COURSE OVERVIEW
The ideal of American citizenship has long laid claim to universal inclusivity and openness: citizenship, as both a legal status and a political-cultural identity, are supposedly accessible to all individuals within the polity. Based on a robust concept of freedom, and grounded in a fundamental notion of equal personhood, United States citizenship promised a form of political belonging free from the kind of status restrictions that defined citizenship in the aristocracies of 18th and 19th century Europe.
Yet the history of American citizenship is one marked by the exclusion, domination, and disenfranchisement of various groups defined as racially other, and thus outside the bounds of citizenship. How do we understand the coexistence of claims to equal democratic citizenship in the U.S. alongside the historical realities of enslavement, extermination, and other forms of racial violence? What does it mean to be an American citizen, and how as that meaning been shaped by the formation of race across space and time? Is citizenship a universal concept – open, in principle, to anyone? Or is it an exclusive concept – reserved for a select few? If racial injustice is not separable from citizenship, but somehow productive of it – that is, if racist structures shape how citizenship is interpreted and practiced – then can American citizenship be remade along more egalitarian lines?
This course will interrogate these questions, asking how race and citizenship have constituted each other over time. Through readings in political theory, American political development, history, and sociology, we will examine dimensions of American citizenship that emerge with, through, and against the creation of racial hierarchies: citizenship as a legal status, as a political-cultural identity, as civic responsibilities and cultural norms, and as a particular arrangement of institutional practices that define who is “inside” and “outside” the political community. Though this course focuses on the political theory of citizenship and not a historical survey, texts will engage with indigenous sovereignty, colonial America, slavery and the antebellum period, Jim Crow, and immigration through the 19th and 20th centuries. While much of the course is devoted to exploring the historical production of “Black” and “white” as categories of political belonging, we will also consider how notions of race and citizenship have shifted and developed through the experiences of First Nations and immigrant groups.
Throughout our discussions, we will also examine how dominated and oppressed racial groups have mobilized by both adopting and challenging prevailing notions of what it means to be a citizen. At the end of the course, we will end by considering how American citizenship might be refashioned in order to promote and sustain equal freedom and racial justice.