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Early one morning in 1996, the sanctuary of a Parisian church was suddenly disrupted by a police raid. A group of undocumented immigrant families had taken refuge in the church under threat of deportation due to the French state's increasingly restrictive immigration policies. Rather than disperse and hide, these sans-papiers-people literally without papers- came together to bring to light the deep contradictions in the French state's immigration policies and practices. Reinventing the Republic chronicles the struggle of the sans-papiers to become rights-bearing citizens, and links different social movements to reveal the many ways in which concepts of citizenship and nationality intersect with debates over gender, sexuality, and immigration. Drawing on in-depth interviews and a variety of texts, this disquieting book provides new insights into how exclusion and discrimination operate and influence each other in the world today.
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Reviews
"Raissiguier makes a passionate and rigorous contribution to the contemporary debate on how traditionally universalist France treats and defines subjects who do not fall neatly within Republican categories. This is a compelling and timely study about who has the right or power to symbolize Frenchness."
Mireille Rosello, University of Amsterdam
"[Reinventing the Republic makes] an important contribution to the study of the struggle for rights by migrant movements in Europe . . . Catherine Raissiguier takes a novel approach to the French debate by substituting the central concept of personhood for the normative considerations defined by elite national politics."
Catherine Lloyd, Signs
"What a smart, engaging book. By taking seriously the experiences, ideas and strategies of African women in France, Catherine Raissiguier makes visible the women activists inside the vibrant sans-papiers immigrant rights movement. She shows us why social movements cannot be understood without a feminist curiosity."
Cynthia Enloe, author of The Curious Feminist