Endorsements

Can reading make us better citizens? This book sheds light on how the act of reading can be mobilised as a powerful civic tool in service of contemporary civil and political struggles for minority recognition, rights, and representation in North America. Drawing on queer theory, studies of citizenship, postcolonial theory, active reading, and border studies, this book closely reads the work of American, Canadian, and Indigenous authors including Gloria Anzaldúa, Dorothy Allison, Gregory Scofield, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Erín Moure, and Yann Martel to offer new ways of thinking about citizenship in the United States and Canada. Crossing borders and queering citizenship is interdisciplinary in its approach and wide-ranging in its subject matter, discussing Chicana/o literature and performance, writing from the white trash community in the U.S South, Indigenous poetry, experimental Canadian language poetry, Latino writing, and a high profile open letter campaign targeting the Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper. The book explores how these authors offer elegant, creative, and transformative solutions to the realities of civic exclusion. Working within U.S. and Canadian cultural studies with a decidedly hemispheric outlook, Feghali theorises how reading creates empowered citizens, and shows how they can work to queer contemporary understandings of citizenship.