Is it time to stop fantasizing about citizenship? In a provocative 2022 essay, the political theorist Linda Bosniak answers in the affirmative: if the twenty-first century has been primarily defined by “drastic democratic decay, left and liberal debility,” and a general erosion of faith in rights-based models of justice, then opportunities to mobilize citizenship’s nominally egalitarian potential on behalf of marginalized communities would seem to be increasingly limited (“Citizenship and Bleakness,” 384-85). Yet, as Carrie Hyde observes, even some of the most well-established forms of contemporary citizenship were initially “highly speculative” endeavours, produced through the conjoining of “what might or could be” with “what should or ought to be” in moments of literary invention (Civic Longing, 7, 16). In an era of hardening borders and widening wealth gaps, then, must citizenship necessarily be written off as an outmoded—even harmful—fiction, or is the concept still open to creative reconstitution?


With these questions in mind, this seminar invites proposals that examine how contemporary literature represents the breadth and/or limits of citizenship’s current imaginative resources. The aim is to discern what sorts of fantasies, speculations, and warnings about citizenship are emerging from the pages of recent fiction, as well as what this fiction can tell us about the ongoing utility of citizenship as a category for both analysis and community-building. Though the seminar will focus primarily on twenty-first-century fictions, papers which address how earlier literary engagements with citizenship anticipate, resolve, or otherwise speak to some aspect of the current impasse are most welcome, as are those which approach the fiction(s) of citizenship through the lens of specific genres or from different national (or transnational) perspectives. Topics that might be addressed include, but are not limited to:

• The form(s) of citizenship: how does literary style illuminate, or productively impede, current and/or emerging modes of civic relation?    


• The relationship between citizenship and the nation-state: is one thinkable without the other and, if so, how might such a separation be imagined in literature?


• Citizenship and migration: how do these phenomena inform one another? How might migrant or diasporic fictions critique, or rework, the norms of citizen-discourse?


• Citizenship and indigeneity: can (and should) citizenship be salvaged from the wreckage of settler-colonialism? What alternative possibilities for collective organization might indigenous ways of knowing make visible?


• “Unreal” citizenship: what, specifically, can non-realist modes and genres (e.g., romance, fantasy, utopian/dystopian writing) reveal about the everyday procedures through which citizenship is constructed?