Description
Book SynopsisA comparative feminist work that starts with a substantial historical account of the different ways that freedom, race and gender were intertwined in Jamaica and Haiti after the end of slavery. It examines the contemporary gendered spaces of citizenship, travel, and popular culture across the Caribbean.
Trade Review"
Citizenship from Below is an important contribution to debates about the complexities of citizenship, particularly in post-slavery, postcolonial societies. Mimi Sheller traces the relations between constructions of gender and sexuality, transnational and diasporic imaginaries, and the various incarnations of Caribbean societies, from the colonial to the postcolonial and nationalist. She expands our notion of citizenship by showing how it is constructed by the state over time amid changing circumstances, and by alternative politics and modes of belonging that emerge from 'below.'"—
Deborah A. Thomas, author of
Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica"This is a stimulating, thought-provoking book of lasting significance to scholarship on the Caribbean, citizenship, sexuality, and embodiment. The way that Mimi Sheller puts the literatures on embodiment and citizenship into dialogue is impressive and important. After reading her analysis of these two bodies of scholarship, I will never again be able to think about one without considering the other.
Citizenship from Below is a very distinguished book, one which will be widely read and discussed."—
Diana Paton, co-editor of
Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing“
Citizenship from Below is a sophisticated, challenging, and ambitious book…. Sheller’s book is a masterful demonstration of the multidirectional, complicated, and ongoing process by which citizenship is constructed, appropriated, defined, and inhabited.… This book will be important and illuminating reading for historians of the Caribbean, of sex and gender, of citizenship, broadly conceived. It is indispensible reading for scholars interested in the fraught process of citizenship after slave emancipation, in particular.” -- Naomi J. Andrews * Itinerario *
“Sheller joins this conversation on sexuality and social justice, with
Citizenship from Below, which will be a useful tool in such dialogues—as well as in the hands of those ‘from below.’” -- A. Lynn Bolles * Women's Review of Books *
“[A] grounded, yet expansive contribution to the study of sexuality, citizenship and post-slavery societies.” -- Kate Houlden * Anthurium *
"[A]n extremely forceful and timely argument. . . . For Sheller, the exercise of sexual agency, while it may not necessarily transform the institutions through which inequalities have historically been structured, 'may enable some forms of maneuver, negotiation, and exchange' (p. 260). It is by training this lens on nineteenth-century Jamaica and Haiti that Sheller most profoundly complexifies traditional political histories of slavery, freedom, and citizenship. I believe this theoretical reframing is the most critical contribution of
Citizenship from Below." -- Deborah A. Thomas * New West Indian Guide *
"A ground-breaking interdisciplinary achievement and contribution to the theory of freedom." -- Aija Lulle * Anthropological Notebooks *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
1. History from the Bottom(s) Up 19
2. Quasheba, Mother, Queen 48
3. Her Majesty's Sable Subjects 89
4. Lost Glimpses of 1865 114
5. Sword-Bearing Citizens 142
6. "You Signed My Name But Not My Feet" 166
7. Arboreal Landscapes of Power and Resistance 187
8. Returning the Tourist Gaze 210
9. Erotic Agency and a Queer Caribbean Freedom 239
Notes 281
Works Cited 305
Index 339
