Citizen

Citizen

Volume 38, Numbers 1 & 2, Spring/Summer 2010
Talia Schaffer, Victoria Pitts-Taylor
Excerpted from the Editor’s Note

There are few citizens in Citizenship. Our primary subjects here are the ones unnamed and unclaimed by nations, or those whose nations fail to confer upon them the protections of citizenship. They are migrants, refugees, the displaced, detainees, illegal immigrants. They are the unclassified bodies who labor, the travelers who disembark, the applicants who wait, the women who have too many lands to ever be, simply, home again. They are those who can participate in the political life of their state only through phone calls, through facial expressions, through hints and pleas, and those whose loves and ways of life are outlawed. They are those whose relationships, whose births, whose language, and whose suffering slip through the meshes of the state.