Editors’ Note

There are few citizens in Citizenship. Our primary subjects here are the ones unnamed and unclaimed by nations, or those whose nations fail to confer upon them the protections of citizenship. They are migrants, refugees, the displaced, detainees, illegal immigrants. They are the unclassified bodies who labor, the travelers who disembark, the applicants who wait, the women who have too many lands to ever be, simply, home again. They are those who can participate in the political life of their state only through phone calls, through facial expressions, through hints and pleas, and those whose loves and ways of life are outlawed. They are those whose relationships, whose births, whose language, and whose suffering slip through the meshes of the state.

There are few citizens in Citizenship, but there are people for whom citizenship is a denied right, a contested category, or an undelivered promise. There are people who migrate, who fall in love, who work, who fight, who face unique and collective difficulties—and then there are abstract legal categories that do not begin to do justice (in any sense) to them. Their lives are profoundly shaped by the gaps between their own histories and the stable, unitary, static subject of the Citizen posited by legal systems. In this volume, writers Mary Bernstein and Nancy Naples, Jane Booth-Tobin and Hanrie Han describe the cultural, economic, and political structures that shape activism in Australia and the U.S. The visa, as Payal Banerjee and Sharmila Lodhia explain, is a particularly acute example of how national structures determine the course of lives. Immigration laws place international workers and abused women in situations of particular risk, wholly dependent upon others to accomplish basic tasks like renting an apartment or driving a car. These structures create gaps, negative spaces with nobody to settle where international workers belong, who should pay them, who can defend them against violence, who will provide their medical care. In a global postmodernity, how can one nation claim a person, and conversely, how can so many remain unclaimed? States do touch them, and economies do; networks of policing, surveillance, and information technology trace them. But they remain unseen as equal citizen-subjects.

Citizenship gives these subjects names and faces, challenging the politics of visibility that identifies them only according to the neoliberal economic needs and security interests of the state. They include real women like Bingai, the peasant woman who would not be displaced, in Daisy Yan Du’s description of the documentary that observes her rebellion. They include fictional women like Chris Abani’s Abigail, who aims to hold onto a tenuous subjectivity in the face of sex trafficking, as discussed in Ashley Dawson’s “Cargo Culture.” We remember real girls like Sunny, the racially ambiguous adoptee whose ethnicity may make her stateless in Malaysia, as described by ChorSwang Ngin. We feel with fictional migrant laboring girls like Estrella, whose dark skin and bilingual culture shape her life and literacy, in Jeehyun Lim’s analysis of Helen María Viramontes’ Under the Feet of Jesus. We recognize the mentally ill artist who is not allowed to speak, as Julia Kristeva eloquently laments.

It is because structures like immigration law and citizenship requirements fail to meet the complexity of global lives that Citizenship provocatively suggests new theoretical constructs. Charles Lee updates Giorgio Agamben’s idea of “bare life” to suggest an interstitial third space, a new form of identity between the wholesale disempowerment of the concentration camp and the full power of citizenship. Ashley Dawson posits a new kind of discourse, “cargo culture,” for human beings treated as cargo, shipped around the world to labor for others. Lee and Dawson challenge us to think of migrant workers not as exceptions to categories, but as the basis of whole new paradigms. Citizenship suggests alternative constructs to name a person’s connection to the collective in which she lives: her situatedness in communities, her political participation, her meeting and transgressing of borders, her memories, language, identifications, and her loves. Such a set of relations comprise what Seyla Benhabib and Judith Resnik identify as a “citizenship of place rather than...