Browsing by Subject "Citizenship"

My dissertation seeks to clarify the stakes of recent calls to increase civic friendship in our communities by initiating a conversation between contemporary and historical theoretical work about the requirements and consequences of using friendship as a model for social and political relationships between citizens. Friends’ lives are bound together by shared activity and by mutual concern and support; in what ways do relations between citizens, who often begin as strangers, take up these attitudes and behaviors? What kinds of civic friendship are possible in our contemporary democratic communities? How are they cultivated? And what are their political advantages and disadvantages? These questions guide the project as a whole.

I begin by canvassing some recent and popular work by Robert Bellah et al., Robert Putnam, and Danielle Allen in order to clarify the claims they make about different forms of civic friendship. The chapters that follow focus on the work of Aristotle, Tocqueville, and Adam Smith respectively in order to respond to various gaps I find in the contemporary accounts. I assess what each thinker, contemporary and canonical, can offer us today as we continue to think about the most sustainable and fair ways in which citizens can relate to one another in vast and diverse contemporary democracies. Along the way I address several important over-arching issues: the relationship between self-interest and care for others; the relationship between different sorts of equality and civic friendship; and the different roles that reason, emotions, habits, and institutions play in the cultivation of various kinds of civic friendship. I conclude that equality and justice ought to be both prerequisites and consequences of civic friendship, that self-interest is not a sufficient source for robust civic friendship and that instead some kind of imaginative and emotional motivation is needed, and that civic friendship must be understood as both a moral and a political phenomenon.

This dissertation examines how perceptions of beauty in Brazil reflect both the existing social inequalities and the struggles to produce a more egalitarian society. While hegemonic discourses about beauty in Brazil foster an upper-middle class, white standard, the working-class make claims to citizenship by redefining beauty according to their own affective, sensory experiences. As I see it, the affective relationship that plastic surgery patients have towards their own bodies is central to understanding why beauty is a source of social recognition in Brazil. In this dissertation, I argue that even though discourse attempts to discipline the body to perceive only the "truths" it produces, subjects reinhabit discourses through their immediate sensory experiences, opening up the political space to generate social change.

In order to access this form of "cosmetic citizenship," however, working-class patients undergo low-cost aesthetic surgeries in public hospitals, which are subsidized by the State and help build the national reputation of plastic surgeons. I argue that this national investment in beauty establishes personal appearance as a precondition for citizenship and inclusion in the nation. While media narratives construct beauty as a vehicle for upward mobility in Brazil, the medical discourse about beauty imagines the Brazilian population as becoming progressively homogeneous through "miscegenation" and surgery. These discourses depend on the raciology established by Neo-Lamarckian eugenics at the beginning of the twentieth century, and later popularized by the work of Gilberto Freyre.

This work offers a theological reading of and response to migration restrictions in the United States of America, focusing on their instantiation in the U.S.-Mexico border and on the discourses and practices of citizenship and alienage that support these arrangements. Unlike most works in Christian immigration ethics, this work not only highlights the negative effects of migration policies, but also unearths the basic assumptions grounding these policies, all while displaying the racial and theological imaginaries grounding them.

The first part of this work argues that the assumption grounding all migration policies is “the preferential option for one’s own people,” that is, the view that citizens not only may but must prefer or prioritize the life of fellow citizens over that of non-citizens. The first chapter draws on French theorist Michel Foucault and decolonial intellectuals to offer a reading of three non-theological arguments for migration restrictions, namely, security, economics, and culture. In short, those who believe the U.S. must have migration restrictions believe that aliens may threaten the security, economy, and culture—in short, the life—of citizens. The second chapter interrogates theological arguments for national borders, the most visible way of restricting migration, showing that ultimately theologians assume the legitimacy of Westphalian nation-states. The third chapter offers a theological reading of the concrete effects of border practices on “illegal aliens,” arguing that national borders will continue to exist as long as citizens assume both that “our people” means “fellow citizens,” and also that they may and must prefer and prioritize their life over that of others. The latter assumption is particularly troubling because it implies that the insecurity, poverty, and cultural denigration that aliens face—though perhaps saddening—is ultimately just. The central argument of the second, constructive part of this work is that Christians (and others) should not prefer or prioritize fellow citizens over non-citizens. Chapter 4 discusses the nature and task of citizenship in light of the parable of the Merciful Samaritan in Luke’s Gospel, and chapter 5 employs Hispanic theologians to articulate an alternative account of faithful citizenship with undocumented Latina/o migrants.

