Citizenship’s Insular Cases, from Ancient Greece and Rome to Puerto Rico
Abstract
:1. Introduction
2. The Island Condition
Smith’s summons to attend to the complex interactions of differentiated citizenship and territoriality has become newly relevant in the wake of Hurricane María, which leveled Puerto Rico’s infrastructure on its way to killing nearly 3000 people. The public recognition that Puerto Rico’s residents are profoundly unequal before the law of American citizenship has received weekly confirmation with every news report on the ineptitude and paltriness of relief efforts on the island, and with every exhibition of callous disregard from senior federal officials who are intent on minimizing the scope of the devastation. These officials take their cue from an American president who shrugged off criticisms of the relief effort’s sluggishness with the comment that Puerto Rico is “an island surrounded by water—big water, ocean water.”3In those [insular] cases, as in others of the Progressive Era (including ones scrutinizing race and gender classifications), the US Supreme Court upheld legislative powers to create what scholars have come to call ‘differentiated citizenship.’ Several of the most important forms of differentiated citizenship then sustained have since been repudiated as systems of unjust inequality.But in the twenty-first century, many are contending that various contemporary forms of differentiated citizenship are necessary to achieve meaningfully equal membership statuses. These include distinct forms of territorial membership. And though all claims for particular types of differentiated citizenship are in some respects unique, they also make up a more general pattern that controversies over territorial membership can illuminate. That is because here—perhaps more starkly than in any other area of modern American citizenship laws—some of the most basic, enduring, and still unsettled questions of civic equality are again being explicitly contested.2
This episode brings into focus a concern that has not lost its edge in the millennia since Livy wrote: under what conditions does the state’s assignment of second-class citizenship do double work as a species of punishment? For the Aequi, the punishment inheres in the denial of choice, the obstruction of their copia legendi.11 The sentiment would not be unfamiliar to Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait communities in Australia, or other Indigenous and First Nation communities elsewhere throughout the settler-colonialist world whose agitation for genuine opportunities to practice self-governance and self-determination is regularly met with velvet-gloved denials of choice.12… temptationem aiebant [sc. Aequi] esse ut terrore incusso belli Romanos se fieri paterentur; quod quanto opere optandum foret, Hernicos docuisse, cum quibus licuerit suas leges Romanae civitati praeoptaverint; quibus legendi quid mallent copia non fuerit, pro poena necessariam civitatem fore.…The Aequi responded that the demand was patently an attempt to force them under threat of war to suffer themselves to become Roman: the Hernici had shown how greatly this was to be desired, when, granted the choice, they had preferred their own laws to Roman citizenship. To those to whom the opportunity of choosing what they wanted was not granted, citizenship would of necessity be a type of punishment.10
3. Definitions of Citizenship: Binary and Bimodal
4. The Repeating Island and the Repetitive Refugee
- “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
- With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
- Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
- The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
- […]” (vv. 9–12; emphasis mine)
