After Citizenship: Belonging in an Age of Disposability

(4 Credits)

This seminar examines the future of citizenship in an era shaped by permanent emergency, digital governance, climate displacement, and mass surveillance. Citizenship is often framed as a stable legal status that guarantees rights and belonging. This course approaches it as a fragile and contested architecture, produced through law, bureaucracy, race, caste, gender, religion, and technology. Through interdisciplinary readings in political theory, law, history, and contemporary reportage, the course asks how citizenship is being transformed from a promise of protection into a conditional status governed by suspicion, productivity, ancestry, and risk. We examine how borders migrate inward, how documents and databases displace constitutional guarantees, and how populations are rendered provisionally included or permanently disposable. The course moves across multiple geographies, including India, the United States, Palestine, Kashmir, the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, and other global sites where citizenship is actively reengineered through registries, biometric systems, counterterrorism frameworks, climate governance, and carceral control. Attention is given to how colonial histories and racialized and caste-based regimes of power continue to shape contemporary forms of belonging and exclusion. Students engage with legal texts, testimony, archival materials, and narrative writing to develop a critical vocabulary for understanding citizenship today. The seminar emphasizes close reading, sustained discussion, and analytic writing. Primary readings foreground Black scholars and writers from the global majorities, including works by Saidiya Hartman, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Achille Mbembe, Nivedita Menon, Aihwa Ong, and Ghassan Kanafani, as well as selected legal texts, policy documents, and first-person accounts.