Citizenship after Orientalism

Transforming Political Theory

Engin Isin

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137479501
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

This edited volume presents a critique of citizenship as exclusively and even originally a European or 'Western' institution. It explores the ways in which we may begin to think differently about citizenship as political subjectivity.

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Transforming Political Theory

Engin F. Isin

Abstract

This chapter lays out a perspective on the research project that produced the 12 chapters presented in this book. How to perform political theory after the postcolonial critique, and in doing so contribute to the decentring of Euro-American political theory, is a question that troubles many scholars today. This chapter argues that a performative political theory must not only attend to the origins but also the workings of institutions by studying how both political theorists and political theories are embedded in them. The book is a response to the question of how to perform political theory by taking one essential institution – citizenship – and focusing on its workings.

Introduction

This book presents critical perspectives on citizenship and its uses in political theory. ‘Citizenship’ is amongst the most important concepts of political theory. This is partly because both as a legal status and social practice citizenship has been an essential aspect of political modernity at least since the American and French revolutions.¹ The word ‘citizen’ evokes a particular legacy that is inexorably associated with ‘European’ values that are seen to define Euro-American states especially. These include secularism, democracy, law, and rights.² However, since 1945, these very values have been increasingly placed under question from various perspectives, so much so that to call them solely European values or to assert that Europe has fulfilled their promise is to encounter scepticism. The influence of works by J. M. Blaut, Jack Goody, and Patrick Chabal among others has steadily contributed to this scepticism.³

This scepticism is part of a broader shift that concerns the place of Europe in the world. For centuries, Europe has asserted its place at the centre of the world – both geographically (as represented by cartography) and historically (as principally represented by historiography). Arguably, and as Walter Mignolo has shown, this has been the case since that period which is called the ‘renaissance’ or rebirth, or at least since the modern experiences of colonization and imperialism, which were certainly a part of the renaissance, or perhaps its dark side. Europe, and later its expanded image ‘the West’, has come to dominate how the world is seen if not made. It has been argued that despite all the resistance or protest against it, Europe placed itself in the centre of the world in more ways than one. And now there is a strong sense that it can no longer do so – or be able to do so – at least without stronger and more persistent resistance against such placement. Europe (and the West) may no longer remain at the centre of the world. As both Dipesh Chakrabarty and Walter Mignolo have illustrated, the consequences of this displacement, provincializing, and decentring are profound.⁴ Their work and that of the first generation of scholars on postcolonial theory have signalled that an era is passing – that of Euro-American empire. The so-called turn to empire or the imperial turn – meaning the resurgence of critical studies on imperialism and colonialism – is yet another signal. So are attempts to reassert the vitality or superiority of Euro-America.⁵ Yet, far more palpably than in the last decade, we are now living through the consequences of the decentring or provincializing of Euro-America.

One of the consequences of postcolonial critique and its project of decentring Euro-America has been the need to question political theory that aims to grasp (and shape) norms, laws, and practices through which power is exercised. If ‘political theory’, with its primary concepts such as power, state, law, justice, and citizenship, is not only performed by canonical thinkers such as Niccolò Machiavelli or John Rawls but also by those who have political lives, we must ask what kind of activity is political theory. A distinction suggested by Michael Freeden is useful to broaden the remit of political theory.⁶ For Freeden, the study of political thinking or thought involves two dimensions. First, it involves investigating political thinking in actually existing practices, situations, and institutions. The focus here is to investigate how thought is deployed in concrete instances geared toward achieving specific objectives (and exercising power), whether these are consciously articulated (and articulable) or not. Second, it also involves studying thinking about politics embedded in ideational configurations. The focus here is thought that is geared toward achieving policies, programmes, visions, arrangements, rules, and entities that function as contested and contestable ideational or ideological configurations. For Freeden, thinking politically is different from thinking about politics. Often the latter is considered as the proper domain of political theory, and if the former comes into view it functions as rarely more than a ‘background’ or ‘context’. Yet, the two dimensions of studying political thought are interrelated and complement each other for a critical and reflective political theory. The important aspect of this distinction is to recognize that while all subjects engage in political thinking, thinking about politics is open to only those subjects whose authority (status and position) allow them to engage in production of language broadly defined as all aural, visual, or textual speech acts concerning politics. These are ideological configurations not in the sense of distorted representations of realities but in the sense of being constitutive elements of the making of realities. So not only is political theory something that canonical political thinkers perform but their performance of political theory is embedded in practical settings and arrangements of politics.⁷

