Citizenship in Motion

South African and Japanese scholars in conversation

edited by Itsuhiro Hazama, Kiyoshi Umeya, Francis B. Nyamnjoh

Anthropological reflections on citizenship focus on themes such as
politics, ethnicity and state management. Present day scholarship on
citizenship tends to problematise, unsettle and contest often taken-for-
granted conventional connotations and associations of citizenship with
imagined culturally bounded political communities of rigidly controlled
borders.

This book, the result of two years of research conducted by
South African and Japanese scholars within the framework of a bilateral
project on citizenship in the 21st century, contributes to such ongoing
efforts at rethinking citizenship globally, and as informed by
experiences in Africa and Japan in particular. Central to the essays in
this book is the concept of flexible citizenship, predicated on a
recognition of the histories of mobility of people and cultures, and of
the shaping and reshaping of places and spaces, and ideas of being and
belonging in the process.

The book elucidates the contingency of
political membership, relationship between everyday practices and
political membership, and how citizenship is the mechanism for claiming
and denying rights to various political communities. ‘Self’ requires
‘others’ to construct itself, a reality that is subject to renegotiation
as one continues to encounter others in a world characterised by myriad
forms of interconnecting mobilities, both global and local. Citizenship
is thus to be understood within a complex of power relationships that
include ones formed by laws and economic regimes on a local scale and
beyond. Citizenship in Africa, Japan and, indeed, everywhere is best
explored productively as lying between the open-ended possibilities and
tensions interconnecting the global and local.

£57.00

About the editors

Itsuhiro Hazama

Itsuhiro Hazama is Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Nagasaki, Japan.

Kiyoshi Umeya

Kiyoshi Umeya is a graduate of Keio University (BA, MA) and Hitotsubashi University (PhD), Professor of Social Anthropology at the Graduate School for Intercultural Studies at Kobe University and Visiting Professor at the University of Cape Town (2019-2020). He has carried out fieldwork among the Jopadhola in Eastern Uganda extensively since 1997 as Research Fellow at Makerere University.

Francis B. Nyamnjoh

Francis B. Nyamnjoh joined the University of Cape Town in August 2009 as Professor of Social Anthropology from the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), Dakar, Senegal, where he served as Head of Publications from July 2003 to July 2009. He has taught sociology, anthropology and communication studies at universities in Cameroon and Botswana, and has researched and written extensively on Cameroon and Botswana. In October 2012 he received a University of Cape Town Excellence Award for “Exceptional Contribution as a Professor in the Faculty of Humanities”. He is recipient of the “ASU African Hero 2013” annual award by the African Students Union, Ohio University, USA. He is: a B1 rated Professor and Researcher by the South African National Research Foundation (NRF); a Fellow of the Cameroon Academy of Science since August 2011; a fellow of the African Academy of Science since December 2014; a fellow of the Academy of Science of South Africa since 2016; and Chair of the Editorial Board of the South African Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) Press since January 2011. His scholarly books include: Africa’s Media, Democracy and the Politics of Belonging (2005); Insiders and Outsiders: Citizenship and Xenophobia in Contemporary Southern Africa (2006); “C’est l’homme qui fait l’homme”: Cul-de-Sac Ubuntu-ism in Côte d’Ivoire (2015); and #RhodesMustFall: Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism in South Africa (2016).

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