Diasporic Citizenship: Inhabiting Contradictions and Challenging Exclusions

On May Day 2006, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of cities all over the United States in an unprecedented protest against the persecution of "illegal" immigrants. As spring moved into summer, the immigration debate in the United States increased with the temperatures and remains, not coincidentally, along with the war in Iraq, an unrelenting point of irresolution in contemporary U.S. politics. Across the Atlantic, only a few months earlier, France was rocked by riots and protests stemming from the deaths of two immigrant boys at a power substation. While the banlieues of Paris may have temporarily stopped burning, and while the protesters who shut down Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco may have returned to work, giving the thin illusion of business as usual, it is clear that the issues that gave rise to these protests remain alive and potent. These protests fiercely signal both the failure and the indispensability of contemporary citizenship. They set fire to what has already been smolderingly obvious: huge communities of people continue to be vital to first world economies even as they are continually reminded of their dispensability through the persistent denial of their right to citizenship. Indeed, to pose the question of immigration in the first world is to pose the question of citizenship and its intersection with the long histories of European colonialism and imperialism. Nevertheless, recent scholarship notes that citizenship in the form granted by the nation-state cannot fully encompass the multiple modes of belonging that are actually practiced, and it is no accident a growing body of scholarship is proposing an understanding of citizenship that is not grounded in the nation-state.

In the books under review here, Andrea Louie, Martin Manalansan IV, and Sandhya Shukla take up this decoupling of citizenship from the nation-state in their explorations of the production of cultural communities under conditions of dislocation. These books assert the possibility of citizenship in diaspora, of citizenship grounded in cultures whose relation to the nation is complex, circuitous, and uneasy. Through a consideration of Louie, Manalansan, and Shukla's work, I want to look at the contradictions and possibilities of diasporic citizenship. There is a crucial dissonance here, in that the subject of diaspora and the subject of citizenship do not map easily onto each other. The former emerges from a commitment to the communal and an insistence upon difference; the latter is founded upon the rights of the individual and the necessity of suspending difference in the name of the universal. Despite the problematic legacy of citizenship, these authors make clear that it remains indispensable for diasporic subjects. What their books reveal are the multiple ways in which we might reclaim citizenship for progressive politics in the fullness of an appreciation for its contradictions. It is in the tension between diaspora and citizenship that Louie, Manalansan, and Shukla locate the productivity of diasporic citizenship.

By not papering over the problematic legacy of citizenship, by attending precisely to the compromises it entails, citizenship can be excavated from the ruins of its exclusionary basis for diasporic ends. As observers of the history of citizenship recognize, it may be a noble concept but it carries an ignoble history. Examining the prehistory of modern citizenship, Susan Maslan argues that in its modern form, citizenship attempts to resolve a foundational divide between the "human" and the "citizen" upon which the early modern models of citizenship depend:

If we think that "human" and "citizen" are or should be corresponding and harmoniously continuous categories it is because we think in the wake of the 1789 Declaration. In the early modern political imagination, to...