Revolutionary Citizenship Research Articles

Egalitarian Lives and Violence

Abstract Since independence in 1975, Mozambique has experimented with society-state relations, including an Afro-socialist revolutionary transformation followed by a multi-party democracy with nominal state functions, such as policing. Building on fieldwork, this article analyzes the genealogy and practices of community policing, arguing that while its emergence reflects a global transformation of state apparatuses reliant on securitization, this transition is still in progress. Community policing practices interconnect with both (petty and organized) crime and nominally past experiments in revolutionary citizenship in socialist Mozambique, including the promises of egalitarian life that linger on in political cosmology and memory. Mozambican community policing thus exhibits the core characteristics of a fluid and ‘predatory-protective’ security assemblage, while simultaneously harboring the potential for instantiating forms of egalitarian life beyond hierarchical state ordering.

A Little Bit of Magic: Nitza Villapol, the Cuban Diet, and the Socialist State, 1959–1983

This paper examines Nitza Villapol’s cookbooks, cooking show, and magazine columns as windows into how the political and economic policies of the revolutionary government affected the daily lives of average Cubans. By providing recipes and educational content about cooking and nutrition, Villapol played a crucial role as a mediator between state and citizenry. In the process, she taught generations of Cuban audiences how to reconcile their lived realities with the ideological imperatives of revolutionary citizenship, which included upholding nationalist ideals by combatting imperialism through an ethos of creativity and thriftiness in the kitchen. Comparative analysis of the 1960 and 1980 editions of Cocina al minuto illustrates the consequences that austerity and dependence on the Soviet bloc had on the options available to Cuban consumers, in terms of both goods and foodstuffs into the late 1970s, a period remembered for its relative abundance. Nitza Villapol helped Cuban women to navigate these consequences, offering solutions to the shortcomings of state economic policies and transmitting state values with regard to how home cooks should understand and experience those shortcomings.

Influence of American and French Constitutional Ideas on the Institution of Modern Citizenship

“Citizenship” is a legal term. Citizenship means a person’s belonging to any state and implies the presence of mutual obligations of a person and a state. Citizenship is a separate institution of law. The modern form of citizenship is different from those that we re before. So it was precise because of the experience present, thanks to the evolution of citizenship. In this article, the formation and development of citizenship will be considered on the example of the revolutionary citizenship of France and America.

Making revolution everyday: quotidian performance and utopian imagination in Egypt's streets and squares

ABSTRACTAfter Egypt's 2011 uprising was quashed, independent dramatists worked to revive utopian revolutionary communities through public performance. This essay analyzes the arts festival Art is an Open Square (2012), and a clown show for refugees by Cairo's Red Tomato troupe (2014), as attempts at everyday utopia. When public activism was banned, these performances in streets and squares adapted quotidian repertoires of festivity and hospitality to stage heterogeneous publics. Analyzing the performances as attempts at activating the utopian within the quotidian, I evaluate the efficacy of such minor scenarios of revolutionary citizenship, devised to sustain hope in oppressive times.

Da Constituição de Cádis à Constituição Federal de 1988: A Conquista da Cidadania Índigena no Brasil

O artigo tem como objetivo apontar um mecanismo para solução dos conflitos entre direitos fundamentais ou princípios constitucionais, mais especificamente do conflito entre a proteção das manifestações culturais imateriais de religiões de matriz africana, que utilizam animais de forma sacrificial, e a proteção do meio ambiente ecologicamente equilibrado, com ênfase na proteção da fauna. Os direitos fundamentais são estudados em sua gênese teórica e evolução legislativa, até a perspectiva atual do tratamento constitucional do tema. Ao final é oferecida uma técnica, que tenciona restringir os princípios de forma a possibilitar a permanência e realização de ambos, garantindo a efetividade constitucional.

The Other Green Revolution: Land Epistemologies and the Mexican Revolutionary State

AbstractThis paper explores the development of Mexican Revolutionary land epistemologies in the years following the global Great Depression. Demonstrating how ideas about agrarian life informed national development efforts across multiple spheres, including public education, state‐sponsored media, and governmental conservation projects, it argues that human–nature relations were constitutive of state visions of Revolutionary citizenship. Scholarly work interrogating the role of scientific knowledge in land politics has focused on the ways that territorial dispossessions are routed through expert truth claims; this study deviates from that work by asking how resource conflicts can also produce new knowledge to support progressive platforms for change.

