In the April issue of Law & Politics book review, Julie Novkov, Department of Political Science and Women’s Studies, University at Albany, SUNY, reviews Ediberto Román’s Citizenship And Its Exclusions: A Classical, Constitutional, And Critical Race Critique, New York: New York University Press, 2010 (Critical America Series):
Ediberto Román’s CITIZENSHIP AND ITS EXCLUSIONS: A CLASSICAL, CONSTITUTIONAL, AND CRITICAL RACE CRITIQUE primarily analyzes exclusionary and partial practices of state recognition of citizenship in the United States. Román identifies several ways that citizenship as a concept, despite its universalist aspirations, fails to embrace all those subject to the laws of the United States in equal ways. Relying on T.H. Marshall’s tripartite classification of citizenship (political, civil, and social), Román shows in historical and contemporary terms that members of some groups (women, African Americans, and Latinos, for instance), do not achieve full access to the rights of citizenship in Marshall’s terms. However, he also notes that millions of individuals living under the sovereign authority of the United States possess rights of citizenship only at the whim of Congress because they live in territories rather than states. His goal is to show that, while “Western societies have uniformly accepted the aspects of citizenship discourse that have championed equality . . . these same societies have repeatedly denied disfavored groups full social, civil, and political citizenship rights” (p.12).
Read the full review here: Vol. 21 No. 4 (April, 2011) pp.204-207.