Reclaiming the Citizen and Renouncing Citizenship: A Case Study of an Arab Woman

Citizenship is essentially a “contested concept” that resonates with subjective and psychological implications (Crick, 2000, p. 3). By exploring Zainab Salbi’s autobiography Between Two Worlds (2005), this chapter examines how citizenship becomes a site of conflict for Arabs who seek to rediscover their identity in diaspora. Salbi’s experience as she journeys from Iraq to America becomes a casein point of how only by renouncing citizenship, as a socio-political construct that stipulates nationalism, can Arab newcomers become active citizens. Due to the lack of citizenship education in their home countries, Arabs tend to conflate the notion of the citizen with national identity. In effect, this study explores how some Arab immigrants tend to conceive citizenship as external – that is, as the obligation of ascription which negates any sense of psychological citizenship. By elucidating on how Salbi experiences citizenship in two worlds, this chapter deconstructs notions of citizenship based on a fallacious sense of duty that entails comradeship and notions of citizenship being synonymous with national identity.