The legal and cultural history of citizenship is fundamentally fraught. In the popular imagination, citizenship has long been idealized prospectively through impassioned dreams of democracy and rights not yet realized. Yet, citizenship also depends on and produces nightmares of violence, dispossession, and disappointment.1 The very existence of the United States is predicated on the occupation of Indigenous lands, the enslavement of African and African descended peoples, and ongoing assaults on Indigenous sovereignty. US citizenship rests on settler colonialism, antiblackness, racism, sexism, heteropatriarchy, xenophobia, ableism, class, capitalism. . . . The list goes on. All too often citizenship functions as a “commonsense category of the social regime of white supremacy,” to quote Nicholas De Genova’s (2017: 37) entry on citizenship in Keywords for Latina/o Studies. And yet, because exclusion from the benefits associated with citizenship is so consequential, citizenship continues to be a touchstone for an array of people who seek to envision the world otherwise: within, against, and beyond the settler nation-state.

This special issue develops, defines, and seeks to give momentum to a “New Citizenship Studies” that grapples with the “both/and” of citizenship: its violent histories and imaginative possibilities; its political importance and limitations. Building on our own work and other recent scholarship that takes citizenship as a fraught but productive field of interdisciplinary inquiry, New Citizenship Studies examines the literatures, practices, and expressive cultures that legalistic approaches to citizenship often devalue, paying special attention to political imaginaries that operate outside of or in contradistinction to the violent logics of white supremacy and the settler nation-state. New Citizenship Studies does not treat citizenship as a universally desirable political goal nor as a guarantor of rights; instead, it understands citizenship as a vexed but potent juridical and imaginative concept that organizes ideas about belonging, access, and resources. In the spirit of David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829) and other texts that use the language of citizenship even as they criticize its exclusionary histories, New Citizenship Studies approaches citizenship as a contested and malleable political and aesthetic form that writers and activists have used to challenge the existing state of things and to imagine alternatives to it. By attending to the aesthetic dimension of citizenship as well as its political limits, New Citizenship Studies recognizes the formative role that literature and other expressive traditions play in the cultural making and unmaking of citizenship.

Over the past several decades, scholars have disrupted celebratory, progress-oriented narratives of citizenship that seek to remedy the failures and limitations of citizenship by expanding its scope rather than rethinking its structures and epistemologies. Whereas earlier work critiqued citizenship in binary terms through the paradigm of inclusion/exclusion, scholars in a number of fields have begun examining the fundamental limitations and violence of formal citizenship—in which inclusion and protection often double as code for absorption and assimilation. Recent scholarship in Indigenous studies, Black studies, Latinx studies, Asian American studies, critical refugee studies, disability studies, queer theory, critical race studies, and a range of other fields has opened up new approaches to citizenship by rethinking the meanings of inclusion, access, community, rights, and equity.2 For instance, as Jodi A. Byrd (Chickasaw Nation) (2011: xxiii) notes, when “inclusion into the nation-state” is posed as the telos for Indigenous communities, “there is a significant failure to grapple with the fact that such discourses further reinscribe the original colonial injury.” Work by Saidiya Hartman (1997, 2022) and others has unsettled the association between citizenship and freedom by excavating the afterlives of enslavement, the ongoing violences of settler colonialism, and the forms of subjection that fetter nominally free individuals, often through the mechanisms of citizenship and the language of rights.3 This scholarship has contributed to a heightened recognition of the violence of liberal notions of citizenship. It also has spurred a critical resurgence and reconceptualization of citizenship. For example, Audra Simpson (2007, 2008, 2014), Edlie L. Wong (2015), Martha S. Jones (2007, 2018, 2020), Koritha Mitchell (2020), Dennis Tyler (2022), and others have begun rethinking citizenship from the perspectives and practices of those whom the state routinely refuses to recognize or protect.

