1Since the emergence of citizenship studies around twenty years ago, there has been a growing catalogue of scholarly works dedicated to uncovering the relationship between citizenship and literature. Citizenship, Law and Literature brings together multiple theoretical and geographical perspectives to provide a resourceful contribution to this expanding interdisciplinary subfield. Despite citizenship’s notorious capaciousness as a concept, the collection manages to balance specific definitions and critiques with sufficient coverage of this expansive topic.

2 The collection is split into two sections: “Citizenship-as-Literature” and “Citizenship-in-Literature,” a distinction the editors derive from Robert Weisberg. In short, they distinguish the way citizenship is both textual (and thus open to being read as literature) and representational (citizenship is a theme that plays out in the literary text). As the editors remind us in their introductory chapter, however, these categories do not form a “mutually exclusive or oppositional relation,” but are instead bounded together in a “reciprocal and continual dynamic of exchange” (7) that reflects the way citizenship, in addition to being a legal category, is a negotiable cultural and social arena, hence the need for critical engagement with how citizenship emerges in art and literature.

3 As with much previous scholarship, this collection affirms the central role that non-citizens play in practices of citizenship and most contributors in turn focus on those alienated from full membership. In the first chapter of the first section, Chandani Lokuge focuses on postcolonialism and expounds on a “new branch of post-colonial immigrant literature” they call “literature of the non-citizen” or “non-citizenship literature” (16). Katja Sarkowsky follows with a reading of British citizenship, the politics of burial, and Sophocles’ Antigone in Kamila Shamsie’s novel Home Fire (2017). Koegler, an editor of the volume, provides the third chapter, an exploration of the performative and affective dimensions of citizenship through a reading of Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017). Janet M. Wilson next argues that Jenny Erpenbeck in her novel Go, West, Gone (2015) crafts a “new moral understanding between citizens” (72) structured around the protagonist’s encounter with refugees in Berlin and the European Union’s legislative response to migration through the Dublin II Regulation. In the fifth chapter, Sunčica Klaas shifts our attention to an often forgotten figure in citizenship discourse: the child. Klaas explores how Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019) represents the child as both unruly subject that escapes adult forms of legibility as well as “citizen-in-waiting” (85) whose trajectory towards political subjecthood is a central concern of nations and state governments. Elisa Bordin follows with a focus at Black citizenship in the United States from the Antebellum period to the present, using multiple sources to explore the enduring figure of the slave and the fugitive. Switching our focus to India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, Nilufer E. Bharucha explores the Bengal diaspora in light of the 2019 amendments to the India’s Citizenship Act of 1955 and the works of Amitav Ghosh who engages with the partitioning of Bengal and its effects on migration. In the last chapter of the first section, Matteo Nicolini goes beyond the nation-state to locate the law and popular science writing in a time of climate change, exposing how traditional legal and political procedures and paradigms are inadequate for dealing with global warming.

4 Laura A. Zander inaugurates the second section with a transhistorical examination of citizenship, linking works from Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine of Hippo with “The Strangers’ Case,” William Shakespeare’s contribution to the collaborative play Sir Thomas More, which Zander reads as defense of a “compassionate migrant policy” (161). Giuseppe Rossi follows with a theoretical exploration of citizenship as a legal framework with extended reference to Plato’s Crito, which Rossi argues affirms citizenship as a moral commitment in Socrates’ refusal to escape from prison prior to his death sentence. Avtar Brah begins her chapter autobiographically with her experience as a stateless person in Britain after losing her Ugandan citizenship with the expulsion of South Asians from Uganda on the orders of Idi Amin in the 1970s, linking this experience with British colonialism in Africa. From this, Brah offers her own concept of difference in the face of globalisation and enduring colonial divisions. Françoise Král follows with a call for renewed emphasis on the concept of narrative, using their concept of “fractality” to explore how postcolonial and diasporic literature offers a “refractive lens whose angle points to the fractal geography of the current moment” (209). In the next chapter, Enrico Rigo, through a reading of Georg Simmel’s 1908 essay “The Stranger,” investigates how gender can fundamentally alter our understanding of migration. Rigo suggests we rethink the stranger as female as a means of exposing how migration and social reproduction are governed. Valentina Adami follows with an exploration of ecological citizenship through readings of Young Adult fiction, noting how the notion of ecology itself is particularly salient in a discussion of citizenship because of its emphasis on the interdependence of both living and non-living things. Daniela Carpi provides the last chapter and acknowledges what such a varied collection implies about citizenship: an ambiguous, contestable idea that requires constant redefinition. Carpi engages citizenship’s contemporary ambiguity through readings of Jeffrey Archer’s Heads You Win (2018) and George Saunders’s The Brief and Frightening Rein of Phil (2005), both of which trouble notions of traditional national borders, from which Carpi advocates for a global citizenship rooted in acts or practices rather than antagonism between national interiors and exteriors.

5 In sum, Citizenship, Law and Literature is a necessary survey of contemporary thought on the intersection between political personhoods, literary texts, and the legal arena. It offers an important reminder that citizenship is far from irrelevant in a globalised world and indeed should remain an important focus of our attention. Scholars working in different corners of literary, legal, and citizenship studies can find something resourceful to gain from this volume.