Female Workers, Political Mobilization, and the Meaning of Revolutionary Citizenship in Beijing, 1948–1950

After entering Beijing in January 1949, the Communist Party immediately sent cadres to local factories in order to mobilize female industrial workers into a women’s movement and to establish the idea of “revolutionary citizenship.” The Party wished to nurture this idea in both the local political arena and in women’s lives inside and outside the factories. This article demonstrates that a host of factors defined revolutionary citizenship, including party directives, choices in revolutionary strategy, cadres’ interpretations of directives and their own initiatives, and workers’ reactions to mobilization. It was in this complex mix of mobilization, women’s strategies to protect and advance their own interests, and the politics of group representation in the revolution, that female workers came to understand the meaning and impact of revolutionary citizenship and the shape of labor-state relations in the emerging socialist China.

Constructing a New Bolivian Society: Public Health Reforms and the Consolidation of the Bolivian National Revolution

CONSTRUCTING A NEW BOLIVIAN SOCIETY: PUBLIC HEALTH REFORMS AND THE CONSOLIDATION OF THE BOLIVIAN NATIONAL REVOLUTION Nicole Pacino University of Alabama in Huntsville On January 5, 1956 Bolivia’s President, Vı́ctor Paz Estenssoro, addressed the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario’s (MNR) seventh annual national convention. While he celebrated the 1952 National Revolution ’s successes, focusing mainly on accomplishments in agrarian reform and nationalization of the country’s tin mining industry, he also warned that “enemies of the revolution” conspired against the MNR at every turn. For this reason, he claimed revolutionary policies for enhanced social welfare and greater economic prosperity were necessary to safeguard these triumphs. Protecting the revolution’s achievements meant moving beyond its first phase, which Paz explained addressed Bolivia’s severest economic inequalities. For the revolution’s longevity and increased national wellbeing , he argued it was time to advance to a new “stage of revolutionary construction.”1 As Paz explained, this “construction of a new Bolivian society” required “new fundamental labor” that would highlight the central concern of any democratic regime: a concern for mankind.2 This idea represented what Paz commonly called human capital, a notion that implicitly associated economic productivity, Bolivian workers, and national wellbeing with revolutionary citizenship.3 Healthy bodies were a prerequisite for this new form of citizenship, and the MNR’s concern for individual Bolivians represented their desire to create ideal citizens that were sanitary, educated, economically productive, and culturally Hispanic. By linking the MNR’s revolution to democratic politics through a concern for ordinary Bolivians, Paz voiced the opinion that individuals could be improved through state policies. To create better Bolivian citizens, Paz outlined a trifold plan: social change, education, and sanitary reform.4 In this way, he merged social inequality and health care with the MNR’s political and economic agenda and suggested Bolivians would become revolutionary citizens by reforming individual practices. When Paz identified “sanitary politics” as one of the three main targets of reform in his January 1956 speech, he made public health campaigns a revolutionary priority. These sanitation reforms focused on maternal and infant health, vaccination against disease, and malaria eradication; they were, in essence, about changing people’s lifestyles, controlling bodies, and preventing the spread of disease in order to make Bolivia more economically prosperous and culturally homogeneous. Improvements to national health, he claimed, would be achieved in two aspects: curative and C 2013 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 25 The Latin Americanist, December 2013 preventative. The curative component suggested the healing of already existing maladies. In this instance, the MNR’s curative policy focused on expanding rural maternal and infant health programs. Conversely, the preventative component, or what he also termed “prophylaxis,” implied protection against dormant diseases that could infect the national body. This preventative aspect focused on vaccination campaigns and what Paz called “one of the most ambitious projects”: malaria eradication.5 While scholars have thoroughly examined the MNR’s social revolution through its political and economic reforms, particularly nationalization of the mining industry, agrarian reform, and universal suffrage, the cultural politics of the revolutionary era have received little attention. Cultural politics, or how definitions of culture are mapped onto ideas of national identity and citizenship, are essential components of post-revolutionary state building projects.6 Paz’s phase of revolutionary construction referred to projects of state and nation building, forging a unified national identity, and expanding a public health infrastructure. In this way, he linked the revolution’s cultural politics to the MNR’s desire to both institutionalize (agree upon and enact reforms) and consolidate (generate public support) the National Revolution.7 Public health provides a unique lens for examining post-revolutionary cultural politics because healthy citizens and workers were the foundation of the MNR’s political and economic reforms. As Hubert Navarro, the MNR’s Director of Biostatistics, explained, “human capital is the most valuable and irreplaceable treasure a nation possesses, [therefore] the state has the primordial obligation to care for its citizens’ health.”8 Referring to Bolivians as human capital placed individuals, and their health, at the center of national discussions of political unification and economic development . Additionally, highlighting the state’s obligation to protect its...

