I am pleased to announce the publication of my new book, Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom (Duke University Press).
Citizenship from Below boldly revises the history of the struggles for freedom by emancipated peoples in post-slavery Jamaica, post-independence Haiti, and the wider Caribbean by focusing on the interplay between the state, the body, race, and sexuality. Mimi Sheller offers a new theory of “citizenship from below” to describe the contest between “proper” spaces of legitimate high politics and the disavowed politics of lived embodiment.
“This is a stimulating, thought-provoking book of lasting significance to scholarship on the Caribbean, citizenship, sexuality, and embodiment. The way that Mimi Sheller puts the literatures on embodiment and citizenship into dialogue is impressive and important. After reading her analysis of these two bodies of scholarship, I will never again be able to think about one without considering the other. Citizenship from Below is a very distinguished book, one which will be widely read and discussed.”—Diana Paton, co-editor of Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing
For more information, and to order the book directly from Duke University Press, please visit http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?productid= 18033
You can now read the introduction to Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom, here:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/87835013/Citizenship-from-Below-by-Mimi-Sheller
A book launch will be held at the Caribbean Studies Association 37th Annual Conference with the theme “Unpacking Caribbean Citizenship: Rights, Participation and Belonging”, 28 May to 1 June 2012 in Guadeloupe.
Mimi Sheller is Professor of Sociology at Drexel University and the author of Democracy after Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica and Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies.
