Review by Choice Review
McNevin's Contesting Citizenship is an innovative addition to the scholarship on citizenship. McNevin's main contribution is to use a geographer's vision to decouple citizenship from its traditional attachment to political territorial physical state boundaries and to reconceive it within the neoliberal globalized capitalist system. By so doing, she releases citizenship discourse from the citizen-noncitizen dyad to a reimagination of citizenship behaviors, thus presenting irregular migrants as full-bodied actors with agency within the state, demanding rights and opportunities rather than hugging the periphery as victims and subjects of state policy. Drawing on examples from classic immigration states, the US and Australia, and France, a civic state, she gives insight into how noncitizens are reshaping their own citizenship destiny. McNevin (RMIT Univ., Australia) contends that as irregular migrants make demands, the state responds by reifying state borders, enacting security measures, and reasserting the legal connection between citizenship and state. It would have been especially helpful to include a case from either a new immigration state or a state that considered itself ethnically homogenous and had little experience with immigration to see if her thesis holds for such cases as well. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate and research collections. R. A. Harper York College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
