Insurgent citizenships have arisen in cities around the world. This book
examines the insurgence of democratic citizenship in the urban
peripheries of São Paulo, Brazil, its entanglement with entrenched
systems of inequality, and its contradiction in violence.
James Holston argues that for two centuries Brazilians have practiced a
type of citizenship all too common among nation-states--one that is
universally inclusive in national membership and massively inegalitarian
in distributing rights and in its legalization of social differences.
But since the 1970s, he shows, residents of Brazil's urban peripheries
have formulated a new citizenship that is destabilizing the old. Their
mobilizations have developed not primarily through struggles of labor
but through those of the city--particularly illegal residence, house
building, and land conflict. Yet precisely as Brazilians democratized
urban space and achieved political democracy, violence, injustice, and
impunity increased dramatically. Based on comparative, ethnographic, and
historical research, Insurgent Citizenship reveals why the insurgent
and the entrenched remain dangerously conjoined as new kinds of citizens
expand democracy even as new forms of violence and exclusion erode it.
Rather than view this paradox as evidence of democratic failure and
urban chaos, Insurgent Citizenship argues that contradictory
realizations of citizenship characterize all democracies--emerging and
established. Focusing on processes of city- and citizen-making now
prevalent globally, it develops new approaches for understanding the
contemporary course of democratic citizenship in societies of vastly
different cultures and histories.