The doctrine of election holds the dissertation together theologically. The first part shows that the preferential option for one’s own people—even when proclaimed by a theologian—is a secularized performance of the doctrine of election: citizens elect themselves for life and belonging, but in so doing they damn the undocumented to death and anxiety. The second part shows that God’s election of the Jews, favor for the poor, and destiny of fellowship for the world sets Christians on a trajectory of border-crossing solidarity that opposes the preferential option for one’s own and de-borders belonging.

This dissertation, Inhabiting the City: Citizenship and Democracy in Caracas, asks how multiple modalities of citizenship arise in order to facilitate working-class and middle-class strategies to negotiate formal and informal structures of rights and obligations among individuals, local communities, and the nation-state. By examining mobile and locally fixed practices in multiple sites of Caracas, Venezuela, this work explores the ways that individuals assert claims to political and social rights that are bound to particular spaces of the city.

Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork in one middle-class and two working class communities, this dissertation explores the discursive formation of citizenships that are based on divergent conceptions of democracy. Although the notions of this mode of political organization are based on understandings of equality in the capital's working-class communities, many middle-class ideas are quite different. In more affluent communities, democratic ideals grounded in equality do not take into account popular notions of meritocracy that reinforce class hierarchy. Although many individuals in Caracas work to produce democratic spaces throughout the city, exclusions persist--and some go largely unnoticed.

Finally, I argue that the modes of belonging that many residents employ to negotiate spaces of citizenship vary according to factors such as race, class, gender, age, and geographic location. By analyzing citizenship in a city space that is as divided as Caracas--especially along class lines--I argue that studies of citizenship require attention to cultural transformations that are tied to social, geographic, and political relationships in local spaces. To conceive of the citizen as an individual with ties to the nation-state is too broad a scope to begin understanding the nuances of social and political belonging that ensure active participation within contemporary societies.

This dissertation centers on Antillean women’s brushes with the French colonial state in nineteenth-century Martinique and Guadeloupe. It argues that while nineteenth-century French Caribbean of African descent women were, by and large, ignored by colonial authorities—unsurprisingly, considered less-than-citizens and, more surprisingly, seldom targeted for or involved in interventions aimed at ‘moral uplift’—they found myriad ways to enact citizenship and forms of belonging. Close analysis of women’s encounters with colonial power in the French Antilles reveals the ways in which gender shaped the contours of women’s political subjectivities. Anchored and intervening in the broad, overlapping fields of Caribbean history, French imperial history, women’s and gender history, and labor history, this dissertation examines subaltern women’s political praxis as they engaged in the realm of reproduction writ large in the midst of their work in both plantation labor and non-plantation waged labor. I argue that, through these engagements, women often offered visions of home and citizenship that transcended the commodifying logics of slavery, racial capitalism, and colonialism.

From 1852 to 1910 Congress labored to find the right instruments to eliminate polygamy among the Mormons and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints struggled to retain its claim as the most American of institutions. What these struggles reveal about the shifting role of religion in the developing definition of American citizenship is at the heart of this dissertation. By looking at developing ideas about citizenship in this particular frame, the social and political history of exclusion and inclusion comes into focus and exposes the role religion played in determining who could lay claim to citizenship and who could not, who tried and failed, who succeeded, and why. In the end, the coercive measures of the state and their own desire to join the body politic drove the Saints to unquestionably abandon the practice of polygamy, a central tenet of their faith, so that they could be accepted as American citizens.

The battle over polygamy and the rights of polygamists was not limited to the floor of the U.S. Congress or the Supreme Court, although those sources are carefully examined here. Debates over polygamy and Mormons' right to be Americans also took place in sermons, novels, newspapers, and popular periodicals. Official actions of the state and popular discourses simultaneously defined citizenship and influenced how Mormons understood their own citizenship. This dissertation is a history of the discourse generated by Mormons and their antagonists, laws passed by Congress, and court cases fought to defend or deny the civil, political and social rights of Latter-day Saints.

