Introduction: performing citizenship and enacting exclusion on Africa's Indian Ocean littoral

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Periodical article

Title:	Introduction: performing citizenship and enacting exclusion on Africa's Indian Ocean littoral
Authors:	Becker, Felicitas Cabrita, Joel
Year:	2014
Periodical:	The Journal of African History (ISSN 0021-8537)
Volume:	55
Issue:	2
Pages:	161-171
Language:	English
Geographic terms:	East Africa Southern Africa
Subjects:	Indian Ocean society citizenship identity
External link:	https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853714000139
Abstract:	The Indian Ocean is frequently depicted as a sphere of seamless connectivity, characterized by fluid and wide-ranging exchanges between traders, sea-farers, clerics, intellectuals, and authors. The present authors seek to nuance this depiction by highlighting the importance of specific, place-bound social concerns that tempered these cosmopolitan performances of citizenship with more exclusionary dynamics. They emphasize the importance of context, contingency, and circumstance in shaping and breaking new forms and practices of citizenship and its twin - exclusionary politics - on Africa's Indian Ocean littoral. The article is an introduction to a collection of articles which derive from a workshop in Cambridge in 2012, on 'Languages of citizenship in Africa and the Indian Ocean.' Notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract]