Busbridge, Rachel

Freie Universität Berlin
11 Urr 2016 -tik 11 Abe 2016 -ra
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During my stay at IISL, I have been working on completing my book, Politics of recognition and postcolonial citizenship: Rethinking the nation, due to be published in mid-2017 as part of Routledge’s ‘Postcolonial Politics’ series. In this book, I explore the ways in which nation functions as a productive but often ambivalent vocabulary and resource in struggles for the recognition of difference, primarily because of the ways in which it demarcates an important dimension of the experience of inequality and injustice in multicultural societies – that is, the hegemonic structures of national belonging that deem some groups more naturally or legitimately ‘national’ than others. Paying attention to the ways in which claims for the recognition of difference are often entangled with demands to revise the purview of the imagined national, the book argues, points us towards practices of citizenship I call postcolonial, insofar as they seek to unsettle the bounds of universality and particularity in the national context and are connected in important ways to the reconfiguration of ‘the West’ as an imaginative category.

I am exceedingly grateful for the opportunity to complete my book here at the IISL –not only is Oñati a wonderful place to work (and work I have done!) but it has been an absolute pleasure to meet staff, students and other visiting scholars.
After two months, I am leaving with a manuscript in my hand and an address book of new friends.