Therefore apart from you, dear child, I would not be willing To be left behind, not were the god in person to promise he would scale away my old age and make me a young man blossoming as I was that time when I first left Hellas, the land of fair women, running from the hatred of Ormenos’ son Amyntor, my father; who hated me for the sake of a fair-haired mistress. For he made love to her himself, and dishonoured his own wife, my mother; who was forever taking my knees and entreating me to lie with this mistress instead so that she would hate the old man. I was persuaded and did it; and my father when he heard of it straightaway called down his curses, and invoked against me the dreaded furies that I might never have any son born of my seed to dandle on my knees; and the divinities, Zeus of the underworld and Persephone the honoured goddess, accomplished his curses. Then I took it into my mind to cut him down with the sharp bronze, but some one of the immortals checked my anger, reminding me of rumour among the people and men’s maledictions repeated, that I might not be called a parricide among the Achaians. […] Then I fled far away through the wide spaces of Hellas and came as far as generous Phthia, mother of sheepflocks, and to lord Peleus, who accepted me with a good will and gave me his love, even as a father loves his own son who is a single child brought up among many possessions. He made me a rich man, and granted me many people, and I lived, lord over the Dolopes, in remotest Phthia, and, godlike Achilleus, I made you all that you are now, and loved you out of my heart… | ὡς ἂν ἔπειτ᾽ ἀπὸ σεῖο φίλον τέκος οὐκ ἐθέλοιμι λείπεσθ᾽, οὐδ᾽ εἴ κέν μοι ὑποσταίη θεὸς αὐτὸς γῆρας ἀποξύσας θήσειν νέον ἡβώοντα, οἷον ὅτε πρῶτον λίπον Ἑλλάδα καλλιγύναικα φεύγων νείκεα πατρὸς Ἀμύντορος Ὀρμενίδαο, ὅς μοι παλλακίδος περιχώσατο καλλικόμοιο, τὴν αὐτὸς φιλέεσκεν, ἀτιμάζεσκε δ᾽ ἄκοιτιν μητέρ᾽ ἐμήν: ἣ δ᾽ αἰὲν ἐμὲ λισσέσκετο γούνων παλλακίδι προμιγῆναι, ἵν᾽ ἐχθήρειε γέροντα. τῇ πιθόμην καὶ ἔρεξα: πατὴρ δ᾽ ἐμὸς αὐτίκ᾽ ὀϊσθεὶς πολλὰ κατηρᾶτο, στυγερὰς δ᾽ ἐπεκέκλετ᾽ Ἐρινῦς, μή ποτε γούνασιν οἷσιν ἐφέσσεσθαι φίλον υἱὸν ἐξ ἐμέθεν γεγαῶτα: θεοὶ δ᾽ ἐτέλειον ἐπαρὰς Ζεύς τε καταχθόνιος καὶ ἐπαινὴ Περσεφόνεια. ἔνθ᾽ ἐμοὶ οὐκέτι πάμπαν ἐρητύετ᾽ ἐν φρεσὶ θυμὸς πατρὸς χωομένοιο κατὰ μέγαρα στρωφᾶσθαι. τὸν μὲν ἐγὼ βούλευσα κατακτάμεν ὀξέϊ χαλκῶι: ἀλλά τις ἀθανάτων παῦσεν χόλον, ὅς ῥ᾽ ἐνὶ θυμῶι δήμου θῆκε φάτιν καὶ ὀνείδεα πόλλ᾽ ἀνθρώπων, ὡς μὴ πατροφόνος μετ᾽ Ἀχαιοῖσιν καλεοίμην […] φεῦγον ἔπειτ᾽ ἀπάνευθε δι᾽ Ἑλλάδος εὐρυχόροιο, Φθίην δ᾽ ἐξικόμην ἐριβώλακα μητέρα μήλων ἐς Πηλῆα ἄναχθ᾽: ὃ δέ με πρόφρων ὑπέδεκτο, καί μ᾽ ἐφίλησ᾽ ὡς εἴ τε πατὴρ ὃν παῖδα φιλήσῃ μοῦνον τηλύγετον πολλοῖσιν ἐπὶ κτεάτεσσι, καί μ᾽ ἀφνειὸν ἔθηκε, πολὺν δέ μοι ὤπασε λαόν: ναῖον δ᾽ ἐσχατιὴν Φθίης Δολόπεσσιν ἀνάσσων. καί σε τοσοῦτον ἔθηκα θεοῖς ἐπιείκελ᾽ Ἀχιλλεῦ, ἐκ θυμοῦ φιλέων… |
Much has been made of this passage’s glorification of the migrant presence as foundational to Rome’s future attainments, and of the historian’s insinuation that, in a deep sense, all claims of civic autochthony and communal rootedness in the soil are simply a sleight of hand—a rhetorical transmutation of a motley assortment into bona fide citizens. All this and so much more can be slotted with little difficulty into Andersonian schemes of imagined community.56 My objectives in citing this passage, however, are rather different.Deinde ne vana urbis magnitudo esset, adiciendae multitudinis causa vetere consilio condentium urbes, qui obscuram atque humilem conciendo ad se multitudinem natam e terra sibi prolem ementiebantur, locum qui nunc saeptus descendentibus inter duos lucos est asylum aperit. Eo ex finitimis populis turba omnis sine discrimine, liber an servus esset, avida novarum rerum perfugit, idque primum ad coeptam magnitudinem roboris fuit.In antiquity, the founder of a new settlement, in order to increase its population, would as a matter of course shark up a lot of homeless and destitute folk and pretend that they were ‘born of earth’ to be his progeny; Romulus now followed a similar course: to help fill his big new town, he threw open, in the ground—now enclosed—between the two copses as you go up the Capitoline hill, a place of asylum for fugitives. Hither fled for refuge all the rag-tag-and-bobtail from the neighbouring peoples: some free, some slaves, and all of them wanting nothing but a fresh start. That mob was the first real addition to the City’s strength, the first step to her future greatness.
