Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil

Princeton University Press, 2008 
• 416 pages, 11 halftones, 6 line figures, and 5 tables

Insurgent citizenships have arisen in cities around the world. This book examines the insurgence of democratic citizenship in the urban peripheries of São Paulo, Brazil, its entanglement with entrenched systems of inequality, and its contradiction in violence and misrule of law under political democracy. 

Part 1 develops a framework to consider this unsettling of citizenship. Part 2 establishes the historical foundations of Brazil’s entrenched regime of citizenship and accounts for the persistence of its inequalities. For two centuries, Brazilians have practiced a type of citizenship all too common among nation-states—one that is universally inclusive in national membership and yet massively inegalitarian in distributing rights and legalizing social differences. The analysis compares the development of French, American, and Brazilian citizenships, especially during the 19th century, in terms of the incorporation of those resident populations considered most problematic for national membership – namely, Indians, slaves, freeborn and freed Blacks, Jews, and immigrants. For Brazil, it emphasizes the significance of restricted and differentiated distributions among national citizens of political rights, land ownership, and labor rights, in the context of urban segregation. 

Part 3 focuses on the insurgence of new citizenship in the urban peripheries of São Paulo since the 1970s. It shows that an insurgent citizenship developed not primarily through struggles of labor but through those of the city – particularly illegal residence, house building, and land conflict. Yet precisely as Brazilians democratized urban space and achieved political democracy, violence, injustice, and impunity increased dramatically.

Part 4 considers these disjunctions. Based on comparative, ethnographic, and historical research, the book investigates why the insurgent and the entrenched remain dangerously conjoined as new kinds of citizens expand democracy even as new forms of violence and exclusion erode it. 

Rather than view this paradox as evidence of democratic failure and urban chaos, Insurgent Citizenship argues that contradictory realizations of citizenship characterize all democracies – emerging and established. Focusing on processes of city-and-citizen making now prevalent globally, it develops new approaches for understanding the contemporary course of democratic citizenship in societies of vastly different cultures and histories.

“James Holston has written a landmark book, . . . an explosive history of modern citizenship. The implications of his work provide fresh insights in Brazilian democracy and its limitations—and suggest ways in which, in fact, Brazil may not be so unique in a world of legalized privileges and legitimated inequalities. A monumental achievement of engaged scholarship.”

—Jeremy Adelman, author of Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic

 “Holston’s topic in this impressive study on unequal citizenship is the contrast between Brazil’s formal, legal equality and the reality that it is a society founded on civic and juridical inequalities. . . . Holston does not claim that insurgent citizenship will bring long lasting triumphs or permanently change Brazilian society, merely that it has that potential.”

—J. M. Rosenthal, Choice

“One of the best books I’ve ever read on Brazil or on citizenship.”

—Margaret Keck, Johns Hopkins University

“This magnificent, richly detailed study . . . offers a provocative view of what democracy and rights mean for diminishing [legal and social] inequalities.”

—Sally Engle Merry, New York University

Book Prizes:

The Roberto Reis Book Prize, Brazilian Studies Association, 2010

The Leeds Honor Book, American Anthropological Association, Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology, 2009

Best Book on Brazil in English, Latin American Studies Association, Brazil Section, 2009