Rivke Jaffe

Citizenship agendas in and beyond the nation-state: (en)countering framings of the good citizen

This special issue analyzes the formulation, implementation, and contestation of citizenship agendas. We define citizenship agendas as normative framings of citizenship that prescribe what norms, values, and behavior are appropriate for those claiming membership of a political community. These agendas are concerned with defining the meaning of membership in explicitly normative ways that go beyond conventional, legal– formal citizenship status. Citizenship agendas prescribe relations between people and larger structures of rule and belonging, which are often but not exclusively nation-states. Such citizenship agendas invariably imply models of virtuous and deviant citizens, favoring particular subject-citizens over others, and suggesting ways to transform the latter into the former. Some of these agendas are part and parcel of the working of the nation-state; other citizenship agendas, however, are produced beyond the nation-state. The articles collected here study various sites where the meaning of ‘the good citizen’ is framed and negotiated in different ways. We approach these framings as agendas that may coexist in apparent harmony, or merge, or clash. The various articles in this special issue engage with normative framings of citizenship in different contexts, ranging from security policies and social housing in Dutch cities, to state-like but extralegal organizations in Jamaica and Guatemala, and from the regulation of the Muslim call to prayer in the US Midwest, to post-conflict reconstruction in Lebanon. In this introduction, we extend the discussion of normative framings of citizenship associated with the nation-state. Building on recent discussions in the field of citizenship studies, which emphasize that citizenship can also be conceptualized and investigated beyond the state, the first section of this introduction provides a more detailed outline of our approach to citizenship agendas in and beyond the state. In the second section, we suggest a typology of three different configurations between state and non-state actors within which citizenship agendas are produced, detailing the different mechanisms of collaboration or contestation between state and non-state/state-like actors. Drawing on the cases presented in the different contributions to this special issue, we attempt to structure the diversity in state/non-state citizenship agendas by differentiating between the

The Popular Culture of Illegality: Crime and the Politics of Aesthetics in Urban Jamaica

This article discusses the ways in which popular culture reflects and reinforces criminal governance structures in Kingston, Jamaica, where so-called “dons” are central to extra-state forms of political order. In order to appreciate why donmanship has developed as a durable structure of rule and belonging, attention must be paid not only to the dons’ informal provision of material services to inner-city residents, but also to the imaginative, aesthetic underpinnings of criminal authority. Drawing on work linking aesthetics, politics, and the body, the article examines the emotional and ethical work that specific texts, sounds, performative practices, and visual images do.

Normalizing urban inequality : Cinematic imaginaries of difference in postcolonial Amsterdam = Normalisation de l’inégalité urbaine: imaginaires cinématiques de la différence dans l’Amsterdam postcolonial = La normalización de la desigualdad urbana: imaginarios cinematográficos de diferencia en la Ámsterdam poscolonial

Abstract Combining insights from critical urban studies with geographies of race and racism, this article examines the role of spatial imaginaries in normalizing urban inequalities, showing how such imaginaries make the associations between places and populations appear natural. We extend analyses of the interplay between material landscapes and imaginative geographies to examine how these connections feature in processes of gentrification and displacement and emphasize the necessity of an intersectional approach in understanding the cultural underpinnings of urban change. We propose that such analyses of dominant spatial imaginaries benefit from attention to their colonial roots, given the persistence of monomythical explorer-hero narratives and the mapping of reworked colonial imaginative geographies onto contemporary postcolonial cities. Our analysis focuses on Amsterdam, the popular Dutch film Alleen Maar Nette Mensen and the spatiality of difference that its ‘monomyth’ narrative presents. It justifies an unequal urban order by contrasting Amsterdam’s city centre, which is depicted as White, middle-class and ‘civilized’, with the post-war urban periphery, which is cast as a mysterious place of racialized poverty, squalor and pathological behaviour. This culturally essentialist depiction contributes to the depoliticization of state-led gentrification and normalizes changes to the material cityscape.

Normalizing urban inequality

Abstract Combining insights from critical urban studies with geographies of race and racism, this article examines the role of spatial imaginaries in normalizing urban inequalities, showing how such imaginaries make the associations between places and populations appear natural. We extend analyses of the interplay between material landscapes and imaginative geographies to examine how these connections feature in processes of gentrification and displacement and emphasize the necessity of an intersectional approach in understanding the cultural underpinnings of urban change. We propose that such analyses of dominant spatial imaginaries benefit from attention to their colonial roots, given the persistence of monomythical explorer-hero narratives and the mapping of reworked colonial imaginative geographies onto contemporary postcolonial cities. Our analysis focuses on Amsterdam, the popular Dutch film Alleen Maar Nette Mensen and the spatiality of difference that its ‘monomyth’ narrative presents. It justifies an unequal urban order by contrasting Amsterdam’s city centre, which is depicted as White, middle-class and ‘civilized’, with the post-war urban periphery, which is cast as a mysterious place of racialized poverty, squalor and pathological behaviour. This culturally essentialist depiction contributes to the depoliticization of state-led gentrification and normalizes changes to the material cityscape.