5. The Fever Dream of Civic Belonging
This gruff wisdom is unmasked over the course of the novel as a spectacular deception, trotted out by Bubakar—himself an immigrant—in an attempt to keep the spigots of his customers’ payments turned on. At every turn, Jende and his spouse Neni are tantalized by the specter of that ever-elusive adjustment to legal status; meanwhile, the experiences of the novel’s secondary characters undermine the notion that citizenship will open the door to a shimmering future of anxiety-free stability. The best-case scenario in store for them is the “citizenship in question” that has lately elicited comment from political theorists.64 But Jende and Neni are denied even this. With no happy ending to the couple’s migratory travails and no redemptive culmination to years of waiting and praying and bureaucratic maneuvering, they are eventually forced back across the Atlantic to Cameroon.We’ll keep on trying our own way, and you keep on sleeping with one eye open, eh? Because until the day you become American citizen, Immigration will always be right on your ass, every single day, following you everywhere, and you’ll need money to fight them if they decide they hate the way your fart smells. But Inshallah, one day you’ll become a citizen, and when that happens, no one can ever touch you. You and your family will finally be able to relax. You’ll at last be able to sleep well, and you’ll begin to really enjoy your life in this country.63
- do you know what it’s like to live
- on land who loves you back?
- no need for geography
- now, we safe everywhere.
- point to whatever you please
- & call it church, home, or sweet love.
- paradise is a world where everything
- is sanctuary & nothing is a gun. (“summer, somewhere”)66
- … once, a white girl
- was kidnapped & that’s the Trojan War.
- Troy got shot
- & that was Tuesday. are we not worthy
- of a city of ash? of 1000 ships
- launched because we are missed? (“not an elegy”)67
Funding
Acknowledgments
Conflicts of Interest
References
- Aguilar, Carlos. 2018. Undocumented Critical Theory. Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Alexander, Michelle. 2018. None of Us Deserve Citizenship. The New York Times. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/opinion/sunday/immigration-border-policy-citizenship.html (accessed on 20 January 2019).
- Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. First published 1983. [Google Scholar]
- Ando, Clifford. 2011. Law, Language, and Empire in the Roman Tradition. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. [Google Scholar]
- Ando, Clifford, ed. 2016a. Citizenship and Empire in Europe 200–1900: The Antonine Constitution after 1800 Years. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. [Google Scholar]
- Ando, Clifford. 2016b. Making Romans: Citizens, subjects, and subjectivity in Republican Empire. In Cosmopolitanism and Empire: Universal Rulers, Local Elites, and Cultural Integration in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Edited by Myles Lavan, Richard E. Payne and John Weisweiler. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 169–86. [Google Scholar]
- Bagelman, Jennifer. 2016. Sanctuary City: A Suspended State. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. [Google Scholar]
- Balasopoulos, Antonis. 2008. Nesologies: Island form and postcolonial geopoetics. Postcolonial Studies 11: 9–26. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Baldwin, James. 1998. Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone: A Novel. New York: Vintage International. First published 1968. [Google Scholar]
- Bayoumi, Moustafa. 2008. How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America. New York: Penguin Books. [Google Scholar]
- Beard, Mary. 2015. Ancient Rome and Today’s Migrant Crisis. The Wall Street Journal. Available online: https://www.wsj.com/articles/ancient-rome-and-todays-migrant-crisis-1445005978 (accessed on 21 January 2019).
- Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. 1992. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, 2nd ed. Translated by J. Maraniss. Durham: Duke University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Bergholz, Max. 2018. Thinking the nation. American Historical Review 123: 518–28. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Boochani, Behrouz. 2018. No Friend but the Mountains. Translated by O. Tofighian. Sydney: Pan Macmillan. [Google Scholar]
- Brathwaite, E. Kamau. 1973. The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Burbank, Jane, and Frederick Cooper. 2010. Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Campa, Naomi. 2018. Positive freedom and the citizen in Athens. Polis 35: 1–32. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Carne-Ross, Donald S. 2010. Classics and Translation: Essays by D.S. Carne-Ross. Edited by Kenneth Haynes. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Ceccarelli, Paola. 2012. Water and identity in the ancient Mediterranean. Mediterranean Historical Review 27: 1–3. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Cornejo Villavicencio, Karla. 2017. The Psychic Toll of Trump’s DACA Decision. The New York Times. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/opinion/sunday/mental-health-daca.html (accessed on 2 October 2018).
