On the Subject of Citizenship

Suren Pillay is Associate Professor and Senior Researcher at the DST-NRF Flagship in African Humanities, at the Center for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa.

In any studies of contemporary Africa and indeed the postcolonial world, Mahmood Mamdani’s empirically grounded and theoretically illuminating scholarship occupies a central place. It is therefore inevitable for scholars to visit and revisit Mamdani’s work as they reflect on current and pertinent issues of how colonialists ruled Africa, what social orders were laid out, how violence was deployed, how knowledge was colonized, and how the colonial impinged on the postcolonial. I have nothing but praise for this volume that is focused on Mamdani’s ever relevant scholarship. Suren Pillay must be commended for assembling a stellar group of scholars to reflect on Mamdani’s work in the advancement of scholarship on Africa in particular and the postcolonial world in general.

• Introduction: On the Subject of Citizenship—Theorizing Postcolonial Predicaments with Mahmood Mamdani Suren Pillay1. Decolonizing the World: On Mamdani’s Thought (Kuan-Hsing Chen)2. Of Citizen(s) and Subject(s): Mamdani on Research, Methods, and Commitments in Postcolonial Africa (Siba N’Zatioula Grovogui)3. Thinking with Citizen and Subject (Talal Asad)4. Beyond the Custom/Market Dichotomy: Women’s Rights to Land and the Challenge of the Commons (Nivedita Menon)5. Empire in the Era of DIY Colonialism: Barbarism or Slavery in the (Post)Colonial Context? (Abdelwahab El-Affendi)6. The Contemporary Challenge of Citizenship in Ethiopia and the Role of Empire in the Making of Subject Populations (Namhla Thando Matshanda)7. Political Identity and Postcolonial Democracy (Karuna Mantena)8. Colonial Legacies of Ethnicized Violence, Gendered Subjectivity, and Feminist Emancipatory Politics (Lyn Ossome)9. The Bifurcated Society: Citizen and Subject in Contemporary South Africa (Steven Friedman)10. Predicaments of the Colonized: Being Coloured, Indian, and Free after Apartheid (Suren Pillay)11. The Legacy of Bandung (Partha Chatterjee)12. Looking Back, Looking Forward (Mahmood Mamdani)Index