"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.
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 " Insurgent Citizenship will provoke vigorous debate. "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. Focusing on processes of city- and citizen-making now prevalent globally, it develops new approaches for understanding the contemporary course of democratic citizenship in societies of vastly different cultures and histories. Rather than view this paradox as evidence of democratic failure and urban chaos, Insurgent Citizenship argues that contradictory realizations of citizenship characterize all democracies - emerging and established. Based on comparative, ethnographic, and historical research, Insurgent Citizenship reveals why the insurgent and the entrenched remain dangerously conjoined as new kinds of citizens expand democracy even as new forms of violence and exclusion erode it. Yet precisely as Brazilians democratized urban space and achieved political democracy, violence, injustice, and impunity increased dramatically.
Their mobilizations have developed not primarily through struggles of labor but through those of the city - particularly illegal residence, house building, and land conflict.
But since the 1970s, he shows, residents of Brazil’s urban peripheries have formulated a new citizenship that is destabilizing the old. 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. This book examines the insurgence of democratic citizenship in the urban peripheries of São Paulo, Brazil, its entanglement with entrenched systems of inequality, and its contradiction in violence. Insurgent citizenships have arisen in cities around the world.
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