- Aubrey de Sélincourt, trans. 1971, Livy. The Early History of Rome. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
- Dench, Emma. 2005. Romulus’ Asylum: Roman Identities from the Age of Alexander to the Age of Hadrian. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Ducloux, Anne. 1994. Ad Ecclesiam Confugere: Naissance du Droit D’asile Dans les Eglises (IVe–Milieu du Ve s.). Paris: De Boccard. [Google Scholar]
- Eberle, Lisa P. 2017. Making Roman subjects: Citizenship and empire before and after Augustus. TAPA 147: 321–70. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Elden, S. 2013. The Birth of Territory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar]
- Finley, Moses I. 1981. Economy and Society in Ancient Greece. Edited by Brent D. Shaw and Richard P. Saller. New York: Viking. [Google Scholar]
- Fynn-Paul, Jeffrey. 2009. Empire, monotheism and slavery in the greater Mediterranean region from antiquity to the early modern era. Past and Present 205: 3–40. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- García, Armando. 2019. Disposable subjects: Staging illegality and racial terror in the borderlands. Critical Philosophy of Race 7: 160–86. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Gettel, Eliza. 2018. Recognizing the Delians displaced after 167/6 BCE. In Displacement and the Humanities: Manifestos from the Ancient to the Present. Edited by Elena Isayev and Evan Jewell. Special issue. Humanities 7: 91. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Gilroy, Paul. 2019. Never again: Refusing Race and Salvaging the Human. The Holberg Lecture. Available online: https://www.holbergprisen.no/en/news/holberg-prize/2019-holberg-lecture-laureate-paul-gilroy (accessed on 14 July 2019).
- Goff, Barbara, and Michael Simpson. 2007. Crossroads in the Black Aegean: Oedipus, Antigone, and Dramas of the African Diaspora. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Gopal Jayal, Niraja. 2013. Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Gray, Benjamin. 2018a. Citizenship as barrier and opportunity for ancient Greek and modern refugees. In Displacement and the Humanities: Manifestos from the Ancient to the Present. Edited by Elena Isayev and Evan Jewell. Special issue. Humanities 7: 72. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Gray, Benjamin. 2018b. Approaching the Hellenistic polis through modern political theory: The public sphere, pluralism and prosperity. In Ancient Greek History and Contemporary Social Science. Edited by Mirko Canevaro, Andrew Erskine, Benjamin Gray and Josiah Ober. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 68–97. [Google Scholar]
- Griffin, Jasper, ed. 1995. Homer: Iliad IX. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Hainsworth, Bryan, ed. 1993. The Iliad: A Commentary. Vol. III: Books 9–12. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Hammer, Dean. 2002. The Iliad as Politics: The Performance of Political Thought. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. [Google Scholar]
- Harrison, Virginia. 2018. Nauru Refugees: The Island Where Children Have Given up on Life. BBC News. Available online: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-45327058 (accessed on 21 January 2019).
- Hernández, Arelis R., Mark Berman, and John Wagner. 2017. San Juan Mayor Slams Trump Administration Comments on Puerto Rico Hurricane Response. The Washington Post. Available online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/09/29/san-juan-mayor-slams-trump-administration-comments-on-puerto-rico-hurricane-response (accessed on 31 July 2019).
