Title: Insurgent citizenship : disjunctions of democracy and modernity in Brazil /
Authors: Holston, James.
Publisher: Princeton University Press,
Year: 2008
Subjects: Sociology, Urban Brazil.; Urban anthropology Brazil.; Citizenship Brazil; Democracy Brazil; Law Political aspects Brazil.; Land tenure Brazil; Cities and towns Brazil; Urban poor Brazil.; Urban policy Brazil; Squatter settlements Brazil.; São Paulo (Brazil) Social conditions.
Abstract: "Insurgent citizenships have arisen in cities around the world. This book examines the insurgence of democratic citizenship in the urban peripheries of Sao 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."--Jacket.
Contents: Disruptions -- Citizenship made strange -- Public standing and everyday citizenship -- Particular citizenships -- Treating the unequal unequally -- History as an argument about the present -- Inequalities -- In/divisible nations -- Comparative formulations -- French indivisibility -- American restriction -- Brazilian inclusion -- Limiting political citizenship -- The surprisingly broad colonial franchise -- Restrictions with independence -- A long step backward into oligarchy -- Urbanization and the equalization of rights -- Restricting access to landed property -- Property, personality, and civil standing -- Land, labor, and law -- The tangle of colonial land tenure -- National land reform, slavery, and immigrant free labor -- The land law of 1850 -- Land law and market become accomplices of fraud -- Illegality, inequality, and instability as norms -- Segregating the city -- Center and periphery -- Evicting workers and managing society -- Autoconstructing the peripheries -- Social rights for urban labor -- A differentiated citizenship -- Insurgencies -- Legalizing the illegal -- The illegal periphery -- A case of land fraud in Jardim das Caḿelias -- Histories of dubious origins -- Federal ownership claims: Sesmarias and Indians -- Ackel ownership claims: posse and squatter's rights -- The ownership claims of Adis and the state of São Paulo -- The misrule of law -- Urban citizens -- New civic participation -- The mobilization of Lar Nacional -- Reinventing the public sphere -- New foundations of rights -- Rights as privilege -- Contributor rights -- Text-based rights -- Disjunctions -- Dangerous spaces of citizenship -- Everyday incivilities -- In/justice -- Gang talk and rights talk -- Insurgent citizenships and disjunctive democracies.