Anticolonial citizenship: From slavery to Windrush

The histories of European empires are replete with examples of citizenship contestation, wherein colonised peoples sought to leverage their partial ‘insider’ status to advance claims for greater inclusion under imperial rule. In this article, I argue that these examples disclose a hitherto under-theorised form of ‘citizenship as claims-making’, which I refer to as ‘anticolonial citizenship’. In developing this argument, I trace the historical continuities in the structure and practice of anticolonial citizenship from the era of colonial slavery in the British Caribbean to the ongoing Windrush campaign in the United Kingdom. By identifying these long-standing continuities, my analysis demonstrates the indispensable role of this novel conceptual framing in understanding citizenship struggles past and present.