Abstract

New citizenships are a common topic in reference to a social and cultural condition that seems to overdetermine migrant and post-migrant comunities in European cities. Usually the main objective in stressing the emerging and the self-affirmation of these new citizenships is to focus on both the multicultural, the transcultural or the global condition that in an irreversible way characterizes our European urban spaces, but also the definitive implosion of the national, modern idea of citizenship. However, current discourses about these alleged new forms and practices of citizenship, although expressed from progressive political perspectives, usually remain trapped within an extremely "culturalist" approach to the politics of migration. They cannot focus in an effective way the material dimension through which these new citizenships are emerging. For this reason I propose the notion of "postcolonial citizenships" to name these constituent practices of citizenship. The principal aim of this essay is to suggest that this notion lets us understand better what is really at stake nowadays, in Europe, in the question of citizenship.