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Seeing Like a Citizen: Decolonization, Development, and the Making of Kenya, 1945-1980

Paperback
Published : Tuesday 12 November 2019
ISBN : 9780821423967
Price : €37.44


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Seeing Like a Citizen: Decolonization, ...

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12 Nov 2019

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Seeing Like a Citizen: Decolonization, ...

Hardback
12 Nov 2019

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Extended stock – Dispatch 5-7 days

Description

In focusing on rural Kenyans as they actively sought access to aid, Moskowitz offers new insights into the texture of political life in the decolonizing and early postcolonial world. Her account complicates our understanding of Kenyan experiences of independence, and the meaning and form of development.

In Seeing Like a Citizen, Kara Moskowitz approaches Kenya's late colonial and early postcolonial eras as a single period of political, economic, and social transition. In focusing on rural Kenyans-the vast majority of the populace and the main targets of development interventions-as they actively sought access to aid, she offers new insights into the texture of political life in decolonizing Kenya and the early postcolonial world. Using multisited archival sources and oral histories focused on the western Rift Valley, Seeing Like a Citizen makes three fundamental contributions to our understanding of African and Kenyan history. First, it challenges the widely accepted idea of the gatekeeper state, revealing that state control remained limited and that the postcolonial state was an internally varied and often dissonant institution. Second, it transforms our understanding of postcolonial citizenship, showing that its balance of rights and duties was neither claimed nor imposed, but negotiated and differentiated. Third, it reorients Kenyan historiography away from central Kenya and elite postcolonial politics. The result is a powerful investigation of experiences of independence, of the meaning and form of development, and of how global political practices were composed and recomposed on the ground in local settings.



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