Oppositional spaces: Contesting the boundary of the democratic citizen

Oppositional Spaces: Contesting the Boundary of the Democratic Citizen examines contemporary liberal democratic notions of citizenship situated within the processes of late capital globalization. It approaches the subject with a spatial materialist framework and argues that contemporary concepts of citizenship are influenced by notions of “cultural difference” and “otherness.” It shows how cultural difference has eclipsed and displaced critical interrogations of social, class and political rights based citizenship practices.

Through a material spatialization of the concept of cultural difference, this work argues how social injuries, which are caused through various states of exploitation and oppression based on the social relations of class, race and gendered practices of citizenship production, have been misrepresented.

It also proposes that current descriptions of globalization (i.e. the transnational, multicultural, or cosmopolitan) and citizenship must be tempered and re-evaluated in light of how “cultural difference” has come to shift the boundaries marked by practices of inclusion and exclusion which are at the foundation of the concept of citizenship.

The first chapter provides a theoretical overview of recent theories of citizenship that are specifically concerned with the possibility of a postnational or transnational concept of citizenship. The second chapter focuses on the debate of multiculturalism in the Canadian context and how it relates to current citizenship practices in Canada. Chapter two examines how the practice of multiculturalism in Canada has produced the ‘nation-space’ in which we live. The third chapter further complicates the notion of the “multicultural” citizen by examining the historical and spatial locality of the citizen. It argues that a practice and discourse of citizenship exists within the simultaneous context of migration, location, and colonial longing. It looks at the way in which these specific practices have been played out historically and spatially in Victoria, B.C. The fourth chapter investigates how the question of cultural difference, rather than becoming an inclusionary system for citizenship, actually further acts to limit and exclude citizenship. It investigates the discursive formation of what feminist scholars have understood to be the potential for a new form of citizenship practice where a “universalist” feminist theory of citizenship is being articulated against and in direct contestation with the notion of cultural difference. The fifth chapter turns to recent discussions regarding the terms of democracy and its impact on contemporary notions of citizen. By arguing that a geo-global political theorization is needed in order to understand the immense nature of “globalization” on the terms of democracy, this chapter presents an alternative to the dislocation of the political, as approached by radical democratic theorists who propose a “third way” in response to the experience of new social movements in liberal capitalist democracies. The contemporary political environment is presented as demanding a locational and material grounding, which is based upon a deconstructive thought, so that the social relations that structure the practices of citizenship production can be revealed.