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E. WEIZMAN
Analysing the ‘colonial psyche’ in The Colonizer and the Colonized Memmi offers an
intimate account of the entangled psychology of both the oppressor and the oppressed.
Memmi’s analysis of the structural condition of the ‘coloniser who refuses’ is pertinent to
reflections on the positionality of the Jewish-Israeli activists. Memmi explains that to
refuse means ‘either withdrawing physically from those conditions or remaining to fight
and change them’ (Memmi [1957] 2003, 63). The two ‘options’ of refusal are therefore
either to leave the settler colony or to stay and actively engage in resistance against the
colonial situation. Neither option is problem free, for leaving the colony does not
necessarily cancel colonial privileges and the relatively privileged position in which the
immigrant settlers might find themselves in.10 Yet the choice of ‘refusal’ from within
entails an inevitable paradox – rejecting an ideology while still living with and benefitting
from it. Indeed, the ‘colonisers who refuse’ live their lives ‘under the sign of
a contradiction which looms at every step, depriving him of all coherence and all
tranquillity’ (ibid.). This paradoxical position of the colonisers who try to reject the
privileges that constitute them and that they benefit from is, for Memmi, a dead-end, as
everything confirms their ‘solitude, bewilderment and ineffectiveness’ (ibid.). The ques
tion then arises: can anticolonial settler-citizens genuinely be committed to, and take part
in, an anticolonial struggle that is premised on the end of their privileges?
Critical Citizenship Studies scholars offer a possible solution to Memmi’s paradox
with the innovative framework of ‘acts of citizenship’ and ‘activist citizens’. Thinking
about citizens who struggle to transform the system that governs them and others, Isin
(2009) suggests important tools of analysis to expand the boundaries of citizenship, its
meaning, and who it embraces. He asserts that:
citizenship is ‘a dynamic (political, social and cultural but perhaps also sexual, aesthetic and
ethical) institution of domination and empowerment that governs who citizens (insiders),
subjects (strangers, outsiders) and abjects (aliens) are and how these actors are to govern
themselves and each other in a given body politic’ (Isin 2009, 371).
The activist citizen, accordingly, is the citizen who performs:
acts that transform forms (orientations, strategies, technologies) and modes (citizens,
strangers, outsiders, aliens) of being political by bringing into being new actors as activist
citizens (that is, claimants of rights) through creating or transforming sites and stretching
scales (ibid., 383).
Isin and Nielsen (2008) argue that citizens are not necessarily those who are regulated by
the state, but also those who strive to be included, in various ways, and with demands that
might entail a transformation of the system itself. Accordingly, ‘thinking about citizen
ship through acts means to implicitly accept that to be a citizen is to make claims to
justice: to break habitus and act in a way that disrupts already defined orders, practices
and statuses’ (Isin 2009, 382).
‘Acts of Citizenship’ is a compelling framework, one that expands the concept of
‘citizenship’ beyond the state and which conceptualises empowerment of citizens and
‘aspiring’ citizens, taking into account a variety of struggles taking place around the world
where migrants, ‘aliens’, asylum seekers and others struggle to be recognised and
included in the states where they reside. However, it is clear is that even here, ‘citizenship’
is still often about incorporation/inclusion in an existing (even if in a reformed) polity. It