From one perspective, “subjects” and “citizens” mark a distinction between discrete formations of state power: on the one hand, feudal regimes and absolutist monarchies, in which peoples are subject to the sovereign power of the monarch; on the other, modern nation-states (republics or constitutional monarchies) organized on principles of popular sovereignty, in which “the people” attain to political subjectivity in the form of citizenship. At the same time, critical thought stretching from the emergence of the modern nation-state in the late 1700s to its erosion in the present – from Tom Paine to Michael Hardt – reminds us that the citizen as modern political subject is also subject to the power marshalled in his name. In Michael Warner’s apt phrase, the American citizens who devotedly peruse the printed Constitution that secures their sovereignty, encounter themselves, paradoxically, “in the act of consenting to their own coercion.” From this latter vantage, citizenship entails a particular social and political technology of subjection.

My aspiration in this course is twofold: First, to revisit the problematic of popular sovereignty, and (or, in relation to) the institutions, the social formations, and the cultural politics that support it. The keywords in this regard are ISAs (ideological state apparatuses), discipline, hegemony, civil society, publics and counter-publics. Second, to engage the transformations of the contemporary moment, where the nation-state synthesis arguably dissolves, and with it, the substance (if not the spectacle) of popular sovereignty. Critical work on “neoliberalism” often invokes a new kind of political subject under the enduring rubric of “citizen” – a “flexible” citizen (Ong), a “whatever” citizen (Hardt), an “entrepreneurial citizen-subject” (Brown). But is it not always clear that these news forms of “citizenship” constitute a form of political agency (however vexed, or limited), or name a coherent relation of social subjects to government.

In keeping with the scope of the inquiry, course materials will range eclectically from early national to (so-called) “post-national” or contemporary contexts. Our readings will encompass political theory and public discourse on citizenship, alongside literary iterations of this political subject, with particular emphasis on the way that literary practices both reproduce and interrogate the norms of intelligible political subjectivity. The course addresses 19th and 20th century Americanists most directly, as our primary materials and the scope of our discussions will be U.S. -centered. However our critical and conceptual focus should be useful for thinking citizenship and its limits in other national contexts, and I welcome students who might want to persue comparative work.

The syllabus remains under construction. Critical materials will likely be culled from the work of Michael Warner, Priscilla Wald, C.B. MacPherson, Ian Haney-Lopez, Lauren Berlant, Wendy Brown, David Harvey, Michael Hardt, Aihwa Ong, as well as Locke, Marx, Gramsci, and Foucault. Primary texts might include Common Sense, Notes on the State of Virginia, The Seneca Falls Declaration of Women’s Rights, Fredrick Douglass, The Heroic Slave, Herman Melville, The Confidence Man, Frances Harper, Iola Leroy, Jessica Hagedorn, Dogeaters, Paul Beatty, White Boy Shuffle. Prospective students are welcome to contact me in December for a more detailed schedule of readings.