The Naked Body of Alia: Gender, Citizenship, and the Egyptian Body Politic

In November 2011, 20-year-old Egyptian blogger Alia al-Mahdy posted a nude picture of herself on her blog. The photograph received 1.5 million hits within a week of its posting and drew condemnations from conservatives and liberals alike in the critical period leading up to the deeply polarized first post-Mubarak parliamentary election. How was Alia’s nudity framed in mainstream public discourse and by Alia herself? Drawing on a corpus of primary sources, 60 articles from mostly Egyptian and Arab newspapers, this article argues that the public controversy transcends contentious media representations of women to reach into the heart of Egyptian revolutionary citizenship. While mainstream Egyptian and Arab media discourse framed Alia’s nudity as “merely cultural” and “Westernized,” Alia described it as an artistic social commentary. These rhetorical frames reveal the reconfiguration of political dissent—its forms, channels, and actors—and the tensions around national identity that animate the contemporary Arab public sphere.

The Citizenship Revolution: Politics and the Creation of the American Union, 1774-1804. By Douglas Bradburn. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009. xiv, 415 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-8139-2801-2.)

This book and several others like it written over the last decade fall into the category of niche histories: they explore a specific subject in great depth and simultaneously use this detailed information to tie together and explain an entire period. Joanne Freeman's Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (2002) is a good example of this approach. Although the authors of niche histories usually overestimate the importance of their subject in the grand scheme of things, they often provide valuable detail and insightful perspective. That is certainly the case with Douglas Bradburn's The Citizenship Revolution. Broadly speaking, Bradburn focuses on two issues—how American colonial subjecthood morphed into revolutionary citizenship and how national citizenship briefly rose during the War for Independence, lapsed under the weak Articles of Confederation, rebounded during the debate over the ratification of the new Constitution, solidified during Federalist dominance in the 1790s, only to be replaced by state citizenship after the election of 1800, which prevailed until the Civil War. Between the first Continental Congress and the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, Bradburn states, “assertions of rights and popular sovereignty in the midst of war and state creation had created citizens from subjects, while necessity and desire had crafted a Union from a collection of colonies” (p. 273). Throughout the 1790s, Federalists used various domestic and international crises to enact laws that, coupled with a national common law interpreted by a friendly federal judiciary, benefited their vision of “a homogeneous citizenry united against foreign ideas, disaffected immigrants, and sectional ambition” (p. 274). Federalist policies, particularly under the John Adams administration, stimulated a loose opposition coalition of planters, small farmers, urban ethnic groups, artisans, and the commercial class in the middle states. After the election of 1800, victorious Jeffersonians implemented their vision of a highly decentralized, loosely connected union of states where citizenship remained the problem and responsibility of the individual states. The federal government would retain its powers, but these were limited and defined in the Constitution to those objects reflecting international and “mutual” relations. (p. 281)

