Reconfiguring Citizenship and National Identity in the North American Literary Imagination (Citizenship Studies)

Literature has always played a central role in creating and disseminating culturally specific notions of citizenship, nationhood, and belonging. In Reconfiguring Citizenship and National Identity in the North American Literary Imagination, author Kathy-Ann Tan investigates metaphors, configurations, parameters, and articulations of U.S. and Canadian citizenship that are enacted, renegotiated, and revised in modern literary texts, particularly during periods of emergence and crisis. Tan brings together for the first time a selection of canonical and lesser-known U.S. and Canadian writings for critical consideration. She begins by exploring literary depiction of "willful" or "wayward" citizens and those with precarious bodies that are viewed as threatening, undesirable, unacceptable―including refugees and asylum seekers, undocumented migrants, deportees, and stateless people. She also considers the rights to citizenship and political membership claimed by queer bodies and an examination of "new" and alternative forms of citizenship, such as denizenship, urban citizenship, diasporic citizenship, and Indigenous citizenship. With case studies based on works by a diverse collection of authors―including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Djuna Barnes, Etel Adnan, Sarah Schulman, Walt Whitman, Gail Scott, and Philip Roth―Tan uncovers alternative forms of collectivity, community, and nation across a broad range of perspectives. In line with recent cross-disciplinary explorations in the field, Reconfiguring Citizenship and National Identity in the North American Literary Imagination shows citizenship as less of a fixed or static legal entity and more as a set of symbolic and cultural practices. Scholars of literary studies, cultural studies, and citizenship studies will be grateful for Tan's illuminating study. Willful citizens. Negotiating Americanness and renarrativizing the "national symbolic" in the American Renaissance : Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Walt Whitman's Democratic Vistas -- Playfully political : the female citizen-in-process in Gail Scott's Heroine -- Willfulness and the Wayward citizen : Philip Roth's American Trilogy -- Precarious citizens. Precariousness and the ethics of narration : Etel Adnan's In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country and Sitt Marie Rose -- Narratives of unhoming, displacement, and reluctaion : George Eliott Clarke's Whylah Falls and the Africadian community in Nova Scotia -- Citizenship unhinged : securitization, identity management, and the migrant in Amitava Kumar's Passport Photos -- Queer citizens. Sexual citizenship and the transgressive body : Djuna Barne's Nightwood -- Queer migration and citizenship in Caribbean Canadian writing : Diionne Brand's In Another Place, Not Here and Shani Mootno's Valmiki's Daughter -- Queer(ing the) nation : ACT UP and AIDS activism in Sarah Schulman's People in Trouble and Rat Bohemia -- Diasporic and indigenous citizens. Narrating contested spaces : denizens and resident alliens of the (new) metropolis in Dionne Brand's What We All Long For and Diinaw Mengestu's The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears -- Exile, migration, and the "poetics of relation" : Edwidge Danticat's Brother, I'm Dying and Dany Laferrière's The Return -- Citizenship deferred : Cherokee Freedmen versus Cerokee Nation in Shannon Ewel Foster's Abraham's Well and Tiya Miles's Ties That Bond The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom Literature has always played a central role in creating and disseminating culturally specific notions of citizenship, nationhood, and belonging. In this study, Kathy-Ann Tan investigates metaphors, configurations, parameters, and articulations of US and Canadian citizenship that are enacted, renegotiated, and revised in modern literary texts, particularly during periods of emergence and crisis.