Insecure Citizenship: Michael Ignatieff, Memoir, Canada

This article links Michael Ignatieff's need to write memoir to his desire to explore what family, public service, and citizenship can mean when they are thought together. Ignatieff does not yet use memoir as most politicians do, to recall what public life was like or to set records straight. He writes as part of a process of self-invention and reinvention. In the process, the concepts of citizenship and national belonging move too, from a position of insecurity and migration as a challenge to national belonging, to a position of citizenship as securely patriotic and the focus of national security.