Staging Citizenship: Performance, Politics, and Cultural Rights esús Martín Barbero | Colombia http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/e-misferica-62/martin-barbero
Politics has been theatrical performance since its origins, as Richard Sennet reminds us when he writes that the polis space in the Agora was a place where people gathered to exchange opinions and relish in debate. That is why Staging Citizenship, the name of this Hemispheric Institute Encuentro given by its organizers in Colombia, is so provocative and performative: citizenship exists only insofar as it is enacted, and its emerging figures have to do with empowerment strategies, exercised in and from the cultural sphere. What the new social, ethnic, gender, gay and lesbian, religious or ecological movements demand is not only ideological representation but also socio-cultural recognition. They seek to become visible in their difference as citizens. This opens up a new mode for the political exercise of their rights, since this new visibility catalyzes the emergence of new political subjects. This was the subject visualized by feminism when it subverted the Left's profound machismo with its slogan: “the personal is political!” which came to embody both a sense of injury and victimization and a sense of recognition and empowerment. The visibility of the Other—and every difference is an opportunity for dominance in a class-based society—together with the diversity of each contested identity today (contested not only in relation to other identities but in relation to itself) is a constitutive part of the recognition of rights. This is expressed in the phonetic similarity and semantic articulation of visibilidad (visibility) and veedurías (community oversight committees): those practices of investigation and intervention by citizens in the public sphere. According to Charles Taylor, the notion of recognition is played out in the distinction between traditional “honor” as a hierarchical concept and principle, and modern “dignity” as an egalitarian principle. Identity is not, then, what is attributed to someone by simply belonging to a group, but rather the narration of what gives meaning and value to the life and identities of individuals and groups. What the notions of diversity and interculturality mobilize today is the breakdown of a political institutionality unable to extend cultural rights to all sectors of the population, be they women or ethnic minorities, evangelicals or homosexuals. In regards to the citizenship of "modern man," which was conceptualized and exercised above and beyond gender, ethnic, racial, or age differences, democracy today needs a cultural mutation that enables it to handle a heterogeneity that is as constitutive of citizenship as it is constitutive of the State. This is the only way we will escape the illusory quest for the reincorporation of alterity into some unified whole, be it nation, political party, or religion. Citizenship rights, those rights exercised today by the different cultural communities that constitute a nation, will then take center stage. This is the new value that attributes the human universality of rights to the specificity of its very diverse modes of perception and expression. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
