The Rhetoric of Citizenship, Slavery, and Immigration: Fashioning a Language for Belonging in English Literature

With the rise of transnational migration, political factions ration the status of citizen against global diasporas, positioning citizenship as the primary space to assert opposition to hybrid forms of identity and multiculturalism. Simultaneously, however, contradictory ideals of inclusion compete using the same language, leading to confusions of citizenship rhetoric. This rhetoric—the vocabulary used to talk about citizenship, including in government legislation, in print and digital channels, and in everyday public life—obscures citizenship's deep normative divides, while exaggerating the nationalistic character of political membership. Located at the intersection of literary and citizenship studies, my dissertation constellates the literary text with issues of state governmentality and rhetorics of belonging in order to examine citizenship rhetoric from a literary perspective that is attentive to its affective and imaginary registers. Instead of citizenship as a form of rootedness, I foster a methodological approach that centres the role of movement—and in particular, the drive for authority over movement—in the imagining and practice of citizenship, in turn revealing the migratory and diasporic threads that underwrite modernity. While postcolonial and ethnicity studies have unravelled the complexity of national and ethnic belonging, my dissertation complements this existing scholarship by converging on citizenship rhetoric as a discursive formation shaped and altered by literature. I trace literature's role in configuring citizenship with sustained focus on Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative, Frances Burney's The Wanderer, Mary Shelley's travelogues and Frankenstein, Herman Melville's Benito Cereno, and Brian Friel's Translations. While historically rooted, this project is forward looking and considers how eighteenth and nineteenth century imaginings of the citizen still inform contemporary political practices.