Theatre and Citizenship: Performing the Myths of We, the People

Prologue

Beautiful evening at a #MAGARally with great American Patriots. Loyal citizens like you helped build this Country and together, we are taking back this Country—returning power to YOU, the AMERICAN PEOPLE. Get out and Vote. GOP!

—Donald Trump, Twitter, November 1, 2018

I want to acknowledge what a harrowing time this is in US history, as well as an especially challenging one in which to be thinking about citizenship. The current multiple calamities—election fraud, numerous violations of both the Hatch Act and the emoluments clause,¹ the courts packed with unqualified, ideologically driven judges, the appointment of incompetent cabinet officials, and the open embrace of white supremacy are just a few of the horrors the country has endured since 2016—have forced everyone in the United States to confront what the rights and responsibilities of citizens are and should be. Perhaps nothing has prompted that confrontation more than the treatment of immigrants, particularly those seeking to cross the United States’ southern border to request legal asylum. The federal government has separated families at the border, caged children, and opened concentration camps.²Fear is palpable—especially within Latinx communities—and that fear has been met with utter callousness from those who believe the camps are necessary. During a 2018 episode of the conservative television show Fox and Friends, host Brian Kilmeade argued: “Like it or not, these are not our kids.... These are people from another country.”³ The idea that those who are citizens of a country deserve better treatment or at least different treatment in that country is not new to the twenty-first century nor unique to the United States. The tension between citizen and non-citizen has been part of the United States since its founding.

Introduction

We, the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

—Preamble, US Constitution, 1789

From the “beginning,” a word I put in quotations since there are no singular beginnings (only deeply ramified origin stories), citizens were interpolated through live performance. Written in 1776, the Declaration of Independence first reached the public as a broadside created by John Dunlap, a twenty-nine-year-old Irish printer in Philadelphia. The initial run of about two hundred copies was distributed as widely as possible at the time and read aloud to the public. Most of those who within a few years would cease to be subjects of the king and be cast as citizens of a democratic republic never read the Declaration. For them it was not a written document but an oral performance. The ideas it promulgated were embodied by the reader, and the nation it called into being populated by the same multitudes gathered together in towns and cities across the thirteen colonies, each person straining to catch every fateful word. Thirteen years later a more attenuated performance called forth “We the People of the United States” as the Constitution was defended by the Federalist Papers and debated on its way to ratification by the states. In 1789 “the people” could be taken for granted as an already existing discrete body hailed into being by the Declaration. “The people” were vaguely assumed to be citizens as the Constitution did not define them in any practical way. In her general history of the United States, written as an “old-fashioned civics book,” historian Jill Lepore asks, “What is a citizen? Before the Civil War, and for rather a long time afterward, the government of the United States had no certain answer to that question. ‘I have often been pained by the fruitless search in our law books and the records of our courts for a clear and satisfactory definition of the phrase “citizen of the United States,”’ Lincoln’s exasperated attorney general wrote in 1862.”⁴ Needless to say, Attorney General Edward Bates did not find anything that helped...