The legacy of Being Political

Abstract

ABSTRACT 2022 marks the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Engin F. Isin’s Being Political: Genealogies of Citizenship, a text which, through its influence on a generation of scholars, has become a, if not the, key text in the field of critical studies of citizenship. By drawing on theoretical traditions and methodologies beyond the usual purview of the field, as well as those subsisting on its margins, Being Political calls into question the nature of citizenship studies, challenging many of the assumptions and fundamental categories and definitions which had come to characterize and delimit the field. The occasion of the twentieth anniversary of Being Political affords us the opportunity to engage with its legacy. The passing of 20 years provides sufficient distance from the time of publication to a) contextualize Being Political – to approach the text as responding to, and working through and against a certain historical, geopolitical and academic context, and identify the ways in which the text continues to respond to changing contexts and questions; b) determine the impact of Being Political, how it has been received within the field of citizenship studies and transformed by various interpretations, and how these interpretations have influenced the direction of citizenship studies; and c) understand Being Political in relation to Isin’s larger project of thinking citizenship and the political, something that he signals in the wake of the book’s publication, but the full meaning of which would not have been available even to him at the time of publication. In other words, this distance allows for the sort of reflection that by carefully engaging with the text itself, contextualizing it and putting it into conversation with other academic traditions, fields, questions and the larger trajectory of Isin’s work, permits us to not only clarify and complicate the text and its interpretations but also to attend to some of the traps that accompany the reception of influential texts.