Content area
Full Text
NOMADIC IDENTITIES: THE PERFORMANCE OF CITIZENSHIP. By May Joseph. Public Worlds, No. 5. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1999; pp. ix + 177. $47.95.
In an evocative opening for a compelling book, May Ioseph recalls her "visual shock" (2) induced by the beginning of Mira Nair's 1991 film Mississippi Másala, which depicts Idi Amin's mass eviction of the South Asian population of Uganda in 1972. This scene triggers memories of her own family's abrupt departure from the neighboring country of Tanzania in 1975 and ultimately leads to an attempt to make sense of the "trauma of failed citizenship" (18) endured by the South Asian diaspora. This attempt has culminated in Nomadic Identities: The Performance of Citizenship, a rewarding journey that traverses East Africa, Great Britain, and the United States. The geographic shifts of the book enact the multiple connections and dislocations that characterize an increasingly transnational world.
The opening chapter grapples with issues of nationalism, participatory democracy, and performance to set forth a theoretical framework of nomadic citizenship. She extends Arjun Appadurai's topography of "-scapes" (ethnoscape, technoscape, etc.) to include that of "citizenscape" as a means of theorizing national identities for migrant populations deemed "inauthentic" by the state. As she explains: "By juxtaposing African socialism, Tanzanian Asian, Black British, and Asian American expressions of citizenship, the following essays lay out an alternative discourse of citizenship in formation, highlighting the competing citizenscapes that shape the political imaginary of urban nomads" (11). loseph's use of citizenscape enables the analysis of overlapping and multi-faceted narratives of national identity as a lived...