As more countries are shifting to right-wing governments and nation-first policies, global cooperation needed to address pressing and interrelated issues, such as climate change and refugee crises, seems more elusive than ever. This shift also reinforces that a narrow, uneven, and often white supremacist notion of the citizen remains the dominant framework by which nation-states exclude others from the possibility of belonging. Literary scholars, nonetheless, recognize that the citizen may no longer be a viable framework. Scholars such as Michael Rothberg and Matthew Hart have already called for extraterritorial understandings of citizenship in literature to make sense of the post-9/11 order and juridical-spatial cracks in political geography, respectively. In his 2022 PMLA article, Hadji Bakara writes about the concept of citizen time in the context of refugee studies: “a historically constructed and highly political construal of time that excludes refugees as political and historical actors in the present, deferring rights and equality to some imminent future citizenship” (443). And yet, citizenship and its attendant rights and protections (however precarious) remain that which the refugee “cannot not want,” to translate Gayatri Spivak’s resonant phrase to a different context. This seminar thus asks if there are alternative frameworks that can repurpose citizenship for our current moment or recenter a different figure that can challenge the insularity in which we appear to exist. 

We invite contributions that explore how literature and literary study might help us to imagine such alternative frameworks as well as work that reevaluates or critiques existing interpretive methods whose unacknowledged subject is the citizen. Possible topics can include, but are not limited to:
 


Human rights and rightlessness (Paik 2016; Gundogdu 2014)
Critical refugee studies (Nguyen 2018)
Long-distance solidarity (Rothberg 2019)
Care ethics (Collins 2015; De la Bellacasa 2017; Mihai 2022)
Global climate justice (Táíwò 2022)
Ethnic studies, especially with a focus on undocumented people (Abrego and Negrón-Gonzales 2020)
Women and gender studies (Brandzel 2016)
Indigenous studies and critiques of settler colonialism
Citizenship and empire, both formal and informal
 


We welcome presenters working in all languages, historical periods, and theoretical frameworks as well as presenters whose work crosses conventional disciplinary boundaries.