Abstract
Citizenship tests are arguably intended as moments of hailing, or interpellation, through which norms are internalized and citizen-subjects produced. We analyse the multiple political subjects revealed through migrants’ narratives of the citizenship test process, drawing on 158 interviews with migrants in Leicester and London who are at different stages in the UK citizenship test process. In dialogue with three counter-figures in the critical naturalization literature – the ‘neoliberal citizen’; the ‘anxious citizen’; and the ‘heroic citizen’ – we propose the figure of the ‘citizen-negotiator’, a socially situated actor who attempts to assert control over their life as they navigate the test process and state power. Through the focus on negotiation, we see migrants navigating a process of differentiation founded on pre-existing inequalities rather than a journey toward transformation.
Highlights
Citizenship tests and ceremonies provoke and fascinate
We argue that citizenship test processes are important ‘windows into the state’ (Löwenheim and Gazit 2009), from which to observe the exercise and negotiation of state power
We explore the different political subjects present in the literature that critiques the citizens that the test aims to ‘make’ or foster
Summary
I am the oldest sister and daughter in law in their house, that’s why I need to go out on my own because I need to cooking, clean everything so I have to go (Woman, from Bangladesh, with Indefinite Leave to Remain (Interview 20)) Such strategies reveal subjects who use the prospect of naturalization for their own personal negotiations and subvert some forms of patriarchal power and inequality while participating in the unequal test process and its fetishization of English fluency. We qualify these responses not necessarily as ‘ruptures’ but, rather, ways in which individuals carved out a separate definition that did not draw on the test’s practicalities or the discourses surrounding it but remained within the broader ‘script’ Some participants defined their citizenship and political subjectivity in confident, independent terms but as an assertion of fitting into and belonging to the existing system in which, for example, they are more knowledgeable and connected than other migrants or even British people.
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