Citizenship and Democracy in the 21st Century

Conveners:

Howard Winant, Sociology, hwinant@soc.ucsb.edu
Paul Amar, Law and Society, amar@lawso.ucsb.edu
James Kyung-Jin lee, Asian American Studies, jkl@asamst.ucsb.edu

Accomplishments, 2004-05:

In the RFG’s first year of operation we were able to constitute an important pole of attraction on the UCSB campus; we sponsored a series of forums that highlighted key dimensions of the crisis of democracy both in the US and global context. As projected in our initial proposal we framed that crisis as one of cultural and political inclusion/exclusion in and from the public sphere and various state apparatuses and instrumentalities. Problems of citizenship – and thus of democracy – were seen as concentrating at various frontiers and boundaries.

In our public events and RFG discussions, we examined how racial, gender-based, national, and class/status categories are employed to assign and withhold rights: notably citizenship-based rights, but also human rights in the broadest sense. In the framework we have been developing, citizenship and access to democratic rights are structured through a dynamic and conflictual process that is primarily political but also deeply grounded in popular culture.

Politically this is the Gramscian framework of hegemony: state-based and privileged social groups seek to manage (and inevitably restrict) access to resources and rights, but are compelled by opposition of various types to make concessions in limited and “moderate” fashion. Such is the incorporative logic of reform that produces right: civil, women’s, gay, and human rights all flow from this dynamic, as does the welfare state, Marshallian social citizenship, and the pacification of class conflict.

Culturally, a parallel framework constructs racial and national identities, gender and sexual difference, and religious “otherness” (notably Islam) as axes of experience and identity that are at least partially assimilable into the “common sense” of democratic inclusivity. The political and cultural burden of upholding that “common sense” – of integrating these conflict-ridden and sometimes contradictory tendencies – is particularly heavy in the cntemporary US: both in mainstream politics and mass culture (primetime media, let us say) sustaining a credible national discourse about democracy and citizenship is becoming more difficult.

Maybe the center is not holding. Maybe we are now at a point where this hegemonic dynamic has been superseded by one of domination. Today restriction of traffic across national borders, curtailment of access to reproductive rights, increased reliance on post-civil rights ideology (“colorblindness”, reinforced nativism, etc.) renewed stigmatization of homosexuality, resurrection of imperial ambition (the “great game”, the “clash of civilizations”), assaults on the welfare state, trade unionism, and social security, and even willful aggression against nature itself (amped up environmental depredation) all work to limit citizenship and curtail democracy. The commons is increasingly privatized and democracy increasingly symbolic.

This is the debate that has shaped our first year of activity: it may be schematically summarized as a question or problem: hegemony or domination? Our public events have returned over and over to this theme, but have not, of course, been able to resolve it. Speakers have addressed it from numerous angles: race, nationalism, and diaspora (Hanchard), global indigenism (Clifford), the uniqueness of California’s demography, political economy, and culture (Pastor), gender/labor interaction (Glenn), the welfare state and sexuality (Smith), immigration and nativism (Prashad), the politics of terrorism (Degregori), and Islamophobia (Ozel). One further speaker remains on our schedule, whose theme is genealogy (and resilience) of democracy itself from the classical to contemporary epoch (Allen).

Throughout this very active first year we have not only sponsored many talks – usually in conjunction with other RFGs and UCSB groups – but have developed both an extensive faculty and graduate network. We have generally succeeded in bringing resource people (i.e., our public speakers) into contact with undergraduate students as well, both by recruiting students to attend lectures, and by bringing speakers into regular course sessions.

Projected Directions and Upcoming Activities, 2005-06:

We’d like to move on from where our 2004-05 efforts have left us. At the center of the debate over hegemony v. domination, at the core of the question about the development of democracy and the vicissitudes of the citizenship in the 21st century, has been the inclusion/exclusion dynamic. In 2005-06 we would like to focus more attention on the changing sociopolitical logic of rule as well as the changing meaning of resistance in the 21st century, of course without entirely repudiating inclusion/exclusion.

This means confronting the poverty of liberalism, in both the classical sense (the unfettered market etc.) and the US sense (moderate social citizenship etc.). It means confronting the crisis of 21st century political rule and the democratic challenges posed by resurgent imperial aspirations abroad and increased repression at home. So we would like to focus more attention on repression and denial of access to the state, both for citizens and for non-citizens, those whom Agamben would label homines saceres (those who can be sacrificed).

At the same time we would like to focus more attention on social movements, on the political dynamism of civil society that does not only make demands on the state, but also engages in autogestion, self-organization, and subversion. There are also movements and organizations that are premised on ignoring the state or achieving “room to maneuver” vis-à-vis the state.

In respect to tendencies toward increased repression, some subjects we would like to consider are new patterns of carcerality and imprisonment, the organization of torture, the use of sexuality as a repressive technology (eg in Guantanamo), the reiterative convergence of empire and racism and the revived potential for fascism.

From the side of new oppositional logics we’d like to focus more on subalternity, autogestion, and racial pragmatism as the praxis of everyday resistance. To what extent is the everyday life of imperial subjects, the poor, women, racialized “others”, sexual minorities, and immigrants opaque to the regimes that rule “over” them? How are traditional organizational ties and identities mobilized in civil society outside the purview of the state, no matter how surveillance-oriented it becomes? How are education, law, medicine, art, and religion refigured as contestatory frameworks in civil society under increasingly repressive political regimes?

We do not intend to dispense with out previous interest in rights discourse or in traditional struggles for democracy (“within” the state, in the Habermasian “public sphere”, etc.). So a big question becomes the interaction between that “traditional” political framework and the emerging new one of preemption from above and subversion from below.

Possible Speakers:

Fred Block (UC Davis) on Polanyi and the social regulation of the market.
Luis Fraga (Stanford) on Latino/a politics in the 21st Century
Mae Ngai (University of Chicago) on immigration and citizenship
Robin D.G. Kelley (Columbia) on cultures of resistance
Nikhil Pal Singh (Uwashington) on the afterlife of fascism
Ange-Marie Hancock (Yale) on the politics of disgust
Amrita Basu (Umass) on women’s movements in global perspective
Cynthia Young (USC) on soul power
Ruth W. Gilmore (USC) on prisons

Participants:

Richard Falk, Global Studies
Lisa Hajjar, Law and Society
Edwina Barvosa-carter, Chicana/o Studies
Chris Parker, Political Science (on leave 2005-06)

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