Published January 25, 2012
by iris_author
The Cynical Citizen: Teasing the Inside of the Settler State
Nathan Prier
PhD Candidate, Geography
York University
January 26
749 York Research Tower
1:30 – 3 pm
The Cynical Citizen: Teasing the Inside of the Settler State
This is a set of reflections on emergent anti-colonial migrant justice organizing in Toronto and questions on “the political” and the insides and outsides of “citizenship”. In the struggle for “Status for All”, a strategy to make the city substantially accessible in all manners to non-status migrants and refugees, the political dimensions of struggle have been framed not as “begging for recognition” but as a direct confrontation of Canada’s colonial state structure. In this framework, difficult questions around what “access without fear” means in terms of validating the state’s role as authority over the powers of life and death have been wrestled with in complex, if unsettled, ways. In the formation of an autonomous politics focused precisely on challenging state documentation and its consequences for communities, language to clearly define one’s subject position with regards to the “recognition of the state” is sometimes lacking. Borrowing from positions developed by Antonio Negri and Judith Butler, this research explores some of the entanglements of what I am tentatively calling “cynical citizenship”.
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