- Honig, Bonnie. 2001. Democracy and the Foreigner. Princeton: Princeton University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Horden, Peregrine, and Nicholas Purcell. 2000. The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History. Malden: Blackwell. [Google Scholar]
- Isayev, Elena. 2017. Between hospitality and asylum: A historical perspective on displaced agency. International Review of the Red Cross 99: 75–98. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef] [Green Version]
- Jameela, Maryam. 2018. Movements through trauma: How to see ourselves. In The Fire Now: Anti-Racist Scholarship in Times of Explicit Racial Violence. Edited by Azeezat Johnson, Remi Joseph-Salisbury and Beth Kamunge. London: Zed Books, pp. 199–208. [Google Scholar]
- Jewell, Evan. 2019. (Re)moving the Masses: Colonisation as Domestic Displacement in the Roman Republic. In Displacement and the Humanities: Manifestos from the Ancient to the Present. Edited by Elena Isayev and Evan Jewell. Special issue. Humanities 8: 66. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Kasimis, Demetra. 2018. The Perpetual Immigrant and the Limits of Athenian Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Kotef, Hagar. 2015. Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility. Durham: Duke University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Kuhrt, Amélie. 2014. Even a dog in Babylon is free. In The legacy of Arnaldo Momigliano. Edited by Tim Cornell and Oswyn Murray. London and Turin: The Warburg Institute and Nino Aragno Editore, pp. 77–87. [Google Scholar]
- Richmond Lattimore, trans. 1957, Homer. The Iliad. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Lavan, Myles. 2016. The spread of Roman citizenship, 14–212 CE: Quantification in the face of high uncertainty. Past and Present 230: 3–46. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Lawrance, Benjamin N., and Jacqueline Stevens, eds. 2017. Citizenship in Question: Evidentiary Birthright and Statelessness. Durham: Duke University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Liew, Tat-Siong Benny. 2017. Black scholarship matters. Journal of Biblical Literature 136: 237–44. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Luiselli, Valeria. 2017. Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press. [Google Scholar]
- Márquez, Roberto. 2010. A World among These Islands: Essays on Literature, Race, and National Identity in Antillean America. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. [Google Scholar]
- Mbue, Imbolo. 2016. Behold the Dreamers: A Novel. New York: Random House. [Google Scholar]
- McConnell, Justine. 2013. Black Odysseys: The Homeric Odyssey in the African Diaspora since 1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Mishra, Pankaj. 2017. Age of Anger: A History of the Present. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. [Google Scholar]
- Mossman, Hannah. 2009. Narrative island-hopping: Contextualising Lucian’s treatment of space in Verae Historiae. In A Lucian for Our Times. Edited by Adam Bartley. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 47–62. [Google Scholar]
- Mufreh, Athar. 2017. Private citizenship: Real estate practice in Palestine. In Displacement and the Humanities: Manifestos from the Ancient to the Present. Edited by Elena Isayev and Evan Jewell. Special issue. Humanities 6: 68. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Müller, Jan-Werner. 2016. What Is Populism? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. [Google Scholar]
- Padilla Peralta, Dan-el. 2015a. Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League. New York: Penguin Press. [Google Scholar]
- Padilla Peralta, Dan-el. 2015b. Barbarians inside the Gate, Part I: Fears of Immigration in Ancient Rome and Today. Eidolon. Available online: https://eidolon.pub/barbarians-inside-the-gate-part-i-c175057b340f (accessed on 2 October 2018).
- Padilla Peralta, Dan-el. 2015c. The Immigration Iliad. Matter. Available online: https://medium.com/matter/the-immigration-iliad-6727955ae085 (accessed on 2 October 2018).
- Padilla Peralta, Dan-el. 2017a. Waste. In Liquid Antiquity. Edited by Brooke Holmes and Karen Marta. Geneva: Deste, pp. 116–19. [Google Scholar]
- Padilla Peralta, Dan-el. 2017b. Classics beyond the Pale. Eidolon. Available online: https://eidolon.pub/classics-beyond-the-pale-534bdbb3601b#.1s1gzxn0g (accessed on 2 October 2018).
- Padilla Peralta, Dan-el. 2018. Documentary Anxieties. The Fabulist. Available online: https://www.aesop.com/us//r/the-fabulist/documentary-anxieties (accessed on 22 January 2019).
- Padilla Peralta, Dan-el. Forthcoming. Peace and shit: Aristophanes as a primer on copropolitics. In progress.
- Petty, Kate Reed. 2017. Is It Time to Retire the Word ‘Citizen’? Los Angeles Review of Books. Available online: https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/time-retire-word-citizen/ (accessed on 2 October 2018).
- Purcell, Nicholas. 2016. Unnecessary dependences: Illustrating circulation in pre-modern large-scale history. In The Prospect of Global History. Edited by James Belich, John Darwin, Margret Frenz and Chris Wickham. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 65–79. [Google Scholar]
- Rabben, Linda. 2016. Sanctuary and Asylum: A Social and Political History. Seattle: University of Washington Press. [Google Scholar]
- Rancière, Jacques. 2010. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Translated and Edited by Corcoran Steven. London: Continuum. [Google Scholar]
- Shaw, Brent D. 2017. Africa. In Handwörterbuch der Antiken Sklaverei. Edited by Heinz Heinen. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, vol. 1, pp. 49–57. [Google Scholar]
- Sherwin-White, Adrian N. 1972. The Roman citizenship: A survey of its development into a world franchise. ANRW I: 23–58. [Google Scholar]
- Shklar, Judith N. 1991. American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Smith, Rogers M. 2015. The Insular Cases, differentiated citizenship, and territorial statuses in the twenty-first century. In Reconsidering the Insular Cases: The Past and Future of the American Empire. Edited by Gerald L. Neuman and Tomiko Brown-Nagin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 103–28. [Google Scholar]
- Smith, Danez. 2017. Don’t Call Us Dead: Poems. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press. [Google Scholar]
- Solnit, Rebecca. 2017. Tyranny of the Majority. Harper’s Magazine. Available online: https://harpers.org/archive/2017/03/tyranny-of-the-minority/ (accessed on 2 October 2018).