This work across the humanities presages a New Citizenship Studies. Our gambit in characterizing this new node and critical mass in the ongoing interrogation of citizenship as “New Citizenship Studies” is to give voice and velocity to a shift that has not yet crystalized as a critical movement per se. By identifying New Citizenship Studies as an emergent movement, with multiple genealogies, we are inviting other scholars to join the conversation and, in some instances, to see themselves as already engaged in this work.

We have inherited not a single sense of citizenship, but multiple, often Janus-faced notions of the concept. For many in the United States, writing and thinking about citizenship at any point in US history produces a sense of dread. It can mean staring at one’s own abjection, rejection, exclusion—and the abjection of others—and understanding this violence and the redoubled pain associated with it as among the constitutive features of citizenship. Nonetheless, many writers and activists are drawn to the term citizen because it provides a recognizable legal and cultural framework for claiming rights, access, and protection—and because legal recognition as a citizen has been and continues to be a matter of life or death. In such cases, citizen often functions as a rhetorical placeholder and political starting point for imagining new formations that have yet to be enacted or named. However, because citizenship is a technology of state power, even the most radical and creative uses of the term are haunted by its ties to the state. In this respect, the practical hope that draws many to the language and project of citizenship can entail disappointing tradeoffs in which expansive visions of community (the possible) are instrumentalized into the logic of the state (as it is).4

New Citizenship Studies approaches literature, the arts, and other expressive cultures as crucial sites of knowledge production that shape understandings of citizenship. This approach to literature requires a critical reorientation, a shift of vision and of method. Typically, scholars treat the law as citizenship’s master discourse, and they privilege the state as citizenship’s most important field of play. Similarly, accounts of the relationship between literature and citizenship traditionally frame literature as a response to and protest against the state. This approach celebrates the revisionist power of literature, but it also privileges the state as the primary arena for defining citizenship. In so doing, it treats literature as a secondary (and presumptively ineffectual) form of political expression. When scholars privilege legal sources and historically empowered authors (white men) as the source of the meanings of citizenship, they fail to recognize the cultural significance of traditions that theorize and enact conceptions of citizenship that exceed the epistemes and interpretive paradigms of the US nation-state and Anglo-American political thought writ large. This epistemic hierarchy is especially pronounced for a range of literary traditions outside of a white Euro-American canon whose cultural significance is often articulated through the framework of protest, resistance, and response.5

New Citizenship Studies recognizes the formative role of literature in creating (rather than reimagining) the meanings of citizenship; in so doing, it moves beyond the paradigm of literature as only resistance.6 In order to fully understand the history and present of citizenship, we need to attend to its cultural practice, as well as its speculative making in a variety of subjunctive forms—including but not limited to literature. As Carrie Hyde (2018: 9, 16) argues, literature and other “subjunctive formulations” of citizenship can be understood “as historically activated genres of political theory,” “where the possible (what might or could be) and the prescriptive (what should or ought to be) collide.” Understood thus, literature and other subjunctive forms do not merely point to alternate worlds not yet realized; they “create a scene for happening” that projects and calls forth new conditions of possibility (Quashie 2021: 59).7

Examining politics from a confined number of sources and (largely European) traditions reinforces white supremacist metrics for recognizing where and how theorizing about citizenship happens.8 The kinds of questions we can ask about citizenship change fundamentally when we approach the concept through the works, methods, and practices of those who cannot presume the protections of the state—people whose exclusion from formal citizenship has been the state’s condition of possibility. “What happens to our thinking about citizenship,” Derrick R. Spires (2019: 2) asks, if “instead of reading black writers as reacting to (or a presence in) a largely white-defined discourse . . . we base our working definitions of citizenship on black writers’ proactive attempts to describe their own political work”? What happens when we approach citizenship through Indigenous writing and organizing? Or from the perspectives and literatures of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers?9 How have writers and activists engaged the framework of citizenship to develop something more just and sustaining? And when does the framework of citizenship sap energy from articulating and enacting something more fulfilling that has yet to be named? The answers to these questions vary, but they offer different “angle[s] of vision” (Wright in Spires 2019: 16); they also require different approaches to the archive as we have received it.10

