As Carrie Hyde and Derrick R. Spires point out in a recent special issue of American Literature on “New Citizenship Studies”, citizenship has long been idealized in the popular imagination “through impassioned dreams of democracy and rights not yet realized,” while it at the same time “produces nightmares of violence, dispossession, and disappointment”. While earlier critical work has framed citizenship in binary terms through models of inclusion or exclusion, recent criticism has begun to explore the limitations of formal citizenship, opening up new approaches beyond legal definitions of the term. This course aims at addressing citizenship’s violent histories and imaginative possibilities by examining how U.S. writers have used literature to represent and (re)think the meaning of nationhood, race, migration, and belonging. We will discuss texts by David Walker, Walt Whitman, Rudolph Fischer, and James Baldwin, along with more recent writings and critical essays on the concept of citizenship.
- Trainer/in: Pisarz-Ramirez Gabriele