- Song Bo, Saum. 1885. A Chinese View of the Statue of Liberty. The Sun. Available online: https://www.newspapers.com/clip/16261363/letter_from_saum_song_bo_re_statue_of/ (accessed on 20 January 2019).
- Sorensen, Martin S. 2018. Denmark Plans to Isolate Unwanted Migrants on a Small Island. The New York Times. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/03/world/europe/denmark-migrants-island.html (accessed on 21 January 2018).
- Stewart, Owen. 2017. Citizenship as a reward or punishment? Factoring language into the Latin settlement. Antichthon 51: 186–201. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Terrenato, Nicola. 2019. The Early Roman Expansion into Italy: Elite Negotiation and Family Agendas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Wahlquist, Calla. 2018. A Year on, the Key Goal of Uluru Statement Remains Elusive. The Guardian Australia. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/may/26/a-year-on-the-key-goal-of-uluru-statement-remains-elusive (accessed on 20 January 2019).
- Walzer, Michael. 1970. Obligations: Essays on Disobedience, War, and Citizenship. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Walzer, Michael. 1989. Citizenship. In Political Innovation and Conceptual Change. Edited by Terence Ball, James Farr and Russell L. Hanson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 211–19. [Google Scholar]
- Wright, Michelle M. 2015. Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. [Google Scholar]
- Wright, Richard. 1941. 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States. New York: Viking. [Google Scholar]
1 | See (Horden and Purcell 2000) for a classic exposition; cf. (Purcell 2016) for an update on the new thalassology and (Ceccarelli 2012, p. 2) for comment on the disjuncture between the island as insular isolate and the island as high-interaction zone. |
2 | |
3 | As quoted in (Hernández et al. 2017). |
4 | |
5 | (Burbank and Cooper 2010) offer a highly original survey. |
6 | See (strictly e.g.) (Kuhrt 2014) on first-millennium BCE Mesopotamia; (Gopal Jayal 2013) on citizenship in the Indian subcontinent. |
7 | The Antonine Constitution as a watershed in European and global histories of citizenship: the essays in (Ando 2016a). This paragraph’s sally against triumphalist readings of Roman citizenship owes much to Ando’s (2016b) critique of the conventional “emancipatory story.” |
8 | Modeling the number of imperial residents whose lives were affected by the Antonine Constitution (Lavan 2016). |
9 | Which is not to say that our knowledge of every single particular is complete: for an overview and discussion of the settlement, see (Sherwin-White 1972), a précis of his magisterial monograph on Roman citizenship. |
10 | Liv. 9.45.7–8 (tr. Ando 2011, p. 88; for more on this incident, see Ando 2016b, p. 178). |
11 | The Livian representation of “differentiated citizenship” as implicated in a reward-or-punish scheme may be anachronistic: thus (Stewart 2017), proposing an alternative model. But his text would still at the very least mirror the concerns of the period in which he wrote; for the imprint of Augustan Rome on Livy’s work, see the conclusion to Section 4 below. |
12 | The lead-up to and aftermath of the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart in Australia (Wahlquist 2018). |
13 | “The Black Aegean” (Goff and Simpson 2007), thus christening the space of productive tension in which African and African-American adaptations of ancient Greek texts have unfolded. |
14 | For one such history, see (Gray 2018a). |
15 | (Mufreh 2017), for whom spatial governmentality and private citizenship are also co-implicated in the turn of (some) Palestinians towards the “global market citizenship” of neoliberal consumption. For the regimentation of movement as a technology of citizenship, note also (Kotef 2015). |
16 | On “nesology”, see Balasopoulos’ (2008) study of postcolonial geopoetics. Australia’s notorious offshore processing site for immigrants (Harrison 2018); for writing from this carceral site that lifts its gaze from islands to mountains, see (Boochani 2018). Denmark’s recently announced plans to warehouse “unwelcome foreigners” on an offshore island (Sorensen 2018). |
17 | For a study of this text, see (Goff and Simpson 2007, chp. 6). |
