Insurgent Citizenship
Subtitle: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil (In-formation)
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: November 19, 2007
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 416
ISBN-13: 9780691130217
Subjects: Human rights; Political activism; Political structures: democracy; Social theory; Contemporary Politics - Latin America; Political And Civil Rights; Social Science; Sociology; Demography; Government - Judicial Branch; Political Freedom & Security - Civil Rights; Anthropology; Latin American Studies; World History / Comparative History; Civics & Citizenship; Political Ideologies - Democracy; Brazil; Citizenship; Sociology, Urban; Urban anthropology
Description: "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.