This session seeks papers that explore the concept of citizenship in hemispheric American literature. The scale and severity of the current immigration crisis in the United States presses us to reconsider how the category of citizenship produces exclusions and abuses that arise from our national imaginary. Thus, we seek papers that broaden our understanding of citizenship beyond the spatially-bounded to better grasp the range of categories that bestow and rescind national belonging. Recent work, such as Carrie Hyde’s Civic Longing: The Speculative Origins of U.S. Citizenship, reframes citizenship as an imaginative longing that sutures the legal concept of the citizen to the cultural work of fiction. Thus, though we often construe notions of citizenship in opposition to the conference’s theme of the trans-national, this panel will consider citizenship in capacious ways to account for its multivalent and shifting nature. In doing so, this panel raises foundational questions about the legal, the national, and the imaginary. What is the relation between citizenship and the literary? How might categories of race and gender complicate or broaden the way we understand national belonging? What are the roles of art, aesthetics, and the imaginary in the emergence of the legal category of the American citizen? To answer these questions, we hope to gain a better understanding of how the speculative or the imaginary might help us to reckon with the scale of the current crisis around citizenship as well as its origins. We invite papers from all periods of American literature—from the colonial era to the contemporary.

To submit an abstract, please go through the NeMLA portal: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/User/SubmitAbstract/17564