Cultures of Citizenship in the Twenty-First Century: Literary and Cultural Perspectives on a Legal Concept

In the early twenty-first century, the concept of citizenship is more contested than ever. As refugees set out to cross the Mediterranean, European nation-states refer to cultural integrity and immigrant inassimilability, revealing citizenship to be much more than a legal concept. The contributors to this volume take an interdisciplinary approach to considering how cultures of citizenship are being envisioned and interrogated in literary and cultural (con)texts. Through this framework, they attend to the tension between the citizen and its spectral others - a tension determined by how a country defines difference at a given moment.

Vanessa Evans is a settler scholar and assistant professor of American Indian literatures at Appalachian State University. Her research focuses on the ways diverse and distinct Indigenous novels from North America, Oceania, and South Asia represent Indigenous resurgence. She is also an associate managing editor for the Journal of Transnational American Studies.
Mita Banerjee is a professor and chair of American studies at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. Her research interests include postcolonial literature, issues of naturalization and citizenship, and medical humanities. She is the author of six monographs and a Principal Investigator in the research unit »human Differentiation« and co-speaker of the research training group »Life Sciences, Life Writing: Boundary Experiences of Human Life between Biomedical Explanation and Lived Experience, « funded by the German Research Foundation.