Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York - Sarah M. Schulman
Tan's eagle eye juxtaposes unpredictably resonant texts to illuminate citizen rebels, rejects, and refuseniks as literary tropes. In this way she coheres troubled relationships to nationalism as a significant force in North American literature.
Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and Author of Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in t - Saskia Sassen
Bringing literature to bear on the ambiguity of citizenship opens up new vectors for positioning membership. An extraordinary book that can add to a social scientist's understanding of the subject.
Chair in Citizenship and Professor of Politics at the Open University - Engin Isin
In social sciences, if we have come to expect to see citizenship performed by wayward, precarious, queer, transient, Indigenous, colonial—or, in short, subaltern—subjects as a constitutive element of citizenship, Kathy-Ann Tan vividly illustrates in this book that it is about time social sciences meet humanities. She finds a lively archive in American and Canadian literary imaginations where such subaltern subjects take the center stage in performing citizenship in creative, autonomous, and subversive ways. In tracing the development of citizenship performed in literature from established subjects to alternative subjects, she makes a quintessential contribution and opens up a massive archive in literature from which to reimagine the political subject.
Chair of American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz - Alfred Hornung
The value of this book lies in the wide range of areas covered which go beyond the established canon of postcolonial literature. The new angle and approach are precisely in Kathy-Ann Tan's attempt to advance the transformation of existing nations by incorporating 'citizens" whose persuasions are still considered different and marginal. The inclusion of Philip Roth and the dialogue with queer and Indigenous studies is quite unusual and insightful. I know of no book that is based on such an original combination of work