘imperialism’ and ‘new colonialism’ (including dependency theory, World System theory, etc.), also fall short of providing a fuller explanation. For they fail to account to the differential impact of the ‘word system’ on specific cases.
In this paper, we ask: What alternatives are there to the ‘decentralized despotism’ of DIY colonialism when dealing with external hegemonies in the post-colonial era? More to the point: do such alternatives exist? Isn’t the much vaunted South African ‘miracle’ just another enactment of this DIY colonialism? Is the post-colonial experience as a whole anything other than colonialism without (the physical presence and direct involvement of) the colonialists? Has the defiance of radicals from Sékou Touré to current ‘rogue states’ brought anything other than ruin and worse forms of despotism on their peoples? How are the differentials of power technologies that enabled a handful of foreign to administrators to rule multitudes against their will being perpetuated in different contexts, and across periods and geographies? Why are the options, as we see today in the Arab world after the popular uprisings, between barbarism and subjection to varieties of ‘voluntary’ enslavement?
In sum: are we at all better equipped to understand the mechanisms of foreign hegemonies, let alone devising ways of countering them, than previous generations of anti-colonial fighters? Can scholarship offer anything more substantial than lamenting this trap of ‘perpetual colonialism’?
Nivedita Menon (JNU)
Beyond the Custom/Market Dichotomy: Women’s Rights to Land and the Challenge of the Commons
Bringing women into the ambit of individual property rights has long been one of the key issues in feminist practice and scholarship. This paper focuses on land ownership and the growing recognition that in the face of large scale land acquisitions for corporate globalization, the only real challenge to capitalist ambitions is posed by collective ownership of land and strong assertions of the commons. At the same time, what is produced as “customary laws” of land ownership in postcolonial societies is dense with colonial interventions, as Mahmood Mamdani’s work has shown. This paper tries to think through feminist understandings of land rights for women in the 21st century, drawing largely on the Indian experience, but also learning from how these issues play out in Africa as well as with movements of indigenous people globally.
Kuang-Hsing Chen: (Chiao Tung University)
Decolonizing the earth: On Mamdani's mode of thought or for a grounded global intellectual movement
My paper tracks Mamdani's critical works from 1972 to the present, which, as a whole, constitutes a "third world" mode of thought. Inspired by his recent work on imperial human right, decolonzing university, and settler colonialism, among others, I propose an programatic agenda on "Decolonizing the earth: for a grounded global intellectual movement" to transform the world via a "return" to the minjung (people or popular) world as basis to move towards a more liveable earth beyond colonialism, imperialism and the Cold War.
Namhla Matshanda (UWC)
Constructing citizens and subjects in eastern Ethiopia: the clash between the British and Ethiopian Empires
This paper investigates processes of identity formation in the Harar and Jijiga localities of eastern Ethiopia during the period of the British Military Administration from 1944-1954. It does so by examining the impact of the antagonistic relationship between the Ethiopian state and the BMA. This period was characterised by the threat posed to Ethiopian sovereignty by the ambiguous presence of the BMA. The paper demonstrates the significance of the presence of the BMA for people’s perceptions of their national and ethnic identities in eastern Ethiopia. It argues that when Britain administered parts of eastern Ethiopia there emerged a complex form of ‘decentralised despotism’ where Ethiopian and British forms of domination collided in a bid to assert their authority. The focus of the contestation was to establish hegemony over sections of the population by categorising them as either subjects or citizens. This collision was motivated by the contestation over Ethiopia’s territorial claims in the region, and Britain’s attempts to ‘rectify’ the ‘territorial problem.’ This paper brings attention to the more recent source of the complex and ongoing processes of identity formation in Ethiopia’s eastern periphery. The current federal system in Ethiopia underscores ethnic identity where decentralisation has introduced different and new forms of relating to both space and identity. However, this model has been shrouded in contradictions that challenge its ethnic basis.[1] This paper demonstrates that current discourses on identification in this area are not a post-1991 phenomenon, but are part of an ongoing historical process of negotiating identification on the margins of the state.
