Gidley, Ben. 2003. Citizenship and belonging : East London Jewish radicals. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]

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Abstract or Description

This thesis is about citizenship and belonging: how citizenship has
articulated with or against different forms, practices and spaces of belonging.
It examines Jewish East London in the period from 1903 to the end of the
First World War and is based on original archival research. It argues that this
period saw the emergence of a new form of racialized biopolitical citizenship,
which was normalized in the "state of emergency" that was the war. This
citizenship was framed by the imperial context, was based on singular
1e1it her/or" identities and was defined against the figure of alien. The thesis
also argues that, in the same period, an alternative space of political
belonging existed in East London, based on different forms of political
rationality and threaded through with multiple loyalties and identifications,
that challenged the either/or logic of the nation-state. Consequently, Jewish
radicals who operated in this alternative public sphere developed
understandings of political belonging which cut against the grain of the
nation-state, and thus offer resources for thinking about citizenship today.
The thesis seeks to unsettle some of the conventional languages of
citizenship and political belonging by historicizing them: by concentrating on
the specific way in which modern citizenship emerged in imperial Britain, and
on the material processes by which this citizenship was policed and mapped.
The thesis examines a series of different spaces and scales of political
belonging. It attempts to keep in focus regimes of visibility, subjectification
and governmentality that produce these spaces and the practices of
belonging and cultural traditions that wove through them.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Additional Information:	Supervisors: Victor Seidler, Michael Keith
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Sociology
Date:	2003
Item ID:	11852
Date Deposited:	25 Jun 2015 07:38
Last Modified:	08 Sep 2022 09:11
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/11852

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