New Citizenship Studies limns the speculative possibilities of citizenship and attunes us to the forms of worldmaking and community that writers build as practitioners of political poiesis. This issue begins with the premise that an approach to citizenship grounded in literary studies can offer new insight into the past, present, and future of citizenship. This attention to literature is all the more urgent today in light of the marginalization of literary studies, the humanities, and higher education more broadly. Attacks on higher education, book-ban initiatives, and the defunding of the arts have the cumulative effect of foreclosing and constraining our capacity to imagine, collectively, more equitable visions of the world as it is and could be. What new stories and methods emerge when we engage with, learn from, and make connections among traditions that have historically imagined citizenship otherwise?

Origins and Principles

Every era makes new conversations about citizenship urgent. The 1990s, for example, witnessed an outpouring of reassessments of citizenship that sought to rethink citizenship in the wake of transformative work on race and gender in a number of fields, an expanding literary canon, and the cultural and political aftermath of the Reagan era.11 This special issue emerges, in part, from a series of formal and informal conversations we had beginning around 2017, when our books about citizenship and literature were in production.12 The 2016 Presidential election brought into view with sharper clarity for a wider range of people the ongoing realities of white supremacy, inequality, and exclusion. For some, the outcome was met with a mix of surprise and disappointment. For others, it represented an eerily familiar (even predictable) backlash—an illustration of misogyny and racism resonant with what Koritha Mitchell (2020: 2, 4–5) has termed “know-your-place aggression.”

The history of US citizenship is characterized not by inexorable progress but by switchbacks, reactionary declensions, and dreams deferred. The years following the 2016 election underlined this dynamic in a number of ways, including a series of anniversaries related to the legal history of citizenship. 2018 marked the one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, which codified the modern legal framework of birthright citizenship in the United States. 2019 marked the one-hundred-year anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment—which formally prohibited denying the right to vote “on account of sex.” These anniversaries mark events of Constitutional and legal consequence, but they also index what has not changed.13 They coincided with the increased visibility of the ongoing violence against a host of people: the police killings of Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, George Floyd, and others; conversations around misogyny and sexual violence under the umbrella of #MeToo14; the buildup to what would become Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022); the resurgence of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism, anti-Asian violence, and queer- and trans-phobia; the fights over the Dakota Access Pipeline; the growing documentation of state-sponsored violence in boarding schools for Indigenous children; the heightened instability of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) protections; the renewed political currency of explicit appeals to white supremacy and Christian Nationalism; and ongoing voter suppression—all of which mark with stark clarity the exclusions and limitations of formal citizenship. They remind us of the disjuncture between legal definitions of citizenship and the everyday experiences of a range of citizens and noncitizens in the United States. They also remind of US citizenship’s “changing same.”

Citizenship is a conceptual palimpsest with many ideas and practices mapped onto it that exceed its legal uses. Its meanings are messy, polyvalent, contradictory, and fraught. We take the following principles to be core to New Citizenship Studies:

  1. New Citizenship Studies understands that ideologies about whose voices and lives matter are as consequential as legal definitions of citizenship—and that literature and literary studies contribute to these ideologies. Literature and the speculative arts play a formative role in shaping the grammars, practices, and imaginaries of citizenship and other forms of collectivity. They illuminate possibilities for sovereignty, personhood, and community that US law and state-centered thinking tend to foreclose; they also provide ways of telling new stories about ourselves and for reexamining archives not built for articulating such stories.15

  2. New Citizenship Studies recognizes narrative forms as dynamic sites of theorizing that embed impactful stories about citizenship, belonging, rights, protection, kinship, care, affection, and the collectives we form. It moves beyond the romance of resistance and attends to the immanent meaning-making practices people have developed proactively for themselves, paying particular attention to the voices, forms, and methodologies that Euro-American canons, epistemologies, politics, and institutions try to marginalize or silence.16 Examining citizenship through the works of those who cannot presume the state’s protections challenges deterministic and triumphalist accounts of legal history; it also provides new ways of reading the law itself.