Surinamese Maroons as reggae artistes: music, marginality and urban space

Abstract This article examines how marginalized Maroon youth in Paramaribo, the capital of the Caribbean nation of Suriname, employ musical strategies in combating ethno-racial stigmatization and improving their socio-economic position. Traditionally, Maroons, after escaping the plantations during slavery, have lived in semi-isolation in Surinames dense rainforest. In recent decades, they have become increasingly urbanized, to the discontent of many in Paramaribo, who view Maroons as backward, violent criminals. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and popular culture analysis, the article discusses how young Maroons use reggae and dancehall to create and recreate physical and social spaces of their own within the city and outside the forest. They protest local conditions and inequity by drawing on regional images of marginality that have been shaped by Rastafari musicians in Jamaica. Simultaneously, they use this Caribbean frame to imagine Black Atlantic unity. Connecting to global soundscapes, young Maroons strategically use music to combat their urban marginality.

Toward an anthropology of the Caribbean state

This essay engages with Exceptional Violence and builds on Deborah Thomas’s attention to state formation, statecraft, and political community to tentatively explore how “the state” has featured in Caribbean studies and what the role of Caribbeanist anthropologists has been and might be. Reflecting on the limited direct concern with the state that Caribbeanist anthropology as a whole has displayed historically, the essay suggests a number of avenues for productively studying the everyday life of the state, including a more explicit consideration of the active role that governed populations play in imagining, representing, and enacting their relationships with governmental actors and assemblages.

Bipolar antagonism and multipolar coexistence: framing difference and shaping fear in two Caribbean cities

This article proposes a new approach to urban geographies of fear, focusing on the connection between fear and cultural understandings and representations of difference. Much of the existing work on the relationship between fear, urban space, and social difference tends to take social difference as more or less given. In this article, we argue that how differences (such as ethnic, political or class differences) are framed has strong implications for geographies of fear. The article suggests that dualistic and nondualistic framings of difference influence levels of fear and that this becomes visible in the use and perceptions of urban space, and in the built environment through the erection of physical barriers. These spatial factors, as they limit mobility and interaction, tend to reproduce the specific framing of difference. Two discursive modes of representing difference are discussed. The first, ‘bipolar antagonism’, is based on a dualist rhetoric of irreconcilable opposites. This is contrasted with ‘multipolar co-existence’, in which social categories are understood as multiple or hybrid, with flexible or fluid boundaries, and as not necessarily antagonistic. This argument is elaborated through a comparative analysis of social–cultural and spatial processes in two Caribbean cities: Kingston, Jamaica, and Paramaribo, Suriname.

From Maroons to dons: Sovereignty, violence and law in Jamaica

At different historical junctures and under different conditions, the Jamaican state has allowed armed “insurgents” to rule over specific spaces within its territorial control, condoning or actively facilitating the development of multiple legal orders as a mode of “outsourcing” sovereignty. Analyzing two contrasting cases, this article provides new insights into the role of violence and law in the context of multiple sovereignties. In the eighteenth century, after several unsuccessful military missions against Maroons, the colonial state signed a treaty granting them a significant portion of the Jamaican interior and partial political autonomy. In return, the Maroons provided military assistance to the British, capturing and returning the enslaved who escaped the plantations, and, decades after Emancipation, helping the British suppress the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion. In contemporary Jamaica, many inner-city neighborhoods are controlled by criminal leaders known as “dons”. While various elements in the Jamaican state combat the power of the dons, many politicians and bureaucrats are entangled in a relationship of collusion and divestment with these extra-state leaders. In exchange for access to electoral blocs and suppressing urban unrest, dons receive lucrative government contracts and a measure of protection from judicial scrutiny. The article contrasts these colonial and postcolonial cases of collaborative or collusive relations between states and “outlaws”, emphasizing the role of violent pluralism and legal pluralism in multiple sovereignties, but also complicating the distinction between formal/legal and informal/de facto sovereignty.

Hip-hop and Urban Studies

How can urban studies research engage fruitfully with hip-hop? This contribution responds to the essays by David Beer and Martin Lamotte on ‘street music’, urban ethnography and ghettoized communities. It discusses how a social science engagement with hip-hop texts might differ from cultural studies approaches, and how the study of hip-hop culture can contribute to social movements studies. The essay argues that academics can utilize this form of ‘urban’ culture in various ways when undertaking urban research, teaching urban studies and engaging a broader public in academic research.

Cities and the political imagination

How can we recognize the political in the city? How might urban scholars engage with forms of urban politics outside of established sites of research such as those associated with representative democracy or collective mobilizations? This article suggests that new perspectives on urban politics might be enabled through reinvigorated connections between the social sciences and humanities, and by combining long-term urban ethnography and cultural analysis. Reading forms of creative expression in relation to power struggles in and over urban space can direct our attention towards negotiations of authority and political belonging that are often overlooked within urban studies. The article explores the possibilities of such an approach by focusing on the idea of the political imagination as socially and materially embedded in urban landscapes. Expressive culture generates both analytical and normative frames, guiding everyday understandings of how urban power works, where and in whose hands it is concentrated, and whether we see this as just or unjust. Such frames can legitimize or delegitimize specific distributions of urban resources and risks, and can normalize or denaturalize specific structures of decision-making. Through a discussion of popular music and visual culture, the article considers how everyday practices both feed into, and are informed by, imaginations of urban rule and political belonging.