Contesting Citizenship by Anne McNevin

Author:Anne McNevin [McNevin, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Law, General, Criminal Law
ISBN: 9780231522243
Google: cPhXoNOA1-UC
Goodreads: 35136110
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

At least in this rhetorical exercise, the Sans-Papiers are not seeking recognition within the scope of existing categories—as asylum seekers or otherwise forced migrants. Nor are they justifying themselves as partners in specific national projects. Rather, their starting point is recognition as active agents in their own political futures, both at the point of choosing to migrate and within the context of their migration destination. They express a new kind of subjectivity that moves beyond the message of being “Sans-Papiers” to question the source of authority provided in the form of papers. These papers are documents that, for better or worse, continue to determine freedoms through the prism of bounded national communities. “We do not want to be victims,” the authors declare, “we want to be protagonists, and the space of our freedom, today, is the space of our common struggle!” They assert the right to move through what they consider to be artificial borders that mark neither the genuine fault lines of contemporary social antagonisms nor legitimate boundaries of political belonging. They identify the European border as the common site of struggle and call for a specifically transnational “movement of migration.”41

This letter is filled with rhetoric largely aligned with the “autonomy of migration” ethos championed by Hardt and Negri. Yet it should not be taken as evidence of a growing global “multitude.” This letter represents only its authors’ views and is not at all indicative of the future direction of the Sans-Papiers’ struggle. I use it to close this section merely as a reference to the diversity of claims emerging in the context of contemporary European border policing and to highlight an example that shifts the discursive terrain. Studies of citizenship that wish to address the farthest frontiers of the political may do well to think through the implications of these kinds of more radical claims, even if they are asserted only at the level of rhetoric. It seems to me that the authors of this letter are somehow engaging with novel forms of subject formation that have the potential to multiply and diversify or to coalesce into identities that fuel strategic ambitions. Either way, such subjectivities engage a spatial terrain that challenges the boundaries of citizenship. They emerge at the crossroads of a system of borders both increasingly fragile and strong.

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