  3. New Citizenship Studies wrestles with the ongoing failures of citizenship—failures that for many Americans, especially white Americans, have historically not been failures at all. It does not approach US citizenship as a universally desirable goal nor as an equally empowering structure; it recognizes the historical and ongoing importance of citizenship without idealizing it. The legal status of citizenship is often a matter of life or death, but the mere fact of being a US citizen has never been enough to guarantee protection from either state agents or nonstate actors. And, in some instances, US citizenship entails the loss of sovereignty, identity, and agency.

The Essays

This special issue takes citizenship as a flashpoint for theorizing the dynamic ways people have shaped and imagined the ideas, practices, and aesthetics of community. The essays examine citizenship through a variety of sources and across a range of genres, including fiction, poetry, periodicals, sketches and treatises, testimonies, and legal documents. The essays also track how writers draw on and improvise on established literary tropes, modes, and traditions, including sentimentalism, the bildungsroman, occasional poetry, and periodical culture. These works exemplify the wide array of venues through which people collectively imagined citizenship; they also dramatize the important role that literature and other extralegal forms play in the cultural constitution of citizenship.

Many of the essays consider formal citizenship, but they are also invested in articulating other ways of belonging and relation that people have created for themselves. When the essays do take up formal citizenship they do so not as a mechanism for liberation but rather as a technology of power that has reinforced subjection—save for brief moments of potential reset that have, to date, been followed by backlash and retrenchment. The works gathered here also challenge the ongoing tendency to periodize American literature around events (antebellum/postbellum, Civil War, Reconstruction, interwar years, etc.) that privilege chronological progress narratives constructed largely in the service of white nationalist mythologies.17 The multiple origin points in the essays highlight the overlapping temporalities and spaces of citizenship: the durée of the long emancipation, ongoing settler colonial violence and occupation, queer time and relationality.18 Collectively, these sources reveal the at times contradictory, at times interconnected, and at times parallel ways writers engage with citizenship—ranging from desire and reform to refusal and inoperability.

Recognition is core to the way critics have conceptualized citizenship and the politics of literature more broadly. In the sentimental tradition, for example, characterological identification is often understood and valued as a stepping stone to political recognition and enfranchisement. And yet, as Xine Yao (2021: 14) argues, “To acknowledge sympathy only as feeling across difference erases its violent origins in the matrices of domination that produce the system of racial difference.” Insofar as sympathy is a precondition for belonging, it demands a level of transparency that elides what Édouard Glissant (1990: 189) terms the “right to opacity”: a right to refuse legibility and therefore incorporation on terms set by white colonial and settler power. The meanings of opacity vary within different histories of racialization. As Erin Suzuki observes in “Transparent Citizenship: The Racialization of Privacy in Post–World War II Japanese American Fiction,” the “ascription of inscrutability or ‘unfeeling’ to the figure of the Asian American” exposes the “limits of the politics of recognition.” Suzuki draws on Hisaye Yamamoto’s short story “Wilshire Bus” (1951) and John Okada’s novel No-No Boy (1955) as case studies for rethinking the “transparent citizenship” of Japanese Americans, who are subject to “racialized surveillance and policing in the name of national security.” Suzuki argues that these midcentury Japanese American texts offer “an aspirational, if often elusive, model for both Asian American and multiethnic solidarity movements whose constituents continue to occupy an ambivalent or ambiguous relationship to the figure of the rights-bearing citizen.”

