ABSTRACT

There are various ways of defining citizenship and, as we have witnessed in the interdisciplinary field of citizenship studies, each falls short of a satisfactory clarity or comprehensiveness. Whether citizenship is defined as membership, status, practice, or even performance, it carries an already assumed conception of politics, culture, spatiality, temporality, and sociality. To say, for example, that ‘citizenship is membership of the nation-state’ assumes so much and leaves so much out that it becomes an analytically pointless statement. Ironically, it is also the most common definition offered today. Similarly, to say that ‘citizenship is performance’ leaves as much unsaid as said about the way in which it comes into being and functions.