Citizenship and Bleakness

ABSTRACT

Responding to the editors’ prompt: ‘Has your relationship to the study of citizenship changed?’ I ask in this brief essay whether the language of citizenship possesses the resources to contend with the fairly dire set of circumstances we currently face. I suggest that the concept’s analytical and normative force relies on certain democratic and universalist horizons which are under siege or in some state of collapse, and I therefore wonder whether continuing to frame social analytics in citizenship terms might not presuppose as backdrop a political world that is vanishing. I also query, in preliminary terms, how much a conceptual project so often conceived and embraced as world-building in spirit can help make instructive sense of the proliferating devastations of this current moment.

KEYWORDS:

• Generations
• critique
• rupture
• affects

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. ‘To claim that the universal has not yet been articulated is to insist that the “not yet” is proper to an understanding of the universal itself; that which remains unrealized by the universal constitutes it essentially.’ (Butler 1997)

2. I asked related questions in earlier work in another moment: ‘If so many aspects and concerns of our collective lives can be articulated in the language of citizenship, how useful can the term really be in scholarly discourse? Citizenship too often seems to represent all things to all people; in the process it is often hard to know what is at stake and how the concept advances discussion at all.’ Bosniak 2006), at 35. Over the years, my work on citizenship has partly taken the form of a self-reflexive inquiry into citizenship’s ‘career;’; I’ve been concerned with ways in which the concept has been enlisted and contested by intellectual and political actors, pressed into expanded uses, as well as deconstructed and criticized. As noted here, I’ve at times imbibed some of citizenship’s magic, but in the end, I’m an anti-essentialist about citizenship.

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Notes on contributors

Linda Bosniak

Linda Bosniak is Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University School of Law.