The agendas of cultural citizenship: a political-theoretical exercise

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Notes

1. Some relevant texts in cultural policy are Mercer (2002), Raad voor Cultuur (2007a, 2007b); in migration studies Rosaldo (1994, 1997), Ong (1996), Tan (2005), and Andrew et al. (2005); in arts education Van der Kamp (2003). More generally in cultural studies and in sociological studies of globalisation, Delanty (2000, 2007), Stevenson (2003), Miller (2007).

2. We want to add that this introduction expresses our own opinions, not necessarily those of the other contributors.

3. One might approach these levels of normativity through the distinction between the ontic and ontological levels of politics, that is, the difference between the many political practices a society harbours and the political as a principle of the very institution of society. This Heideggerian idiom is taken up by e.g. Chantal Mouffe (2005, esp. chapter 2). When we speak of the normative political question, we locate it on the ontological level where ‘the political’ makes possible what (and who) will come into social existence.

4. For the latter see Weeks (1998), Isin and Wood (1999), Richardson and Turner (2001), Lister (2003), who discuss the concept of ‘sexual citizenship’.

5. Kalberg (1993) is a further example.

6. We could add a related strand of discussion, which is the novel reception and further elaboration of the philosophy of recognition. Axel Honneth (1992, English translation 1996) is the seminal text here, revisiting in particular the Hegelian approach of social conflict. The normative stakes of this type of theory in many ways resemble Young's. We cannot discuss here this branch of social philosophy, which itself has generated a vast debate.

7. For an overview of the many angles, see Stevenson (2003), the acclaimed first initiative to a systematic discussion of the idea of cultural citizenship.

8. See for instance Pakulski (1997). We should add that Kymlicka's later title from 2001 has joined his 1995 book in the ensuing debates.

9. To avoid misunderstandings, we do not refer here to the ‘republican’ political ideology embraced by states like France, but to the political-theoretical tradition of republicanism or civic humanism. This obviously is a strained reference. As far as Jean-Jacques Rousseau is one of this tradition's protagonists, he reveals one problem of this strand of political thinking for any theory of cultural citizenship. He thought that politics' task was to bring the citizen back into a beneficial ‘wholeness’ – he called the citizen a fractional number who finds his denominator but in the whole of the citizens (Rousseau 1991, pp. 39–40). Such a communitarian detour, however, is a gratuitous impairment of republican thought. We may say that ‘cultural citizenship’ precisely assumes the citizen to be a ‘fractional number’: it targets the ideas of a civic commonality, assuming it a hegemonic, disciplining and excluding one, and of the classic citizen, assuming it a figure not beyond but affected by hybrid subjectivities. The concept deserves republican-inspired inquiries in deviation from communitarian ones. Republicanism has historically been a vital alternative to liberalism – which in the Taylor-Kymlicka kind, deplorably, makes advances only to communitarianism.