Our last issue focused on modern modalities of regulation, particularly regimes of law and bureaucracy, to examine how these structured selves and personhood, constructed peripheral urbanisms, and created modes of imagination through which spatial and conceptual constraints might be breached and redefined.
This issue continues this latter focus on the subversive role of political imagination to consider renegade forms of popular sovereignty in particular. It begins with a special section entitled “Political Society and Popular Politics in Africa,” which explores both the analytic potential and the limits of notions of “political society” as a way to address specific histories of violence and governmentality in postcolonial African states. Anneeth Kaur Hundle surveys new practices of citizenship among South Asian communities in Uganda as they navigate between “nativist” Ugandan policies, on the one hand, and transnational forms of political organization on the other. Similarly, Ahmed Veriava discusses problems of postapartheid citizenship for...