18 | (Kotef 2015) is excellent on this paradox. |
19 | (Kasimis 2018). I reference one of her more pointed insights into the heuristic value of the metic below. |
20 | For pithy comment on chattel slavery as “sea-centered and seaborne phenomenon,” see (Shaw 2017, p. 49), with (Fynn-Paul 2009) on maritime regions and “slaving zones.” The interrelatedness of Greek notions of freedom (a sine qua non for the exercise of citizenship) and chattel slavery (Finley 1981, chp. 7). |
21 | For trailblazing studies of the “birthing” of modernity in the islands of the Black Atlantic, see the essays in (Márquez 2010). |
22 | (Baldwin [1968] 1998, p. 63, quoted at Brathwaite 1973, p. 160). |
23 | |
24 | (Petty 2017) for the former; (Solnit 2017) for an illustration of the latter. |
25 | Quotations: (Shklar 1991, p. 16). |
26 | |
27 | (M. Wright 2015). On the appeal of maritime metaphor to Afro-Atlantic thinkers, see (Gilroy 2019). |
28 | (Walzer 1989), commenting on several features of citizenship that had been previously singled out for scrutiny in (Walzer 1970, chp. 10). Though cited regularly by political theorists, Walzer’s handling of citizenship in these and other publications has come in for heavy criticism: see, e.g., (Honig 2001, pp. 82–86) on the immigrant myths that subtend his account. Kasimis (2018, p. 168, n. 2) usefully pinpoints the genealogical debts of Walzer’s encounters “with Athenian political thought.” Alternatives to the Walzerian approach include a more robust application of the positive/negative freedom model: for engagement with the rapidly proliferating literature on this front, see (Campa 2018). |
29 | |
30 | |
31 | |
32 | For a full explanation one would need to turn to an assertively marxisant critique of political labor and socioeconomic inequality, to which Walzer is allergic. |
33 | For agency and politics within the spaces of “displaced agency”, see (Isayev 2017). |
34 | (Walzer 1989, p. 216). The limits of this dualism are coming into clearer view thanks to scholarship on citizenship in the Hellenistic polis: see (Gray 2018b). |
35 | For interrogation of the term “migrant”, see (Gettel 2018) in this volume. |
36 | See, e.g., (Padilla Peralta 2015b)—but note the reservations at n. 53 below. |
37 | Programmatic sketch in (Padilla Peralta 2017a). |
38 | I thank Phiroze Vasunia for first opening my eyes to this reading of Lazarus’s poem. |
39 | For two bracing perspectives on the tragic consequences of not commanding this speech-act, see (Mbue 2016) (fiction) and (Luiselli 2017) (non-fiction); I revisit the first below. |
40 | For some pertinent comments along similar lines, see (Alexander 2018). On the anguish experienced by those immigrants who recognized in the monumentalization of (an ideal of) civic inclusion, their own endlessly reiterated estrangement from citizenship, see (Song Bo 1885), written in response to the fundraising for the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal. |
41 | (Rabben 2016) builds on several foundational studies of asylum’s sacro-legal pedigree; one of the more important, because of the meticulousness with which it charts the involvement of church structures in the medieval institutionalization of asylum as practice, is (Ducloux 1994). |
42 | For a snapshot of this framing (and awareness of its limitations) in the United Kingdom, see (Bagelman 2016, pp. 17–19). |
43 | This self-indoctrination is a correlate of the “drama of election” through which the host country continuously re-enacts its claims of merit on the backs of those immigrants who choose it; see (Honig 2001) on the Book of Ruth for a sketch of the discourse’s basic components. |
44 | The narratological imprint of Homeric island-hopping in authors such as Lucian (Mossman 2009). On the debts of Derek Walcott’s island poetics to Homer, see (McConnell 2013, chp. 3). |
45 | Il. 9.444-63, 478-86 (tr. Lattimore); I quote from the Munro-Allen Oxford edition. Lattimore (1957) followed the lead of editors who placed 458–459 after four lines that were first obelized by the Hellenistic scholar Aristarchus and that I have therefore italicized (see n. 38); as the placement of 458–459 is not important to my argument, I have omitted their translation. At 478, Lattimore’s rendering of εὐρυχόροιο as “wide spaces” assumes that this choral adjective’s choral resonance had given way to conflation with εὐρύχωρος already in the period of the epic’s composition, but we have no way of confirming this: see (Hainsworth 1993 ad loc). |