Several contributors examine the centrality of print culture to the making of citizenship. Kathryn Walkiewicz’s “The Sentimentalist Terrain of Ora V. Eddleman Reed’s Twin Territories Fiction” identifies Ora V. Eddleman Reed—editor of and contributor to Twin Territories (1898–1904), a magazine in the Muscogee Nation, Indian Territory—as a “vital contributor” to “Indian Territory’s rich literary and media landscapes.” Reed’s fiction uses “sentimentalist tropes to assert the necessity of tribal autonomy,” but, as Walkiewicz observes, her representation of “Indian Territory as a space of regenerative domesticity—a sentimentalist terrain” also reinforces “racialized notions of Indigeneity.” In light of the lack of evidence that Reed was an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation, the essay conceptualizes Reed as a “good territorial citizen”—a concept that draws meaning from Reed’s literary advocacy for Indigenous sovereignty over Indian Territory (rather than from her own citizenship status). Sidonia Serafini’s “‘Unquestioned Citizenship’: History, Poetry, and Black and Native Military Service in Hampton Institute’s Southern Workman” takes up the politics of print culture through its engagement with poems published by Black and Native historians and poets in the Hampton Institute’s Southern Workman (1872–1939), including Sarah Collins Fernandis (1863–1951), Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906), Arthur C. Parker (Seneca, 1881–1955), and Hen-toh (Wyandot, 1870–1927). These writers stress that military service should guarantee formal citizenship, but they also develop what Serafini terms unquestioned citizenship: a sense of citizenship that “place[d] value on the formation of social, cultural, racial, and familial coalitions within—but separate from—the larger American nation.” These writers saw themselves as “soldiers, fighting not with a gun on the battlefield but fighting with the pen in the public sphere to claim Black and Native peoples’ place as unquestioned citizens.” By conceptualizing literature as a form of warfare, even in times of “ostensible peace,” Serafini also brings to light the “female figures on the periphery of the war effort.”

Xiomara Santamarina, Ajay Kumar Batra, and Eve Eure show how Black Americans and Black Cherokees in the nineteenth century improvised modes of affiliation through and against formal citizenship and racial capitalism. Santamarina’s “Market Nation: Forging Economic Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century African America” draws on two mid-nineteenth-century proto-sociological sketches by Joseph Willson and Cyprian Clamorgan to examine the benefits and perils of deploying “an ideal of economic citizenship that translated Black material successes and social mobility into an extra-legal symbolic citizenship.” These sketches are part of a larger tradition of writing by free African Americans that sutures citizenship, labor, and economic uplift. Whereas Santamarina’s “Market Nation” examines economic success as the measure of proper citizenship for free Black Americans, Batra’s “Becoming ‘Fellow-Servants’: Slavery, Theft, and Improper Fellowship in the Nineteenth-Century South,” examines theft—rather than private ownership or possessive individualism—as the basis for building fellowship among fugitive slaves. In the 1863 deposition by Octave Johnson that Batra discusses, theft is more than a tactic for survival amid hostile conditions; it is a creative practice of “improper fellowship” that forged “bonds of communal reciprocity” outside of enslavement’s predatory racial capitalism. In a moment of extreme flux—when the possibilities for Black freedom, let alone Black citizenship, were unclear—Johnson and his compatriots point us toward an alternative to the “burdened individuality” (Hartman 1997: 115) upon which Reconstruction eventually hinged.

Where Batra and Santamarina focus on enslaved and free Black people engaging with US citizenship and enslavement in the middle of the nineteenth century, Eure examines how a Black Cherokee family navigated kinship, citizenship, and the legacies of enslavement at the turn of the twentieth century. In “Intergenerational Testimonials and the Politics of Black Cherokee Belonging,” Eure examines a Black Cherokee family’s attempt to claim formal Cherokee citizenship in a series of applications and appeals that spanned multiple decades. Eure reads these documents as intergenerational testimonials: “an emergent literary practice that created a Black Cherokee politics of collective belonging defined by intergenerational community and family knowledge and relationships.” These testimonials show how forms of fellowship deemed improper between enslaved Black people and Indigenous people haunt future generations.

