From Prohibited Immigrants to Citizens: The Origins of Citizenship and Nationality in South Africa. By Jonathan Klaaren. Cape Town: UCT Press, 2017.

• Date: 01 June 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12406
• Published date: 01 June 2019

Americans of the structural causes of poverty, future “economic

upheaval” (235) will yet transform the cultural discourse. If

anthropology’s cultural lens directs us to a vision too distant, then

perhaps Bridges might have concluded more constructively with

an agenda for legal reformers.

The disappointments of the conclusion notwithstanding, the

heart of The Poverty of Privacy Rights demands reading as a signifi-

cant contribution to—and critique of—rights. The patchwork quilt

of privacy law today appears much more coherent when skillfully

woven through Khiara Bridges’ multidisciplinary toolkit and,

importantly, when viewed through the eyes of poor women. Their

lives attest that inequality does not merely make rights less effec-

tive; under the most severe conditions, inequality excludes some

people from the umbrella of rights altogether.

References

Bridges, Khiara (2011) Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Raciali-

zation. Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press.

Isenberg, Nancy (2017) White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America.

New York: PenguinBooks.

***

From Prohibited Immigrants to Citizens: The Origins of Citizenship

and Nationality in South Africa. By Jonathan Klaaren. Cape

Town: UCT Press, 2017.

Reviewed by Penelope Andrews, New York Law School

Jonathan Klaaren has written an important study of the historic

formation of South African citizenship against the backdrop of its

admirable 1996 Constitution and Bill of Rights, its embrace of

dignity and equality as founding principles, and especially the

commitment in the Preamble: We, the people of South Africa …

believe that South Africa belongs to all who live within it, united in our

diversity. Klaaren refers to the inherent contradictions of this con-

stitutional promise in contemporary South African public dis-

course and judicial decision making, notably the dichotomy

between citizens and residents and citizen residents and citizen

nonresidents. He locates the origins of these contradictions in the

period leading up to as well as after the establishment of the

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