The Norman Foerster Prize for the best essay published in American Literature in 2021 was awarded to Madeline Zehnder for her essay “Colonial Relations in Miniature: Affective Networks, Race, and the Portrait in Victor Séjour’s ‘Le Mulâtre’” (93:2, June 2021). An honorable mention was awarded to Michelle N. Huang for her essay “Racial Disintegration: Biomedical Futurity at the Environmental Limit” (93:3, September 2021). Members of the judging committee were Dixa Ramírez D'Oleo (chair), Brown University; Erica R. Edwards, Rutgers University; and Walt Hunter, Clemson University.
Citizenship remains one of the most pervasive and contested terms in literary and cultural studies. It has been both idealized as the remedy for the struggles of the disenfranchised and challenged as an exclusionary model of belonging built on structural inequalities and subjection. In reassessments of citizenship beginning in the 1990s, Lauren Berlant, Michael Warner, David Kazanjian, and others show how the abstractness of universalist...
