Political Geography 24 (2005) 341–343 www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo Introduction to Engin Isin’s Being Political: Genealogies of Citizenship Lisa Drummond*, Linda Peake Urban Studies Programme, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3, Canada This introduction is unashamedly biased. As Engin Isin’s colleagues in the Urban Studies Programme at York University in Toronto, we are very much aware of the passion and intensity that he brings to his work and his genuine love of the city. These characteristics are reflected in Being Political, and it was that which prompted us to organize an Author-meets-Critics session at the 2003 American Association of Geographers. That session has developed into this forum which presents both critiques of the book and Engin’s response to those critiques. We consider it most appropriate that such a debate is taking place in Political Geography because we believe that political geography’s promise as a sub-discipline relates precisely to the kinds of issues that are discussed in this forum. In Being Political, Engin has articulated a new analytical framing of cities and citizenship studies. He thinks of citizenship as being constituted through a series of differences, with the citizen being counterposed to the slave, the vagrant, the refugee, and so on. Citizenship, he argues, is ‘‘a generalized form of otherness’’. In other words, citizenship is about relations between groupings of subjectivities that produce sameness and difference, and it is in the city that these relations are played out. The city for Engin is thus a ‘‘difference machine’’ and although his empirical focus is on cities in the West, his theoretical motivation is precisely a response to the impossibility of citizenship outside the West as argued within the framework of Orientalism. That is, he critiques the notion that citizenship could only have developed from and within Western cities. However, although this may have been his * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: drummond@yorku.ca (L. Drummond), lpeake@yorku.ca (L. Peake). 0962-6298/$ - see front matter Ó 2004 Published by Elsevier Ltd. doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2004.07.001 342 L. Drummond, L. Peake / Political Geography 24 (2005) 341–343 primary motivation for writing this book, he had others, of which one was to distance himself from the ‘‘stale categories of perception that have come to dominate the social sciences’’ (Isin’s reply in this forum). In his discussion of cosmopolis, for example, he maintains that the social science metaphors of ‘‘hierarchy, centre, stratification, polarization, elites, and even class are inadequate for interpreting the cosmopolis as a space through which various groups struggle to constitute themselves.’’ (Isin, 2002: 253–254). In this he demonstrates a willingness to challenge established orthodoxies, including challenges to interpretations both of the political and of ontological notions of being. It is perhaps the multifarious nature of this book that makes it difficult to know where it should be situated. In Being Political, Engin has conducted a genealogical investigation, knitting together not only the ideas of major contemporary social and political theorists such as Michel Foucault and Edward Said, but also those of their intellectual elders such as Max Weber, Henri Lefebvre, Pierre Bourdieu, and Lewis Mumford, as well as the poems of Baudelaire, and the work of philosophers such as Heidegger and Nietzsche. While not all readers will be convinced that a genealogical approach is the only one that could have been undertaken, he is clearly an author well-versed in a wide-ranging theoretical, historical and urban-based literature and from his close reading of these bodies of work he has built up his own formidable and innovative synthesis of the relationship between being urban and being political. Indeed, in our current academic climate where people are increasingly located within specific sub-fields within disciplines and who are known to be specialists within their chosen fields, it is rare for scholars to engage in what is effectively a Renaissance-like study. In this endeavour, Engin appears as a sort of intellectual detective, tracking clues with little attention to the obstacles of discipline, geographical location, or historical period. And while the book is notable for the breadth and depth of its coverage, spanning centuries, continents, and contexts, it is even more remarkable for Engin’s effortless movements between the high grounds of political, legal, and sociological theory and geographical and historical specificities. Where then do we choose to situate this book? We believe that it is probably best placed in the long-established tradition of critical urban theory that seeks to understand the nature of the urban and the role the city plays in everyday life. It is a tradition that starts with the work of Tönnies, Simmel, and Durkheim, followed by that of Wirth and the Chicago School, and most recently articulated through the oeuvres of Harvey, Castells, and Soja, but which now, we would argue, has been extended with Being Political. Like these latter theorists, Engin has gone beyond a territorial understanding of the city, and like them has developed his theoretical framing from a vision of social transformation that informs political practice. Most recently, however, the analytical focus of urban studies has primarily been empirical and conceptual, and an over-arching vision and theory of the city has been missing. Being Political is thus perhaps long overdue. Perhaps the major purpose of this book is the author’s insistence that without a theoretical focus on the city we cannot understand citizenship. Such an understanding elevates the city to both a theoretical and a political object of analysis. Engin’s work is thus also a significant addition to the long line of those who have L. Drummond, L. Peake / Political Geography 24 (2005) 341–343 343 studied citizenship. As perhaps the foremost geographer working in this field, he has persuasively illustrated how space is central to the negotiation of rights, privileges, and obligations of citizenship. ‘‘Space’’, he argues, ‘‘is a condition of being political’’ (Isin, 2002: 43). Moreover, at the same time as his analysis has revealed the inherent spatiality of being political, he has given his readers an authoritative synthesis of Western social and political thought on citizenship. In the five pieces presented here, his critics engage with Being Political in such a range of ways that their critiques underline the book’s expansive scope. Each has responded to different points, different arguments, different theoretical concepts in the book. The critiques levied here range from a suggestion that he privileges time over space, to a neglect of the citizen as embodied, to a focus on the political at the expense of the geopolitical, to various queries over the definitions he employs. Engin’s response addresses each of these concerns, and underlines the multifaceted importance of Being Political. In relation to this latter point we would like to end on the same note as Engin does in his response to his critics in noting his regrets that they did not engage with the importance he assigns to the poetic in Being Political. Perhaps the real importance of this book is to be measured in the multitude of ways in which it speaks to different people about the nature of being political. References Isin, Engin (2002). Being political: Genealogies of citizenship. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.