Realism, Race and Citizenship: Four Moments in the Making of the Black Body, Colombia and Brazil, 1853 - 1907 investigates the visual and literary mechanisms used to refurbish racial and social hierarchies in Brazil and Colombia in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery. Chorographic paintings, scientific photographs, identification documents, and naturalist literature are taken to together to argue that: on the one hand, the slave is the fleshy object that defines freedom and, in the postcolonial moment, citizenship. In "Realism, Race and Citizenship: Four Moments in the Making of the Black Body, Colombia and Brazil, 1853 - 1907," I propose that in geo-political spaces where the abolition of slavery and the re-branding of work were intensely debated and violently fought over, realist programs of representation facilitated the propagation of modern racializing schemas. Chapters 1 and 2 study the watercolors created for the Comisión Corográfica (the pre-eminent mapping project of nineteenth century Colombia) and scientific photographs produced in Brazil. These chapters uncover the stylistic conventions that make possible the staging of blackness as visible and immutable biological inferiority and as cumulative category that encompasses a variety of physical and social characteristics including but not limited to skin color, occupation, costume, and physical environment. Chapters 3 and 4 argue that the disavowal of slavery structures Brazilian naturalist novels such as O Cortiço (Aluísio Azevedo, 1890) as well as legislative debates about the nation and the citizen. By focusing on the visual and narrative orchestration blackness, my dissertation provides a critical framework for understanding how realist aesthetic conventions configured (and continue to animate) discourses of race and citizenship in Brazil and Colombia.

The Organic Citizen investigates an underlying environmentalist sensibility that links texts and discourses from varied realms and disciplines - Indian reform, environmental policy, social reform, ecology, sociology and legislation. I contend that, taken together, these works narrate an ecological vision of national affiliation: a concept of the nation as an ecological, natural zone of interdependence and its citizens (or non-citizen inhabitants) as members of this environmentally-conceptualized nation. This shared narrative of natural collectivity gives rise to what I call an "organic citizen" - the literary-political figure of an individual imagined to be a natural member of an ecological national body. I show that this concept of eco-citizenship both informs and is informed by contemporaneous concepts of indigeneity (what it means to be native) and by the actual political positioning of the American Indian in the U.S. citizenry throughout the century.

In five chapters, I argue that environmentalism is a site in which subjectivity is shaped, initially establishing modes of assimilative collectivity at the turn of the last century and later providing a realm in which the terms of subject affiliation may be analyzed and revised. I show how environmentalist discourse is profoundly connected to democratic practice and membership and how it formulates models of citizen collectivity. I contend that this discourse encompasses significantly more than a narrowly defined set of conservationist concerns for ecological entities, and can be used as a site of activism. Certain forms of stories - narratives that question these terms of national affiliation- expose the nuances of environmentalist thought. This type of storytelling offers a means through which environmentalist thought can become a realm of citizen engagement or activist possibility, opening access to and agency within a participatory democracy. An examination of this eco-narrative, I suggest, provides useful insights into how land use and rhetoric give definition to the way U.S. citizenship is socially imagined, legally adjudicated, and independently or communally practiced in a democratic system.

The first chapter examines the simultaneous emergence of wilderness narratives with the science of ecology and discourses concerned about national and geographical assimilation of communities and individuals of ethnic difference. I draw upon the writings of social reformers, particularly Jane Addams, ecologists Henry Chandler Cowles and Frederick Clements, and environmentalists John Muir and Gifford Pinchot. Together, I argue they demonstrate how immigrant and impoverished subjects living in urban zones were rhetorically imagined and physically and metaphorically associated with natural entities. I contend that this literal naturalization makes immigrant presence less threatening to a national collective by converting these bodies and places into natural resources to be consumed for nationalist purposes. This version of citizenship imagines collectivity as a form of organicism, a process by which foreign subjects and non-citizens can be incorporated into a citizenry as natural resources while not necessarily legally constituted as citizens of the nation.

While the rhetoric surrounding land use began to take new political, constitutional and sociocultural form in the first wave of a formal environmental movement, there simultaneously was a dramatic jurisprudential shift in Indian status in the U.S. This chapter explores how the formulation of an "organic citizen" at the turn of the century draws upon circulating concepts of indigeneity. I bring together Indian reform policy, specifically the Dawes Allotment Act, environmental policy, particularly the Antiquities Act, and fictional writings by Mary Austin and George Bird Grinnell. These narratives demonstrate the consistency with which American Indians were imagined as organically connected to natural lands. I argue that the result is a concept of indigenous organicism that is predicated upon the Indian being publicly, although uncomfortably, imagined as a natural constituent of a citizenry and Indian land as a natural part of a national body. Chapter Three examines the fictional and political writings of Zitkala-Sa and Charles Eastman to consider how they use stories and their public roles to analyze the legal and discursive connections between an environmentalist sensibility and concepts of indigeneity. I contend that Eastman and Zitkala-Sa begin to use a language of rights and democracy within this eco-discourse as a way to insert the native as a rights-bearing citizen in the U.S. nation, putting forth a race analysis that ultimately disrupts the idea of ecological assimilation prevalent at the time. Reading their work alongside key environmental policies, like the Organic Act of 1916, Indian reforms, like the Citizenship Act of 1924, and Willa Cather's novel The Professor's House highlights the persistence of a concept of natural indigeneity that continued to be narrated even after American Indians are given legal citizenship.

