Abstract
Uncertain Citizenship: Life in the Waiting Room is a timely intervention that examines how citizenship policies and practices are envisioned, acquired and enacted at meso-levels of governance. The premise of this book is concerned with a core paradox: that the governance and design of citizenship is based on uncertainty, whilst its value is reliant on being narrated as an object of stability. It is through the heuristic device of citizenisation that Fortier firstly unpacks such contradicting rationale of precarity and endurance. As a concept that incorporates both regimes of integration and naturalisation, citizenisation renders visible how “the promise of the certainty of citizenship still operates even as it is normalised as uncertain” (p. 6). Uncertain Citizenship thus explores how citizenisation functions institutionally and socially in twenty-first century Britain, capturing the contradictions on which it is both founded and replicated in specific contexts.
Interlaced throughout the structure of the book are a series of mise-en-scènes that succinctly bridge institutional frameworks, policy rhetoric and lived experience. The opening chapter contends that analysing citizenisation as a social intervention sheds light on how citizenship is understood, mobilised and resisted in contemporary Britain. Citizenisation is thus depicted as a social space whereby structural and institutional conditions interact with lived experience, a process that Fortier argues is emblematic of a ‘waiting room’ (p. 41). Three axes of citizenisation are subsequently introduced: firstly; how citizenship takes time, secondly; how citizenship takes place and thirdly; how citizenship takes hold. As Fortier summarises, the waiting room renders visible the ‘making and unmaking of citizens and of citizenship as operating through multiple and at times contested temporalities, spatialities and affects’ (p. 163).
The subsequent chapters situate contemporary regimes of Britain in specific historical and institutional contexts. In contrast with articulations of citizenisation measures as ‘raceless’, Chapter Two traces the imperial and racial structures that remain entrenched in processes of citizenship in twenty-first century Britain. The remainder of the book continues to illustrate the temporal, spatial and affective aspects of citizenisation by drawing on three facets of the process: documentation requirements, the significance of language and rituals of naturalisation. The first (Chapter Three) examines the generative capacities of documents from the perspective of both applicants and registrars, scrutinising the interpretive gaps that render the ‘documented citizen’ as both contingent and situated. The second (Chapter Four) illustrates how the normalisation of language requirements as a practical measure obscures the structures of whiteness that shape its formation and perceived significance. The third (Chapter Five) unpacks how the discursive framing of citizenship as a choice conceals its embeddedness in a global system of unequal distribution. By situating contemporary processes of citizenisation in the relevant historical and institutional contexts, Uncertain Citizenship thus illustrates ‘how citizens and migrants are made, unmade and naturalised’ (p. 8).
The insights generated from Uncertain Citizenship are based on rich ethnographic and interview data, primarily collected between 2012 and 2014. Fortier grounds her in-depth theoretical framings within a variety of institutional contexts, including registrar offices, English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) classes and citizenship ceremonies. Narratives from a range of actors are drawn upon throughout the book, including those who operate as intermediaries of state policy and those who are impacted by such interventions. By centring meso-levels of governing citizenship, Fortier reveals how both institutional actors and applicants are unequally positioned in the matrix of citizenisation, leading to various consequences. Fortier thus provides a nuanced account that captures the discursive, relational, affective and material practices by which citizenisation processes are sustained and undermined.
Scholarly critiques of British citizenship as inflected by racialised, patriarchal and heteronormative assertions are further advanced by Uncertain Citizenship. Throughout the book, Fortier demarcates how cultural racism is embedded in citizenship interventions, measures that are identified as extending to ‘the fabric of society as a whole’ (p. 12). Such technologies are exemplified via Fortier’s raciolinguistic approach that captures how the ‘violent injunction to speak English [is] one that commands to “speak white”’ (p. 150). However, it is the in-depth examination of the meso-levels of governance that proves most fruitful in unpacking the processes by which structures of whiteness and coloniality are normalised, replicated and resisted by applicants and advisors. By attending to citizenisation as a relational process, the book interweaves the ambiguities and tensions that emerge when structural constraints collide with the agential responses of those who encounter such regimes.
Uncertain Citizenship thus provides a rich and detailed account of the structures and imaginaries that manifest in contemporary regimes of British citizenship. By exploring everyday encounters of citizenisation, this book provides a vital contribution that renders visible the legacies of power and inequality by which citizenship was formed, and within which it continues to endure.