Since the early 1990s, concepts of ‘citizenship’ have gained new currency both in political debates and the social sciences. More recently, concepts of ‘cultural citizenship’ in particular, have been formulated in cultural and literary studies as well. While these concepts are understood in a broad variety of ways, they all underscore the role of culture in the production, affirmation, or subversion of notions of belonging, of inclusion in or exclusion from political, social, and cultural collectives.
In this presentation, I will take this current debate as a starting point to explore how literary texts engage in acts of ‘negotiating citizenship’. Taking as a starting point a broad notion of citizenship as the “ways and means by which a society imagines and organizes social membership, political participation, and societal arrangements,” I will look at examples from twentieth-century Canadian literature to first highlight the ways in which literary texts use the language of citizenship to negotiate exclusion, inclusion, cultural belonging, and the question of rights. In a second step, this paper discusses the inherent tendency of this language of citizenship to reproduce the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and thus the ways in which literary texts struggle with questions of national inclusion and exclusion while at the same time making a plea for universal rights. Building upon these analyses, I then want to critically highlight the possibilities and limitations of ‘citizenship’ as a framework for discussing the role of literature in social and cultural negotiations of belonging.