Description: This work starts with a substantial historical account of the different ways that freedom, race and gender were intertwined in Jamaica and Haiti after the end of slavery. Newly free men and women were rebound into a racialized class order with acceptable and unacceptable forms of masculinity and femininity. Sheller traces these histories of racialized and sexualized forms of freedom to the present.
Review Quotes: "Citizenship from Below is a sophisticated, challenging, and ambitious book.... Sheller's book is a masterful demonstration of the multidirectional, complicated, and ongoing process by which citizenship is constructed, appropriated, defined, and inhabited.... This book will be important and illuminating reading for historians of the Caribbean, of sex and gender, of citizenship, broadly conceived. It is indispensible reading for scholars interested in the fraught process of citizenship after slave emancipation, in particular."--Naomi J. Andrews, Itinerario
"Sheller joins this conversation on sexuality and social justice, with Citizenship from Below, which will be a useful tool in such dialogues--as well as in the hands of those 'from below.'"--A. Lynn Bolles, Women's Review of Books "[A] grounded, yet expansive contribution to the study of sexuality, citizenship and post-slavery societies."--Kate Houlden, Anthurium "[A]n extremely forceful and timely argument. . . . For Sheller, the exercise of sexual agency, while it may not necessarily transform the institutions through which inequalities have historically been structured, 'may enable some forms of maneuver, negotiation, and exchange' (p. 260). It is by training this lens on nineteenth-century Jamaica and Haiti that Sheller most profoundly complexifies traditional political histories of slavery, freedom, and citizenship. I believe this theoretical reframing is the most critical contribution of Citizenship from Below." --Deborah A. Thomas, New West Indian Guide "A ground-breaking interdisciplinary achievement and contribution to the theory of freedom."--Aija Lulle, Anthropological Notebooks