Citizenship from Below: Erotic agency and Caribbean freedom by Mimi Sheller (review)

The condition of the subaltern is shaped by the silencing, suppression and denial to which they are subjected by elites. Mimi Sheller’s Citizenship from Below fits nicely within the current moment of Caribbeanist scholarship, which for some time has been tackling the challenge of giving voice and visibility to Caribbean subalterns, in part by asking, as Sheller does, as well: How do we know what we know, who has the authority to sanction certain forms of knowledge (particularly as it establishes “evidence” for its own arguments), and how does the situated character of knowledge work to objectify its subjects? Ambitiously crossing much interdisciplinary conceptual ground, Sheller focuses her critique on gender, race, class and (heteronormative) sexuality, drawing examples primarily from Jamaica and Haiti. Her framing questions concern exploring the ways that peoples who have been denied political personhood and citizenship still leave “traces of subaltern agency” (6) in the form of local and embodied knowledge. These traces can be made present and visible both in official discourse and documentation and in new strategies of representation, Sheller observes, by scholarly methodologies that mine below dominant and orthodox surface assumptions about subjectivity and agency—including the forms of agency by which subalterns may themselves reproduce the silences imposed by elites.

Sheller’s own excavations involve approaching embodied practices, which she sees in both material and spiritual terms, as imagined and practiced notions of freedom. These occur as “embodied freedom” within the sphere of “erotic agency.” Embodied freedom consists of a continuum that, on one end, references the “negative liberties of freedom from constraint,” to “the more positive liberties of participatory action and agency” (246) located at the other end. The basis for this continuum is the “fundamental matrix of the body” (246), given that, in Sheller’s view, the body constitutes the foundation for any exercise of freedom. Because racial, ethnic and sexual inequalities are reproduced and sustained through sexual violence and forms of erotic domination, erotic agency can be regarded as the salient basis (or arena) for resistance to these violations (16–17). Sheller’s argument is that in addition to the discourses of citizenship that have conventionally informed our interpretations, understanding citizenship necessarily includes “the full sexual, sensual, and erotic agency of an embodied freedom” (17), much of which is hidden and thus must be creatively sought to be revealed. These kinds of innovative explorations are best served if they do not simply pay attention to official, public claims and movements but also to the quotidian politics that occur in interactional spaces, which Sheller annotates as “inter-embodiments.” Inter-embodiments include kinship practices, landholding institutions, challenges to the hegemonic gaze through affirmations of the body, and performance—dance, worship and music. As Sheller attests, all of these practices are germane to erotic agency and embodied freedom, and therefore to citizenship from below.

Chapter 1, “History from the Bottom(s) Up,” discusses the concepts of performativity, citizenship and sexual citizenship, elaborating on the idea that the body and sexuality are key sites where (subaltern) freedom is, or is attempted to be, exercised. Chapter 2, “Quasheba, Mother, Queen,” is an overview of Afro-Jamaican women political leaders from slavery to the post-emancipation era. Their images became significant public personas for Black women, particularly in popular religious and political movements in Jamaica. Chapter 3, “Her Majesty’s Sable Subjects,” looks at the construction of subalterns’ post-emancipation masculinities, also in Jamaica. Changing notions of and access to freedom influenced the mutually constitutive relationship between (performed) masculinity and the ability to access the rights and privileges of citizenship. In the development of this relationship, not only were women subjugated by patriarchy; foreign and indentured men experienced exclusion or marginalization from dominant ideas about manliness. Chapter 4, “Lost Glimpses of 1865,” reconsiders Jamaica’s Morant Bay Rebellion by analyzing a recently discovered collection of photographs of Jamaica in 1865, housed at Princeton University. Turning to Haiti, Chapter 5, “Sword-Bearing Citizens,” offers a discourse analysis of the gendering of Black...