NOTES ON CULTURAL CITIZENSHIP IN THE BLACK ATLANTIC WORLD

In 1995 and 1996, Verena Stolcke (1995) and Aihwa Ong (1996) were embattled over the legitimacy of the concept of citizenship—a debate that was preceded by those writing about the complexities of Latino/a as well as Caribbean transnational migration (Basch, Glick-Schiller, and Blanc 1994; Sutton and Chaney 1987) and the resultant complexities of hybridity and borderlands (Anzaldua 1987). The debate that followed in Current Anthropology in 1995 propelled the discussion further. It clarified what was at stake in reconceptualizing the classification of national belonging and pushed scholars to contend with power through the ways people resignify meaning and produce new forms of socialities outside of and in relation to the statecraft. This engagement called into question the prevailing literature that presumed an omnipotence of the state; it shifted the gaze to an engagement with other long standing formations—migration from the South to the North, dispossession, refugeeism, pan-Africanism and various forms of internationalism—that produced new forms of exclusions as well as innovative possibilities for reimagining the locus of social and political authority. It was about the complexities of power— its circulation and its centrality within and beyond the state. The stakes were high in this debate and the issues were made more difficult by the fledgling globalization literature which had begun to articulate social changes in relation to the demise of the nation state and shifts toward imagining new possibilities (Appadurai 1996; Sassen 1991, 1996, 1998, 2006).