Violent Entanglements and (Be)longings: Anti-Black Constructions of Citizenship in Resistance Narratives

• In Event: Genealogies of Terror: Revisiting Violent Narratives and Vestiges of Disposability

Abstract

Citizenship studies has been instrumental for revealing the role of the nation in the governance of life and death. However, cultural historian Saidiya Hartman puts citizenship into crisis by demonstrating the entanglements between citizenship and slavery, where Black fungibility and abjection are necessary for the construction of the nation. I argue that migrant ‘resistance’ narratives, as framed by the ‘DREAMer’ movement, depend on the criminalization of Black bodies in order to (be)long to the nation. To challenge the lure of ‘resistance,’ I make use of undocuqueer activist documents and trace what I call an ‘undocuqueer movida’ (Sandoval).

Presenter

• Ruben Zecena, University of Arizona