Description
Through a masterful blending of history and ethnography, James Holston offers his readers an innovative and compelling way to think about citizenship in Brazil and elsewhere. Insurgent Citizenship shows how, historically, the category of 'citizen' in Brazilian society has been subject to differential rights and subtle gradations that have forced many people who enjoy formal citizenship to resort to illegal arrangements to survive. Perhaps most important, Holston analyzes the struggles of insurgent movements in Brazil's urban 'peripheries' not only to claim inclusion but to reshape the very meaning of citizenship. -- Barbara Weinstein, New York University James Holston has written a landmark book. In this multilayered study, Holston has written an explosive history of modern citizenship. The implications of his work provide fresh insights in Brazilian democracy and its limitations--and suggest ways in which, in fact, Brazil may not be so unique in a world of legalized privileges and legitimated inequalities. A monumental achievement of engaged scholarship. -- Jeremy Adelman, author of "Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic" This is a major book, and should provoke significant debate among Brazilianists and beyond. Holston offers a thoroughly researched, acutely argued, and well-written account of the emergence of a new understanding of citizenship in Brazil. He grounds his account of 'insurgent citizenship' in the study of neighborhood activism in two working-class neighborhoods on the periphery of Sao Paulo, Jardim das Camelias and Lar Nacional. His analysis of the former, in particular, is stunning. -- Bryan McCann, Georgetown University This magnificent, richly detailed study of the emergence of an idea of the citizen as a rights-bearing subject, out of the morass of legal and social inequalities that have characterized Brazilian society since its inception, offers a provocative view of what democracy and rights mean for diminishing such inequalities. The developments in Brazil are similar to those taking place elsewhere in Latin America, and this book shows us in vivid detail why they are happening and what their implications might be. -- Sally Engle Merry, New York University One of the best books I've ever read on Brazil or on citizenship. -- Margaret Keck, Johns Hopkins University
About the Author
James Holston is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of "The Modernist City" and the editor of "Cities and Citizenship".
Reviews
Co-Winner of the 2010 BRASA Roberto Reis Book Prize by the Brazilian Studies Association Winner of the 2009 Best Book on Brazil in English, Brazil Section of the Latin American Studies Association Winner of the 2009 Leeds Honor Book, Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association "Holston's topic in this impressive study on unequal citizenship is the contrast between Brazil's formal, legal equality and the reality that it is a society founded on civic and juridical inequalities."--J.M. Rosenthal, Choice "Insurgent Citizenship will provoke vigorous debate. But Holston has set the terms for such debate with force and intelligence, and his book will surely be an enduring touchstone for scholars of law, social movements, and urban development."--Brodwyn Fischer, American Anthropologist
Book Information
ISBN 9780691142906
Author James Holston
Format Paperback
Page Count 416
Imprint Princeton University Press
Publisher Princeton University Press
Weight(grams) 567g