Karuna Mantena (Yale)
Political Identity and Postcolonial Democracy
In Citizen and Subject and When Victims Become Killers, Mahmood Mamdani offered powerful analyses of how so-called racial, ethnic, tribal affiliations that had become pivotal to politics in Africa are best understood as distinctive political identities. Political identities are neither natural nor cultural but the specific and direct consequence of state formation, in this case, colonial state formation. I want to supplement this seminal analysis by attending to the dynamics of democracy that have contributed to the politicization of identity and exacerbated political conflict and violence. I focus on the rise of “majoritarianism” and the concomitant increase in minority exclusion and vulnerability that seems coincident with deepening democratization. If law was the primary mode by which the colonial and postcolonial state inscribes, institutionalizes, and enforces political identity, in the case of democracy, we might look to formal processes like elections where communal identities have proven especially resilient bases upon which to build political parties, coalitions, and patronage networks. Perhaps even more important and more elusive are the deeper informal transformations of political imaginaries that accompany the logic and history of democracy. Here I want to explore the ways in which the numerical categories - especially of majority and minority - are endowed with powerful moral and political valence. The moral-psychological attractions of democracy lay in part in its anti-elite, egalitarian promise but also - and more dangerously - as a claim to power, a discourse of legitimation about who has the moral right to rule.
Partha Chatterjee (Columbia)
The Legacy of Bandung
This paper traces the genealogy of the law of nations in Asia and Africa as part of the history of European imperial control over the region. The idea of territorial sovereignty as developed in Europe was imposed on the eastern world largely to mutually demarcate European colonial possessions. This also produced the idea of graded sovereignty and protectorates. The anti-colonial movements rejected imperial sovereignty and insisted on the equal right to sovereignty of all nations. This was the call at the Bandung conference of 1955. Consequently, it defined colonialism and racial discrimination as the greatest impediments to human rights. The paper concludes by showing how the significance of human rights has changed, while the demand for equal sovereignty of nations remains unfulfilled.
Juan Obarrio (Johns Hopkins)
Citizen/Subject: turns and returns of History
This paper engages Mahmood Mamdani's analysis of citizenship and subjecthood in Africa through an analysis of the political production of historicity in late colonial and early post-liberation times.
With a comparative view vis-a-vis Etienne Balibar's study of the "return of the subject in the citizen" in Western modernity, and the unstable relation betwen equality and freedom in liberal democracy, the paper traces the specificity of African cases within a discussion on the scope and meaning of citizenship.
If, as Mamdani has suggested, "the rule of law and the law of value" have worked in tandem in the neo-liberalization of the continent, the paper ends by exploring an analogy between citizenship / equality in
democracy and the value-form / equivalence within late capitalism.
Siba N'Zatioula Grovogui (Cornell University): Paper title to follow
The colonial politicization of racial identity and its reproduction after independence is one of the central themes of Mahmood Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject. In fact, the institutional implications of Citizen and Subject for the present have not been fully explored. Mamdani’s theses are vindicated by anti-slavery and anticolonial reflections on citizenship as foundation of sovereignty and membership in the human family beginning in Palmares (present-day Brazil) to Haiti and South Africa and throughout the Caribbean and the African Diasporas. To understand the full implications of Citizen and Subject, therefore, it might be helpful to examine the cultures of right, freedom, and solidarity and non-discrimination that provided justifications for both anti-colonialism and decolonization. It is conceivable – and to me plausible – that these were unitary cultures, held together by common treads, however internally diverse their inflections. The commonalities are evident, first, in the imaginaries and symbols of freedom and un-freedom and, second, in anti-slavery and anticolonial precepts of citizenship as well as their postulates of African identity and equality. These contrast with colonial narratives, ideologies, and practices that proffered an absurd metaphysic of difference and inferiority of Africans. Citizen and Subject compels us to revisit self-determining modes of polemicity, and their narratives and pragmas, equal citizenship and constitutional civil and political existence. The institutional deficiencies of the postcolonial state and the alarming rising tide of authoritarian and nativist political forms and practices compels such a return to self-determining constitutional reflections on the relations between citizenship, sovereignty, freedom, democratic and constitutional principles. This is the only way to save the postcolonial state from its current stasis.