46 | Aristarchos’ position on these lines: Plut. De aud. poet. 8. |
47 | (Griffin 1995, ad 9.447ff). |
48 | Lattimore’s translation of ἐριβῶλαξ as “generous” unrolls the compressed signification of the verse—whether by choice or by accident (cf. Carne-Ross 2010, chp. 5 on Lattimore’s practice as translator). The “probably formular” (thus Hainsworth 1993 ad loc.) collocation ἐριβώλακα μητέρα μήλων capitalizes on the synergy of flock-keeping, manure collection, and fertility; see (Padilla Peralta forthcoming) for more extensive commentary on this feedback loop in archaic and classical Greece. |
49 | For a list of “obligatory exiles” in Homer, see (Hainsworth 1993 ad 9.479–84). The interweaving of criminality and sanctuary is showcased in another textual production of the Iron Age Mediterranean and Levant, the Hebrew Bible: see Joshua 20 for the Israelite “cities of sanctuary”. |
50 | Perhaps the most infamous episode is the tragedy of Adrastos: Herodotus 1.35. On classical Greek tragedy’s handling of this theme see (Isayev 2017, pp. 80–84). |
51 | Il. 9.648 with (Hammer 2002, pp. 94–95) on metanastes. Achilles’ complaint is quoted to suggestive effect at Aristotle Pol. 1278a37, in connection with metics; on this passage and the phenomenology of “immigrant passing” in classical Athens, see (Kasimis 2018, chp. 2). |
52 | For the rhetorical practices of these nationalisms, see (Müller 2016); on the background to the contemporary “age of anger,” (Mishra 2017). |
53 | See, e.g., (Beard 2015), as critiqued by Jewell (2019) in this volume. I have succumbed to this temptation, or at the very least failed to subject my own flirtations with it to more searching examination: compare (Padilla Peralta 2015b, 2017b). |
54 | |
55 | Liv. 1.8.5-6. Note, e.g., de Sélincourt’s (1971) rendering of obscuram atque humilem as “homeless and destitute”; or the defanging of avida novarum rerum as “wanting nothing but a fresh start.” |
56 | (Anderson [1983] 2006). For the extraordinary multi-disciplinary impact of this work, see (Bergholz 2018). |
57 | E.g., Attius Clausus and the Claudii: Liv. 2.16.5; Dionysius of Halicarnassus AR 5.40.5. For the historical mobility of elites in archaic and Republican Italy, see now (Terrenato 2019). |
58 | The literature on this subject has metastasized; of recent publications I have found (Eberle 2017) exceptionally good to think with. For imperial recourse to denaturalization, see the remarks of (Ando 2016b, p. 185). On the imprint of the Caesarian and Augustan colonization/forced resettlement programs in the construction of Rome’s civic imaginaries, see Jewell (2019) in this volume. |
59 | (Bayoumi 2008) on Arab-Americans, channeling W.E.B. Du Bois. |
60 | The postmodern state’s weaponization of insecurity (Rancière 2010, chp. 8). Cf. (Jameela 2018) on the weaponization of whiteness and black and brown “movements through trauma.” |
61 | See (purely, e.g.) (Cornejo Villavicencio 2017) on the psychological costs. |
62 | |
63 | |
64 | Exemplary for their exposition and interrogation of this concept are the papers in (Lawrance and Stevens 2017). |
65 | |
66 | |
67 | |
68 | (Aguilar 2018). |
69 | On the nature of these rituals and the insidiousness of their psychological encroachments, compare (Padilla Peralta 2015c, 2018). |
70 | See (Elden 2013) for an audacious and sweeping genealogy. |
71 | For the concept of the “disposable subject” and the artistic strategies that emerge in conscious resistance to its interpellating manifestations see (García 2019). |
© 2019 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Share and Cite
Peralta, D.-e.P. Citizenship’s Insular Cases, from Ancient Greece and Rome to Puerto Rico. Humanities 2019, 8, 134. https://doi.org/10.3390/h8030134
Peralta D-eP. Citizenship’s Insular Cases, from Ancient Greece and Rome to Puerto Rico. Humanities. 2019; 8(3):134. https://doi.org/10.3390/h8030134
Chicago/Turabian StylePeralta, Dan-el Padilla. 2019. "Citizenship’s Insular Cases, from Ancient Greece and Rome to Puerto Rico" Humanities 8, no. 3: 134. https://doi.org/10.3390/h8030134