Ingenious Citizenship is an examination of the idea “democratic agency” that is dominant in Western political thought. Charles Lee argues that the kind of citizen subjectivity that is acknowledged and celebrated in both democratic theory, scholarship on social movements and insurgency, and by activists themselves, unnecessarily, and indeed, detrimentally privileges “a capacity to act politically in ways that are public and collective” (p. 3). Lee argues that even thinkers who forward the agonistic theory of “radical democracy” in the tradition of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have a view of democratic agency that is “linear and one dimensional,” pointing our attention only to avowedly political displays aimed at impacting the state. He calls this focus on explicitly state-directed collective action the “romance of democratic agency” and cautions that this romanticization of democratic subjectivity “crystalizes an invisible form of judgement and normative exclusion that systematically remainders other forms of political agency” and, even more critically, “forecloses a serious open-ended investigation of how marginalized subjects lacking access to resources may contest and resist in surprising ways to improvise and expand spaces of inclusion and belonging, thus obtaining ‘citizenship’ via non-linear routes” (p. 5). Instead, Lee points the reader’s attention to the “nonlinear and circuitous social change that is always occurring in liberal social life” (p. 6). These changes occur, not via a triumphalist narrative, but instead emerge from the “messy entanglements” (p. 8) that characterize life in the world as it actually exists. In the real world, Lee argues, the politics of social change is not about “purity” or “transcendence,” but is instead characterized by the ways that the cast-off can carve out “spaces of greater inclusion, dignity, and belonging” (p. 17). The methods that marginalized people use to do this work may “normalize and redeem them in ways that simultaneously abjectify others,” and all require some degree of “instrumental negotiation” with the given system that will be both transformative and complicit, “reshaping the terrain of the battlefield, without transcending the battlefield” (pp. 18–19).

While this argument begins very similarly to the idea of “infrapolitics” present in James Scott’s oeuvre, Lee’s work pulls away from Scott’s in that he not only affirms the ability and presence of resistance among those whose place in the polity goes unacknowledged or actively repressed, but points out the affirmative “ingenious” actions that “abject” subjects can and do take in order to claim a place for themselves at any and all levels of lived experience—personal, social, and political. Like Scott, Lee wants to challenge our notions of “‘proper’ political subjectivity” (p. 5) by confronting us with cases in which oppressed peoples do not mass in the streets, but nevertheless, manage to change the conditions of their lived experience in ways that are significant to them. Also, Lee helpfully points out that Scott can seem to set up in his work a fundamental disconnect between “infrapolitics” and organizational or institutional politics. This creates a cordoning off between the “purity” of those who practice “the art of not being governed,” in Scott’s terms and the “contamination” of those who sully themselves in the always already-corrupt governance and governmentality that marks institutionalized politics.

As an alternative, Lee wishes to alter our understanding of the range of acts that count toward social change, eradicating the opposition between “pure” and “contaminated” political acts and toward the “endogenous co-existence of purity and contamination in the eruption of subordinate contestation” (p. 12). For Lee, the romance of democratic agency, even when inverted to hold up those practicing infrapolitics rather than the more-commonly acknowledged direct variety, is detrimental because it produces critical inaccuracies in our observations of the politics of the marginalized and, even more profoundly, leads to a recuperative narrative of social change that is based on preconceived notions about what fits into a triumphalist narrative, rather than on the unusual tracks people take to incrementally improve their lived experience. The most usual narrative of social change we find in the literature on social movements and, Lee implies, among activists themselves, goes thus: “We must unlearn our participation in structural oppression . . . in order to purify our consciousness and engage in democratic struggles for social justice” (p. 13). Lee argues that social progress, in fact, always hinges on both an “aspiration and hope for purity” and “complicity in a given system” (p. 13). As evidence, Lee points our attention to several different “episodes” in which the marginalized, whom he describes as “abject subjects” use “quotidian practices” to exercise agency to “resist their state vis-à-vis the liberal citizenship script” (p. 39)—a script that does the work of both instructing people in a given time and place about the “normal” way to conduct themselves and producing the binary of “normality and abjection” (p. 39). Lee uses the cases of migrant domestic workers, global sex workers, trans people, and suicide bombers to illuminate the ways that those who are cast-off from “normal” society attempt to create more “livable spaces” for themselves using “unordinary” means in an attempt to re-write their relationship to the political script of normalized political citizenship (p. 55).