Lyn Ossome (Makerere)
Colonial legacies of ethnicized violence, gendered subjects and emancipatory politics
The possibility of pursuing feminist emancipatory politics within liberal democracy remains a much-touted possibility in feminist scholarship. Yet the valorization of multiparty politics as a means of containing violence and stabilizing political contestation has not been borne out by experience in a number of African countries (Zimbabwe, Kenya, Cote d’Ivoire, Uganda). In those contexts, the increase in violence/gendered violence attached to politics lends multipartyism a particular paradox: an apparent consensus between normative freedom and violence. Furthermore, a significant body of scholarship shows the dialectal ways in which the liberal democratic pact is undermined by ethnic politics, and the ways in which the politicization of ethnicity tends to deploy generalized and gendered violence in contexts of political competition. This latter problem, feminists have argued, can be traced to the complex ways in which ethnicity tends to map on to the bodies of women. Mahmood Mamdani (1996) dealt variously with these questions in his seminal work on Citizen and Subject. His critique offered a lens through which violence perpetrated against the subalternised, ethnicized and gendered subject could be historically understood. The problem of the postcolonial state, Mamdani argued, was that of an incomplete transition: the tribalised postcolonial state lacked the logic of apprehending the very conditions of violence that its colonial legacy continued to reproduce. It could not be abstracted from the society out of which it had sprung. What his thesis seemed to call for was the necessity of a universalizing society (Gordon) to rise above the bifurcated, universal state. For feminists struggling to make sense of violence amidst democratization, the contemporary predicaments foreshadowed by Mamdani’s critique are twofold: firstly, that popular democracy inaugurated through multiparty politics cannot, in seeking to include everyone through its universalism, mediate an emancipatory path without apprehending the limits of its own identitarianism; and second, that particular injuries suffered by individuals and groups based on their class, racial, gender or ethnic subjections are no longer apparent when examined within the very structures (of the liberal human rights discourses) that reproduce them as injuries. The violence that today accompanies the politicization of ethnicity may in this sense be regarded as the necessary means through which marginalized subjects of democracy seek to exceed identitarian boundaries to gain legibility within the democratizing state. Yet we must ask what it means for feminist emancipatory politics to similarly locate gendered violence associated with democratic contestations within the realm of the excess: what does it mean to lay claim on an ethnicized state that has historically tended to trivialize discourses (such as feminism) that fall outside of its parameters? Tracing the possibilities of feminist emancipatory politics through the dialectics of politicized ethnicity and the formal mechanisms of colonial rule (Mamdani), I seek in this paper to expose certain limitations inherent in the liberal construction of rights, and how these limitations structure violent power – or power as violence – within the democratizing neoliberal state.
Steven Friedman (Rhodes/UJ)
The Bifurcated Society: Citizen and Subject in Contemporary South Africa
Mamdani’s distinction between citizen and subject lies at the core of a contemporary South African reality – the society remains divided between those who enjoy substantive citizenship and those who are subject to coercive power. The themes discussed in Citizen and Subject are particularly salient at a time when the divisions between citizen and subject, rural and urban and between civil society and the lived reality of the majority increasingly define politics, one symptom of which is an attempt by a section of the governing party to empower traditional authority structures. But, while Mamdani locates this division in the bifurcation of the state, this paper will argue that it is the bifurcation of society which creates and sustains this dichotomy between citizenship and subjection: the core reality in post-1994 South Africa is not the retention of the colonial state, but that a change in state power has not altered the persistence of colonial power relations in society. The current attempt to impose traditional authority shows not the persistence of chiefly power but its erosion, further evidence that bifurcation is a product of a social reality which the state did not create and which it is rarely able to influence.
Brian Raftopolous (UWC)
Belonging in the city: Changing State Constructions of Urban Labour in Post-Colonial Zimbabwe
The paper examines the changing constructions of labour as citizen in Zimbabwe since 1980. In particular it analyses four particular constructs: Firstly as a peripheral figure in the liberation movement; secondly as the disciplined subject of a post-colonial development model; and thirdly as political enemy; and fourthly as social ‘trash’ and excess in a modernist conception of the city. The paper also tracks the responses of labour to these changing characterisations in the official nationalism of the state.
Mbongiseni Buthelezi (Wits) paper title to follow
Suren Pillay (UWC) paper title to follow