This broadened understanding of political theory is crucial if we are to appreciate the radical intervention by postcolonial theory in demonstrating how colonialism and imperialism operated in both dimensions of political theory. Classic if not clichéd illustrations are that John Locke was not only the author of Two Treatises of Government (1680) but also a helping hand in drafting a colonial constitution and that John Stuart Mill was not only the author of Considerations on Representative Government (1861) but an officer of the East India Company.⁸ The point is that political theory is a speech act proper: it does not merely describe the world, it is also in it and by saying something about that world brings it into being.⁹ The contributions to this book are animated by a performative understanding of political theory. They aim to shift attention from a political theory that features canonical authors (from Aristotle to Žižek) to a political theory embedded in how people perform politics in and by saying things political.

Once we shift our focus from canonical political theory to performative political theory, we recognize that Europe not only stamped its authority on how and by whom political theory was performed since the renaissance but also made political theory perform Europe, or the West, as centred, that is, placed at the geographic and historical centre of the world. It is not an exaggerated claim that political theory was amongst the most powerful mechanisms by which Europe has sustained its centrality. One of the major contributions of postcolonial theory, which took European political theory and its assumptions, approaches, and concepts to task, was precisely this point.¹⁰ And, postcolonial theory would have been unthinkable without Edward Said’s intervention with Orientalism (1978). Said highlighted that one of the strategies by which political theory – again performatively understood since Said’s primary focus was art – centred Europe was by distinguishing itself from other ‘cultures’ through a series of presences and absences. Europe was the space of presence of such things as capitalism, law, science, medicine, and labour and of concepts or processes such as rationality, the state, secularism, and bureaucracy. When Said critically intervened in the debate over how a divide was opened between ostensibly independently existing civilizations or cultures – between the West and the East (or the Occident and the Orient) – his specific concern was with representations of the Orient in Western art, especially literature. This was neither surprising nor a problem, Said being, in his own words, ‘... by training and practice a teacher of the mainly European and American humanities, a specialist in modern comparative literature’.¹¹ Orientalism in governmental, legal, sociological, and political discourses was not Said’s main concern. True, he remarks that orientalism functioned as a ‘type’ – an analytical device in the social sciences – and that by using orientalism as a type, ‘Weber’s studies of Protestantism, Judaism, and Buddhism blew him (perhaps unwittingly) into the very territory originally charted and claimed by the Orientalists’.¹² But Said never explained what he meant by Weber being blown into a territory originally charted by orientalists except further remarking that Weber ‘... found encouragement amongst all those nineteenth-century thinkers who believed that there was a sort of ontological difference between Eastern and Western economic (as well as religious) “mentalities”’.¹³ Said then referred the reader to Maxime Rodinson’s Islam and Capitalism ‘for a sustained proof of Weber’s total inaccuracy’.¹⁴ Said appears to have held a view of orientalism in which the role of the social sciences in general and political theory in particular in constructing the Orient seems derivative. When Said broadened his critique in Culture and Imperialism (1994) and located orientalism as part of imperialism, his focus still remained broadly ‘culture’.¹⁵

It is only recently that the debate on orientalism began challenging this derivative view of orientalism in political theory and documented how political thought was in the forefront of the emergence and development of orientalism in colonial and imperial discourse.¹⁶ As a result, the orientalist workings of such political concepts as the state, democracy, rule of law, and citizenship came under renewed postcolonial critique. This book is a contribution to our understanding of the orientalist workings of citizenship as a political concept emerging out of colonial and imperial experience.

In Euro-American political theory, a significant presence and absence that came to be associated exclusively with Europe was the concept of ‘citizenship’. European colonial and imperial projects proceeded with assumptions that understood colonial subjects as not only without history but also without political subjectivity.¹⁷ In other words, the ways in which people occupy political positions by claiming a right, if not the right, to have rights were seen to be inimical to the supposedly limited political capacities of subject peoples. This was the most poignant observation made by pioneering critics such as Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Albert Memmi.¹⁸

Yet, despite the enourmous influence of postcolonial theory on studies concerning decolonization, colonialism, and imperialism, in citizenship studies there has been s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• 1. Transforming Political Theory
• Part I: Undoing Citizenship
• Part II: Uncovering Citizenship
• Part III: Refiguring Citizenship
• Index