The episodes that Lee examines come from literature, popular culture, and news accounts. In the chapter on migrant domestic workers, Lee highlights the ways that non-citizens with no formal political status, like a Filipina domestic worker in Malaysia or “second-class” citizens like the Afrian American maid, Minny, in the novel The Help, can use their bodies and products thereof to enact their will as subjects in situations where they are meant to remain invisible. The domestic workers in these examples use their own menstural blood and feces, respectively, to contaminate the possessions of their bosses and to make space for themselves as human beings worthy of consideration. Lee argues that we should view acts like these as political because they essentially create a space where someone we might not recognize as a “citizen” can make claims about their place in the world, subtly unsettling status-quo arrangements of power and privilege. He calls this space for claim-making “nonexistent citizenship” and defines it as an “interstitial” category that “neither fall[s] into the desperate void of bare life nor neatly align[s] with the universal trajectory of democratic citizenship” (p. 19).

Lee’s chapter on suicide bombers and the way they attempt to claim a place in the political community by using the public death of their bodies interestingly illuminates and expands this argument. He argues that the lethal act of a Palestinian girl who walks into a market and blows herself up, killing an Israeli girl who looks so like her that it is difficult to separately identify their remains, “can be read as an inventive improvisation by [an] abject [subject] . . . to enact [herself] politically [and] to destabilize the existing relations of normality and abjection between Israelis and Palestinians, thus ameliorating their abjection and normalizing their dignity and humanity” (p. 196). This is a kind of bleak, Hobbesian view of liberal citizenship. One that asserts that suicide bombers are reminding us of the foundational context of political equality—that is, what makes us equal and worthy of membership in the political community is that we all, regardless of status, have fragile bodies, endowed with the same senses, and marked by mortal finitude.

In Lee’s concluding section “Politics without Politics” he argues that we must, as scholars and activists, remain open to the idea that politics can come from anywhere and anyone, and as such, we should remain alert to actions that people take to improve their positions, however minutely, even when they don’t follow the political scripts we’re used to. He directs our attention to “a warring stance” that he calls “politics without politics” (a nod to martial artist Bruce Lee’s fighting style of “using no way as a way”) which points to the idea that the political “need not be assumed a priori, but should entirely depend on [its] political usefulness in specific locations, contexts, and circumstances” (p. 251). This, Lee believes, allows one to be optimally adaptive in political challenges, potentially revealing to both scholars and activists potentialities for futurity which might otherwise remain invisible, like the subjects cast off from normal politics.

Lee’s general argument is convincing. There is plenty of empirical evidence that the politics of the marginalized can and does defy the “romance of democratic agency.” Likewise, Lee argues convincingly that the categories of “purity” and “contamination” distort our understanding of the meaning and significance of political acts. However, in the end, the reader may be left wondering, as I did, what this is meant to teach us about how we as students of politics should value these acts? Insofar as claiming space for one’s subjective will is always already political, I understand the significance of the acts that Lee highlights in his vivid vignettes: however, our job as social scientists is to not only identify these acts, but to explain why they matter—not only to the individuals engaged in them, but to the polity as a whole. That any act, by any person, even the politically cast off, might be political, is certainly true, but what kind of analytical leverage does it give us for explaining the world?

Lee doesn’t make the argument that these kinds of acts are precursors to more easily recognizable or “normal” democratic agency: indeed, he explicitly argues against such linearity. Instead, he wants us to value these kinds of acts in and of themselves, as a part of what he wants us to acknowledge as the murkiness of political reality. However, even if we accept such a stance, what is the payoff? Does it make us better political analysts and tacticians? If so, it would have been illuminating to be shown an example of how a seemingly personal act of ingenious agency can lead to an enlargement of the category of “citizen” as it is written in the “political script,” which Lee acknowledges is inescapable, even though it is also alterable.

On the one hand, Lee’s insistence that social change in liberal democracies ought not be romanticized as linear narratives of triumph by subjects made pure and citizenly by their awakened consciousness and that “abject subjects need to act in complicity with the given citizenship script even as they disrupt and appropriate it” (248), is well-taken. On the other hand, recognizing the complicated and contingent nature of agency does not necessarily give us insight into which acts we ought to consider political and which not, and how to tell the difference, or even whether we should spend time on this distinction. These intriguing questions lurk under the surface of Lee’s engaging text, but remain largely unanswered. And yet, it is in the answers to these questions that lies the explication of the full genius at work in the process of social change.