Citizenship from Below
We are pleased to announce the publication of Mimi Sheller’s 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 was 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. She has also published extensively in the field of Mobilities research, including co-editing with John Urry Mobile Technologies of the City (Routledge, 2006), Tourism Mobilities: Places to Play, Places in Play (2004), and a special issue of Environment and Planning A on ‘Materialities and Mobilities’.
Her current work in progress includes:
- the forthcoming book Aluminum Dreams: Lightness, Speed and Modernity (MIT Press) on the history of aluminum as a material of speed and mobile modernity, and its relation to Caribbean bauxite mining and global environmental issues;
- the co-edited volume Handbook of Mobilities (Routledge, 2013), a definitive guide to the interdisciplinary field of mobilities research;
- and with Hana Iverson a co-edited special issue of Leonardo Electronic Almanac and forthcoming book on Mobile Art: Network Culture and the Aesthetics of Placemaking, based on the mobile art exhibit LA Re.Play that they co-curated in Los Angeles in association with the College Arts Association Conference in February 2012.
