This collection affirms the role of language as central to the lives of citizens and state-recognized citizens. The multiple sites and spaces profiled in the book attest to the nuanced and layered reality of people's everyday experience of and with language, language training, and regional and national government language-policy contexts. The texts included in this volume were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Language and Politics 14:3 (2015).
The book presents a cohesive and fresh perspective, drawing on language and citizenship as performative expressions involving material and affective relations. The conditions for state inclusion through national citizenship requirements are seen here to be ever-changing entanglements of language and citizenship responsibilities and sometimes government responsiveness, as Lionel Wee (in this volume) details is the case in Singapore.
The performative aspect of citizenship is drawn on explicitly in the piece by Kamran Khan & Adrian Blackledge that follows the experience of a Somali man applying for and completing the process of attaining British citizenship. Yet, it is also read throughout the book in more subtle and overt expressions of taking up space and making visible the marginalized bodies and plural voices of a citizenry. Reinhilde Pulinx & Piet Van Avermaet discuss the never-ending journey of becoming a citizen for some people in Flanders where cultural competency equates highly with moral integration, but what constitutes this is ill-defined for newcomers. Kristine Horner's piece examines Luxembourgish language testing as a condition for satisfying nationality requirements in the context of limited opportunities for encountering the language. Quentin E. Williams & Christopher Stroud highlight a comedy act that profiles well-recognized South African raced and classed characters through employing strategic intonations, expressions, and chronotopes that are often left out of mainstream media. Tommaso M. Milani's text on sexual cityzenship follows the One in Nine campaign's protest during the Joburg Pride that visually illustrated the diverse bodies that make up Johannesburg's LGBTQI community and to the staggeringly different treatment racialized feminists received as they appropriated space at Pride. These chapters delve into the perspectives of marginalized communities and individual people through multiple methods (e.g. speech acts, news articles, stand-up, policy documents, and interviews) critically examining their treatment, representation, and the more mundane semiotic expressions that prevail and structure these individuals’ engagements in their surroundings.
Continuity between the texts is also reflected in the book's conceptual framework. Many of these authors draw on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Engin Isin to both inform and challenge their understandings of the relationship between language and citizenship practices. These texts demonstrate how the role of language and language practices embedded with citizenship policies and the more mundane expressions that occur in societies to uphold differences between nationals and migrants has not been reduced with the reality of global migration. The book delivers a reading on language and citizenship that questions the taken-for-granted assumptions about the role and responsibility of government, the everyday practices of citizens and what citizenship requirements for migrants establish, reveal, and leave ambiguous about nations and regions.
