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Can reading make us better citizens? This book sheds light on how the act of reading can be mobilised as a powerful civic tool in service of contemporary civil and political struggles for minority recognition, rights, and representation in North America. Crossing borders and queering citizenship reimagines the contours of contemporary citizenship by connecting queer and citizenship theories to the idea of an engaged reading subject. This book offers a new approach to studying the act of reading, theorises reading as an integral element of the basic unit of the state: the citizen. By theorising the act of reading across borders as a civic act that queers citizenship, the book advances an alternative model of belonging through civic readerly engagement. Exploring work by seven US, Mexican, Canadian, and Indigenous authors, including Gloria Anzaldúa, Dorothy Allison, Gregory Scofield, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Erín Moure, Junot Díaz, and Yann Martel, the book offers sensitive interpretations of how reading can create citizenship practices that foreground and value recognition, rights, and representation for all members of a political system.
Refugee communities and the state in France v 10 v Citizenship on the move: refugee communities and the state in France, 1914–18 Alex Dowdall Introduction The outbreak of war in 1914 generated large-scale population displacement in France, as in other belligerent states. In the combat zones of the north and east, few civilians could avoid the conflict’s direct impact. The movements of armies, German atrocities, bombardments of towns by both sides, and the fears that these events engendered, prompted large numbers to flee. In mid-October 1914, the parish priest
get quarters and districts of towns and cities that get taken over by one particular group… 2 Yet the picture of migration, citizenship, and rights in the city of Peterborough and its surrounding rural areas is, unsurprisingly, more complex than its reputation as a major reception city for international migrant workers, or Farage's portrayal of the consequences of this, might suggest. In this chapter I argue, through the example of Peterborough, that a focus on
Allwood 05 24/2/10 5 10:30 Page 129 Refugees, gender and citizenship in Britain and France This chapter explores the question of citizenship-building processes in relation to women asylum seekers and refugees and their civic participation not only in discrete refugee women’s community associations or organisations (RCOs) but also in (longer established) migrant women’s community associations.1 Its aim is fourfold: first, it discusses the relationship between the question of citizenship, refugee women and their associations; second, it presents an overview
6 Reading for hemispheric citizenship in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao In his 1992 Nobel Speech, Saint Lucian poet and Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott theorised Caribbean art as working to achieve the recovery and reconstruction what he called the region’s ‘shattered histories’. As he put it: ‘Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent.’1 Walcott’s comments on the connections between art and history encapsulate the
political agenda to promote individual entitlements that transcend national citizenship ( Moyn, 2010 ). In his inaugural address, in January 1977, President Jimmy Carter declared that ‘Our commitment to human rights must be absolute’ (quoted in Moyn, 2014: 69 ). Under the guardianship of the UN, following the UDHR in 1948, the concept of human rights had lacked prescriptive force; only once adopted by the US as an instrument of order and hegemony did it become the basis for a global movement. For many liberal commentators at the turn of the 1990s
moral obligation to take a political stance that citizenship imposes. 5 No such ‘opt out’ is available with regard to the boat people at sea or the migrants in Calais and other French port cities, camped as they endeavour to find a way to get to Britain. The fact that where one stands with regard to the migrants has become the defining political and moral issue in the EU makes even a semblance of humanitarian ‘neutrality’ an impossibility. And rightly so. At present, however, European relief NGOs seem to want to maintain the fiction that their
practicality prevents it). This is the same foundational commitment that animates human rights work. The humanist core to both of these forms of social practice is a similar kind of belief in the ultimate priority of moral claims made by human beings as human beings rather than as possessors of any markers of identity or citizenship. What differences exist between humanitarianism and human rights are largely sociological – the contextual specifics of the evolution of two different forms of social activism. I have argued elsewhere, for example, that
, cosmopolitan citizens and themes relevant to their everyday lives and perceptions of citizenship. Thus, the distinction commonly drawn between ‘data rich’ governments, institutions and commercial enterprises, which collect, store and mine data, and ‘data poor’ individual citizens targeted by such efforts has been criticised for obscuring global inequities ( Ruckenstein and Schüll, 2017 ). This insight is highly relevant to humanitarian wearables, because it
Tiessen , R. and Huish , R. (eds), Globetrotting or Global Citizenship? Perils and Potential of International Experiential Learning ( Toronto : University of Toronto Press ), pp. 230 – 57 . Glassford , S. ( 2018 ), Mobilizing Mercy: A History of the Canadian Red Cross ( Montreal and Kingston : McGill-Queen’s University Press ). Herriman , M. ( 2021 ), ‘ Social Media and Charities in Canada ’, in Phillips , S. D. and Wyatt , B. (eds), Innovations: Change for Canada’s Voluntary and Nonprofit Sector