If the nation is an imagined community constructed through discourse, then belonging—the feeling of being part of that nation—can only arise when citizens are empowered to enter the discourse and modify it. Linking political science and cultural studies to explore the mutually constitutive role of discourse and institutions, this volume argues that citizenship is an ongoing and evolving discursive project. Further, it studies the role of culture and different media in the process of citizen-making by taking postcolonial India as its case study.

The volume explores discursive plurality and the monopolization of interpretation as the poles from which inclusion in and exclusion from the national community are negotiated. By interfacing political science’s interest in the power of institutions and cultural studies’ focus on the power of discourse, the author is able to investigate into the ways in which citizenship manifests itself-and is contested-outside the institutional realm, thus revealing conceptual relativity, ruptures and creative re-interpretations of citizenship.