What does it mean to live under “the double-bind of choice under settler colonial conditions”? Florencia Lauria’s “More than ‘A Matter of Deciding To’: Citizenship, Border Positionality, and Irresolution in Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman” examines irresolution as a form of refusal. Building on the model of refusal developed in Audra Simpson’s Mohawk Interruptus (2014), Lauria uses the term border positionalities to describe “the unresolved and unsettled tension between the characters’ Indigenous and settler political identities.” For the Chippewa characters in Erdrich’s The Night Watchman (2020), Lauria argues, “all choices are irresolute, inadequate, and contaminated.” Refusal, as Lauria frames it, is not about whether one accepts or declines; rather, it is “a demonstration of the difficulty of absolute choice” amid the unresolved tensions of settler colonialism.19 These tensions subtend US imperialism more broadly. Joseph Isaac Miranda’s “The Suspended States of Latinx Literature” examines the impositions and inadequacies of US citizenship in the context of the Insular Cases (1901–25), which “legitimized the suspension of Puerto Rican sovereignty in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War” and created a qualified form of citizenship. Drawing on Justin Torres’s We the Animals (2011), Miranda shows how the “legal maneuvers” of the Insular Cases are “entrenched in the representation of Latinx Literature.” Miranda reads Torres’s novel as a distinctly Puerto Rican bildungsroman, in which the protagonist’s “suspended maturation” and “infantilization” mirrors the US empire’s investment in keeping Puerto Rico in a perpetual state of childlike pupilage.

Taken together, the essays highlight the “lived contradictions between US citizenship and citizenship” in other communities (Lauria), on other terms, and in other sites. The essays track the various ways writers and practitioners have engaged with citizenship, as well as related frameworks such as fellowship, kinship, relation, and entanglement. They point to not one literary history of citizenship, but rather multiple, overlapping traditions, temporalities, and aesthetics. By tracking plural idioms, imaginings, and practices of citizenship across multiple critical traditions, this special issue invites a reading practice based on “connection.” To invoke Sunny Xiang’s review essay in this issue, “by reimagining comparison as connection,” critics can “give new meaning to a politics of recognition, one in which seeing each other is more important than being seen.”

We bring this introduction to a close not knowing the future world into which it will enter. It is hard to write about citizenship without considering the meanings it will take on in the future, because it is haunted backward and forward in time. Given the political problems that already beset the moment in which we write, we cannot help feeling a sense of foreboding. Yet, the uncertainties that surround each act of writing about citizenship are part of what has drawn so many writers to the term, even as they seek to write beyond its meanings in the present. Ultimately, this introduction, too, is one incitement—in a longer history of incitements—that looks ahead to new connections, collaborations, and beginnings.

Notes

1

See Hughes 1994; Rusert 2015; Fuentes 2016; Shklar 1991; Hildebrandt et al. 2019.

2

For a sampling of related scholarship published in the last ten years, see: “Contested Citizenship: Legacies of American Slavery,” an online forum (hosted by Black Perspectives and the Gilder Lehrman Center in 2021); Altschuler 2023; Best 2018; Blackhawk 2023; Brady 2022; Bruce 2021; Byrd 2021; Crawford 2023; Escobar 2023; Espiritu et al. 2022; Field 2014; Fleming 2022; Greer 2019; Han 2019; Hardison 2014; Hirschmann and Linker 2015; D. Jones 2021; M. Jones 2018 and 2021; Kazanjian 2016; King 2019; Mitchell 2020; Nguyen 2012; Le-Khac 2020; Miles 2015; Pegues 2021; Pexa 2019; Pickens 2019; Pinto 2020; Ponzio 2022; Roberts 2021; Roh 2021; Saguisag 2018; Saldaña-Portillo 2016 and 2019; Schalk 2022; Schlund-Vials 2016; Sépulchre 2021; Simpson 2014; Stanciu 2023; Stanfield 2022; Tyler 2022; Walkiewicz 2023; Wong 2015.

3

See, for instance, Best 2004 and 2018; Crawford 2023; DeLombard 2007 and 2012; Dayan 2011; Mansouri 2020; Miles 2015; Roberts 2021; Sharpe 2016; Sirenko 2023; Staidum 2022; Tillet 2012; Walcott 2021; Wong 2009 and 2015.