Citizenship, Ethnicity, Gender, and Mobilization

Citizenship, Ethnicity, Gender, and Mobilization María Teresa Fernández Aceves (bio) Jocelyn Olcott . Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. ix + 337 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8223-3653-7 (cl); 0-8223-3665-0 (pb). Shannon Speed, R. Aída Hernández Castillo, and Lynn M. Stephen, eds. Dissident Women: Gender and Cultural Politics in Chiapas. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. xxiv + 280 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-0-292-71417 (cl); 978-292-714440-3 (pb). Susan Berger . Guatemaltecas: The Women's Movement, 1986–2003. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. 157 pp. ISBN 0-292-70944-7 (cl); 0-292-71253-7 (pb). Elaine Carey . Plaza of Sacrifices: Gender, Power, and Terror in 1968 Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. xvii + 254 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8263-3544-6 (cl); 0-8263-3545-4 (pb). The recent expansion of scholarship on women's mobilization in Mexico and Latin America has revealed a neglected history of female activism, as it has incorporated a gender perspective and new ways of thinking about politics, social movements, social and political change, citizenship, feminism, ethnicity, the rise and fall of the Corporatist State, and how neoliberal policies and globalization have been challenged and resisted. The four works under review tackle complex relations among class, gender, identity, ethnicity, generation, and state policies in the history of Latin American politics. Studies of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917) and the postrevolutionary process of state formation (1917–1940) have shown that popular sectors gained political voice and space through the process and influenced the policies and forms of the new state, while at the same time being integrated into it within new frameworks of domination. Analyzing mainly the roles of peasants and workers, this literature has not truly examined women's politics in the Mexican Revolution, a topic that new scholarship addresses. Jocelyn Olcott's Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico exemplifies this growing historiography. Olcott examines women's political involvement after the Mexican Revolution of 1910 by combining rich [End Page 162] detailed archival information with sophisticated theoretical discussion about citizenship, politics, power, negotiation, and everyday life. Olcott gives especial attention to what happened with organized progressive and radical women during the rise and development of Cardenismo (1928–1940) in three different regions—La Comarca Lagunera, Michoacán, and Yucatán—where the Communist Party organized peasant and labor women's leagues. Olcott refers to Cardenismo as a "revolutionary" regime, with traditional and paternalist political and gender policies that promoted socialist education, land redistribution, and labor reform by recognizing the collective rights of disenfranchised groups—peasants, workers, and women. The national Cardenista project flourished during the pinnacle of Mexico's Popular Front. Olcott contextualizes and contrasts these cases with the expansion of women's movements and the campaigns for female suffrage in Mexico during the 1910s and 1930s. She contends that progressive and radical women became central actors in the mobilizations of the 1930s and in the consolidation of postrevolutionary Mexico because they sought "to make the revolution meaningful for ordinary Mexicans" by claiming revolutionary citizenship (3). Olcott particularly opens up scholarly debates on the meaning and significance of citizenship by reconstructing local cases and contrasting this data with theoretical discussions. She points out that between 1917 and 1934, the characteristics of revolutionary citizenship experienced important transformations and setbacks and two questions dominated the meanings and qualifications for citizenship: "what is the proper balance between the rights and the obligations of citizenship, and to what extent is citizenship a status versus a practice" (4). This book argues that men and women "experienced revolutionary citizenship as contingent, inhabited, and gendered" in accordance with local, regional, and national processes and transformations (6). Olcott argues that Mexican activists used three contrasting forms of citizenship—a liberal rhetoric of suffrage, traditional practices of patronage, and revolutionary promises of popular mobilization—to obtain certain benefits. Olcott affirms that Mexican women's mobilization followed patterns similar to the regional processes of revolutionary state formation. Incipient feminist associations and congresses also debated how to define citizenship from a gender perspective: "Should they strive to create a place for the citizen-mother, or should they highlight women's...

Educational Policy and the Socialist Imagination: Revolutionary Citizenship as a Pedagogy of Resistance

This article mounts a critique of neoliberal policy reforms from a Marxist perspective. Offering a spirited challenge to North American educators who see little if any merit in Marxist educational analysis, the authors maintain that a Marxist analysis of education worldwide is more urgent today than at any other time. The central argument is that Marxist analysis offers a powerful means of understanding and transforming the social injustices generic to neoliberal educational reform efforts in particular and capitalist education in general. The article sets the groundwork for a comprehensive approach to educational reform that directly challenges the value form of labor and posits a new model of what the authors call "revolutionary citizenship."

The Globalization of Capitalism and the New Imperialism: Notes Towards a Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy1

1Sections of this essay has appeared in the following journals: McLaren, P. & Farahmandpur, R. (2001). Educational Policy and the Socialist Imagination: Revolutionary Citizenship as a Pedagogy of Resistance; Educational Policy, 15(3), 343‐378; McLaren, P. & Farahmandpur, R (2001). Teaching against Globalization and the New Imperialism: Towards a Revolutionary Pedagogy; Journal of Teacher Education, 52(2), 136‐150; McLaren, P. & Farahmandpur, R (2001). Class, Cultism, and Multiculturalism: A Notebook on Forging a Revolutionary Multiculturalism. Multicultural Education, 8(3), 2‐14; McLaren, P. & Farahmandpur, R (2000). Reconsidering Marx in Post‐Marxist Times: A Requiem for Postmodernism?; Educational Researcher, 25(3), 25‐33; and McLaren, P. & Farahmandpur, R. (in press). Freire, Marx, and the New Imperialism: Toward a Revolutionary Praxis, In J. J. Slater (Ed), The Freirean Legacy: Educating for Social Justice. Peter Lang.