Most contemporary theoretical considerations of citizenship and political organization touch on citizenship’s antecedents in ancient Greece. To participate in the body politic, Athenian citizens had to be property owners, heads of a household, and male. In Citizenship (2015), Étienne Balibar turns to the Greek term politeia to trace the linguistic resonance in contemporary conceptions of political organization, including postnational and deterritorialized conditions. “The Romans ‘translated’ this as res publica, and the British of the classical period translated it first as polity, then as commonwealth, adopting alternate ancient etymologies,” Balibar writes (Citizenship, trans. Thomas Scott-Railton; 2015; Malden, MA: Polity). Out of this emerges a universal conception of political organization that has expanded to include more than propertied males in the more contemporary arena, leading Balibar to wonder “to what extent this category contains an unchanging kernel of meaning, and whether its application to a context that...
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December 2024
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Review Article|
December 01 2024
When Citizenship and National Belonging Diverge
From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture
. By Koritha Mitchell. Urbana
: Univ. of Illinois Press
. 2020
. xi, 274
pp. Cloth, $34.95; paper, $24.95; e-book, $14.95.The Makings and Unmakings of Americans: Indians and Immigrants in American Literature and Culture, 1879–1924
. By Cristina Stanciu. New Haven, CT
: Yale Univ. Press
. 2023
. x, 370
pp. Cloth, $45.00; e-book, $45.00.Minor Transpacific: Triangulating American, Japanese, and Korean Fictions
. By David S. Roh. Stanford, CA
: Stanford Univ. Press
. 2021
. xv, 214
pp. Cloth, $120.00; paper, $30.00; e-book available.Represented: The Black Imagemakers Who Reimagined African American Citizenship
. By Brenna Wynn Greer. Philadelphia
: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press
. 2019
. xiv, 312
pp. Cloth, $104.95; paper, $34.95; e-book, $34.95.Scales of Captivity: Racial Capitalism and the Latinx Child
. By Mary Pat Brady. Durham, NC
: Duke Univ. Press
. 2022
. xi, 297
pp. Cloth, $107.95; paper, $28.95; e-book available.
Rodrigo Lazo
Rodrigo Lazo is professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His books include Letters from Filadelfia: Early Latino Literature and the Trans-American Elite (2020) and the coedited collection The Latino Nineteenth Century (2015). He has published more than thirty articles on nineteenth-century literature of the Americas, Latinx literary history, and archival theory. Lazo is working on a history of Spanish-language newspapers in the United States.
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American Literature (2024) 96 (4): 757–768.
Citation
Rodrigo Lazo; When Citizenship and National Belonging Diverge. American Literature 1 December 2024; 96 (4): 757–768. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-11611101
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