Eastman's and Zitkala-Sa's use of the environmentalist/native link as a means for race critique falls out of environmentalist thought and practice in a critical moment of transition in the environmental movement. Their use of storytelling and sense of political right, however, lays the foundation for the type of environmental narrative that emerges with the second stage of the environmental movement. My fourth chapter shifts to this moment, focusing on Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac (1949) and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962). I argue that both authors use an environmental narrative, particularly storytelling, as a means to imagine citizen engagement in a participatory democracy. However, while Leopold and Carson incorporate a language of political rights, they do not carefully factor into their versions of national/ecological belonging and action the ways in which race and class identities affect the social, political, and legal standing of various subjects within the eco-nation.

My final chapter explores how a race and class critique in environmentalist thought and politics returns in the last quarter of the twentieth century. I draw from significant legislation and Supreme Court opinions that explicitly defined the political rights of ecological objects and species, such as Sierra Club v. Morton, the Endangered Species Act, and a series of legal battles that emerged around the construction of the Tellico Dam, particularly the Cherokees' resistance to its development. These documents and cases deliberate over the political standing and rights of natural, non-human entities, but they circumnavigate engagement with questions of political standing for geographically and socially marginalized human citizens in the U.S., although this issue is implicitly present and strategically drawn upon in their arguments. This lost component takes shape and political articulation in the following emergence of the environmental justice movement. The politics of voice - "speaking for oneself" - that emerges particularly out of indigenous environmental justice movements highlights the use of storytelling as an activist practice. In their careful novelization of environmental activism, Linda Hogan's Solar Storms (1995) and Ruth Ozeki's All Over Creation (2003) not only pinpoint the interconnections, but also the injustices that arise out of the way human and ecological subjectivities are legally and culturally constructed. I argue that both authors use the literary form to model how stories and the act of storytelling allow for the articulation of and/or resistance to certain terms of national affiliation. Both Hogan's and Ozeki's novels bring forth an expanded sense of environmentalism, showing that storytelling can redefine our roles as U.S. citizens and position ourselves as active agents in democratic discourse, policy-making and change.

We are living in another pivotal moment of environmentalist thought as new attention is given to the way environmental conditions are deteriorating and as popular culture begins to take interest in these issues. It is crucial that Literary Studies rigorously engage with these issues to examine the kinds of narratives being generated. While Ecocriticism and Native American Studies have remained somewhat marginalized from the core of Literary Studies, this project (particularly in this moment) argues that these types of criticism and theory have an imperative role to play in illuminating narratives of identity, nation, and citizenship.

My dissertation, <“>Transcending Borders: The Transnational Construction of Mexicanness, 1920-1935,<”> examines the conflicting attitudes towards "Mexicanness" or mexicanidad both in Mexico and the United States, an area that, Jos<é> Lim<ó>n, conceptualizes as "Greater Mexico." Beginning with an analysis of the Mexican postrevolutionary state's construction of nationalist culture, I argue that the transnational invention of Mexicanness through the circulation of the Aztec artifact reveals the possibilities for people of Mexican descent to reclaim public space and cultural citizenship on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. I examine the construction of Mexicanness through an analysis of the limitations of Mexican post-revolutionary literary production in generating a clear vision of Mexican nationhood as well as the possibilities for nation building offered by public spaces such as the museum and the monument (an outdoor museum). Tracing the cultural manifestations of Mexican nationhood as expressed by the state and by people of Mexican descent is essential to understanding how the nation is practiced and thus intimately intertwined with the practice of citizenship. Through an interdisciplinary analysis of the Aztec artifact's various incarnations as an archaeological artifact, created artifact, and spurious artifact, I contend that the artifact represents an alternative text for the study of nationalism in its ability to narrate a national identity ultimately shaped beyond Mexico's geographical borders.