Abstract:
Engaging equally with ancient Greco-Roman and contemporary Euro-American paradigms of citizenship, this essay argues that experiences of civic integration are structured around figurations of island and archipelago. In elaboration of this claim, I offer a transhistorical account of how institutions and imaginaries of citizenship take shape around an “insular scheme” whose defining characteristic is displacement. Shuttling from Homer and Livy to Imbolo Mbue and Danez Smith, I rely on the work of postcolonial literary critics and political theorists to map those repetitive deferrals of civic status to which immigrants and refugees in particular are uniquely subject.
1. Introduction
“No man is an island,” the seventeenth-century poet and cleric John Donne memorably mused (Meditation 17). The modern banalization of Donne’s insight has tended to obscure the imaginative work entailed by equating islands with humans, even if only for the purposes of disavowal. Yet Donne’s presumption of island insularity would not pass muster among contemporary practitioners of what has come to be known as the new thalassology, for whom the very notion of the island as a self-contained and bounded entity—shorn of any connective ligatures—is dead on arrival; “only connect” is the principle to which many students of island networks nowadays subscribe.1Taking root in the gap between these two models, this article locates an unusually felicitous transubstantiation of the paradoxical island in the institution of citizenship, especially as experienced by immigrants. From a transhistorical perspective, it is this institution that sublimates, and in the process mystifies, the myriad human transits from one insular civic body to another. The migrant’s suspension between welcome and rejection in the course of these transits is apparent not only during the initial exodus across expanses of water (or desert) but through the compulsive repetition that forces the differentiated citizen to remember their difference. To lift an image and a model from the Caribbeanist critic Antonio Benítez-Rojo, the island is ceaselessly repeated (Benítez-Rojo 1992). The dance of repetition commences at the very moment of arrival on the liminal shore, where the migrant—naked, Odysseus-like, before the searching gaze of a prospective host community—has to earn the polity’s trust. This dance’s choreography is describable both as a historical process and as an ideational phenomenon; the opening section of this article briefly considers the affordances recoverable from each.
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