For the first decade of the twenty-first century, every weekend, people throughout Uganda converged to participate in ebimeeza, open debates that invited common citizens to share their political and social views. These debates, also called “People’s Parliaments,” were broadcast live on private radio stations until the government banned them in 2009. In Talkative Polity, Florence Brisset-Foucault offers the first major study of ebimeeza, which complicate our understandings of political speech in restrictive contexts and force us to move away from the simplistic binary of an authoritarian state and a liberal civil society.

Brisset-Foucault conducted fieldwork from 2005 to 2013, primarily in Kampala, interviewing some 150 orators, spectators, politicians, state officials, journalists, and NGO staff. The resulting ethnography invigorates the study of political domination and documents a short-lived but highly original sphere of political expression. Brisset-Foucault thus does justice to the richness and depth of Uganda’s complex political and radio culture as well as to the story of ambitious young people who didn’t want to behave the way the state expected them to. Positioned at the intersection of media studies and political science, Talkative Polity will help us all rethink the way in which public life works.

A collection of essays whose authors reach beyond simple definitions of citizenship as determined by documents and legal rights

The scholarly conference from which this publication emerged was circulated in the waning months of 2018, following a summer of urgent and emotional debate surrounding new US immigration policies regarding immigrant family separations, arguments fueled on one side by fears about the loss of social cohesion, and on the other by photographs of incarcerated children. Given the then-prevailing political atmosphere, editor Andrew Gibb anticipated that a good number of submissions might draw connections between the patterns, policies, and histories of immigration on the one hand, and theatrical or otherwise performance-centered expressions of citizenship, whether inclusive or exclusionary, on the other. In retrospect, what could have been foreseen is that theatre scholars, educators, and professionals would interpret recent events against a wider and more complex backdrop. The ultimate result of that initial call is this volume, a collection of essays whose authors reach beyond simple definitions of citizenship as determined by documents and legal rights, and who engage in larger conversations about what citizenship can mean, and how such meanings are expressed through theatre and performance.

Interestingly, while none of the authors published herein take up immigration as a central issue, they all make use of some combination of three particular analytical frameworks, all of which happen to be pertinent to the current immigrant experience and attempts to regulate it: bodies, institutions, and technologies.
 

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, all of us consider ourselves to be citizens of something-–but of what? Nation-states? Regions? Ethnic groups? Corporations?
 
An accomplished set of meditations by one of Europe's leading Americanists, Them and Us is a rich comparative study of European and American cultural traditions and their influence on conceptions of community. In contrast with the ethnic and nationalist allegiances that historically have splintered Europe, Rob Kroes identifies a complex of cultural practices that have mitigated against ethnically rooted divisions in the United States. He argues that the American approach–-articulated by a national rhetoric emphasizing openness rather than closure, diversity rather than uniformity--has much to offer a Europe where the nationalist and ethnic conflicts that spawned two world wars continue to sow terror and destruction.
 
Kroes discusses European and American attitudes toward the welfare state, the human rights tradition in the United States, and the role of regionalism in shaping conceptions of national identity. He also considers new, transnational forms of cultural membership that are emerging to take the place of nation-based citizenship. He contends that the frame of reference Europeans now use to make sense of their collective situation draws on ingredients provided by the worldwide dissemination of American mass culture. He investigates the way this emerging world culture, under American auspices, affects the way people in their local and national settings structure their sense of the past and conceive of their citizenship.
 
Imagining a new set of cultural relationships that could serve as the basis for global citizenship, Them and Us is an insightful consideration of the types of solidarity that might weave humankind together into a meaningful community.
 

It is only in the last 250 years that ordinary people (in some parts of the world) have become citizens rather than subjects. This change happened in a very short period, between 1780 and 1820, a result of the foundations of democracy laid in the age of revolutions. A century later local governments embraced this shift due to rapid industrialization, urbanization, and population growth. During the twentieth century, all democratic governments began to perform a range of tasks, functions, and services that had no historical precedent. In the thirty years following the Second World War, Western democracies created welfare states that, for the first time in history, significantly reduced the gap between the wealthy and everyone else. Many of the reforms of that postwar period have been since rolled back because of the belief that government should be more like a business. Jos C.N. Raadschelders provides the information that all citizens should have about their connections to government, why there is a government, what it does, how it does it, and why we can no longer do without it. The Three Ages of Government rises above stereotypical thinking to show the centrality of government in human life.

In Transforming Citizenship Raymond Rocco studies the “exclusionary inclusion” of Latinos based on racialization and how the processes behind this have shaped their marginalized citizenship status, offering a framework for explaining this dynamic. Contesting this status has been at the core of Latino politics for more than 150 years. Pursuing the goal of full, equal, and just inclusion in societal membership has long been a major part of the struggle to realize democratic normative principles. This illuminating research demonstrates the inherent limitations of the citizenship regime in the United States for incorporating Latinos as full societal members and offers an alternative conception, “associative citizenship,” that provides a way to account for and challenge the pattern of exclusionary belonging that has defined the positions of the Latinos in U.S. society. Through a critical engagement with key theorists such as Rawls, Habermas, Kymlicka, Walzer, Taylor, and Young, Rocco advances an original analysis of the politics of Latino societal membership and citizenship, arguing that the specific processes of racialization that have played a determinative role in creating and maintaining the pattern of social and political exclusions of Latinos have not been addressed by the dominant theories of diversity and citizenship developed in the prevalent literature in political theory.

This multidisciplinary collection investigates the ways in which marriage and partner migration processes have become the object of state scrutiny, and the site of sustained political interventions in several states around the world. Covering cases as varied as the United States, Canada, Japan, Iran, France, Belgium or the Netherlands, among others, contributors reveal how marriage and partner migration have become battlegrounds for political participation, control, and exclusion. Which forms of attachments (towards the family, the nation, or specific individuals) have become framed as risks to be managed? How do such preoccupations translate into policies? With what consequences for those affected by them, in terms of rights and access to citizenship? The book answers these questions by analyzing the interplay between issues of security, citizenship and rights from the perspectives of migrants and policymakers, but also from actors who negotiate encounters with the state, such as lawyers, non-governmental organizations, and translators.