4

Here we take inspiration from José Esteban Muñoz’s (2009) use of “educated hope” and Lauren Berlant’s (2011) and Nancy Bentley’s (2018) use of “cruel optimism.”

5

See Quashie 2012: 3–5; Mitchell 2020: 40–42; Spires 2019: 25–26.

6

Hyde 2018: 15–16; Spires 2019: 25–26.

7

Kevin Quashie argues that “subjunctive utterances, through their wishfulness, seem to create or manifest a scene for happening, as if the subjunctive is a spell that casts its subject into the suspension of an imaginary” (Quashie 2021: 59).

8

This method follows from African American literary critical traditions and Barbara Christian’s (1987: 58) insight: “For people of color have always theorized—but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic. And I am inclined to say that our theorizing (and I intentionally use the verb rather than the noun) is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language, because dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking.”

9

How, for example, “could historical struggles over borders, citizenship, and identity by Latina/o and immigrant groups help to contextualize and challenge our thinking about these important and contemporary topics,” asks Josue David Cisneros (2014: viii)? And what if we theorize citizenship from the vantage of refugees and others for whom the so-called “gift of freedom” is used coercively by the state to elicit and demand gratitude and loyalty (Nguyen 2012)? How can an attention to “homemade” models of citizenship, kinship, and placemaking reorient understandings of political membership, community, and belonging (Mitchell 2020; Brooks 2008; Bentley 2009; Fielder 2020)?

10

See, for instance, Hartman 2022; Nunley 2023; Trouillot 1995.

11

See Berlant 1991 and 1997; Burgett 1998; Castronovo 1995; Delany 1999; Harris 1993; Isenberg 1998; Kerber 1997 and 1998; Moon and Davidson 1995; Morrison 1992; Nelson 1998; Reid-Pharr 1999; Smith 1997; Shklar 1991; Wald 1995; Warner 1990. As the decade came to a close, Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection (1997), among other works, provided a fundamental and radical reorientation in our understanding of citizenship and the law as mechanisms of subjection.

12

These conversations developed across a range of forums, including: “Re-Framing the Constitution: Futures of the Fourteenth Amendment” (organized by Keith McCall and Scott Pett at Rice University, October 5–6, 2018); a roundtable on Citizenship and Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies (organized by Gordon Fraser and sponsored by MLA’s Nineteenth-Century Literature Forum, January 9, 2021); and a roundtable and seminar on citizenship that we co-led at C19 on October 17 and 23, 2020. (The response to the C19 CFP was so robust that we had to divide the seminar into two sessions.) These forums revealed the breadth of thought on and ongoing interest around citizenship.

13

This way of understanding the history of US citizenship is informed by Hartman’s (2022: chapter 4) analysis of the “nonevent of emancipation”; Christina Elizabeth Sharpe’s (2016: 12) observation that “the means and modes of Black subjection may have changed, but the fact and structure of that subjection remain”; and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s (2022: xiii) reminder that the long afterlives of enslavement function “as affirmation of a kind of deeply constrained and compromised conception of democracy and liberty in the first place.”

14

Tarana Burke coined the phrase Me Too in 2006.

15

For related work on archives see, for instance, Hartman 2022; Keith 2013; Nunley 2023; Trouillot 1995. Our use of grammars draws on Spillers 1987.

16

Our attention to imminent meaning-making practices draws on Brown 2009; Foreman, Casey, and Patterson 2021; Foster 2005; Mitchell 2020; W. Johnson 2003.

17

For recent work rethinking these chronologies, see Marrs 2015 and “Revisioning Reconstruction,” a special issue of ALH (2018).

18

On the “long emancipation” and the durée of emancipation, see Walcott 2021 and Staidum 2022.

19

On refusal more broadly, see, for instance, Bernstein and Er 2022; Campt 2019; Harney and Moten 2013; Moten and Hartman 2016.

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