Universal Citizenship

Scholars have increasingly challenged the ideal of universal citizenship, arguing that the universality it claims has always depended on exclusions of race, class, and gender. R. Andrés Guzmán does not abandon the concept. Instead, he takes these critiques seriously and makes a case for universal citizenship, with particular attention to Latina/o and ethnic studies. He treats citizenship as more than a status the nation-state grants after recognizing and admitting someone, a struggle for the right to have rights. For Guzmán, universal citizenship forces its way into politics from the exclusions on which politics was founded, and it appears at the boundary between the legal and the illegal, through a process that cannot be reduced to identity.

Guzmán draws on Lacanian psychoanalysis and Alain Badiou's concept of "generic politics" to build this argument. His chapters examine literary, cultural, and legal materials in which disputes over who belongs politically are central. These include the French Revolution, reactions to Arizona's H.B. 2281, the 2006 immigrant rights protests in the United States, the writings of Oscar "Zeta" Acosta, and Frantz Fanon's account of the Algerian anticolonial struggle, among others. Throughout, he follows how the "citizen" emerges as a collective subject composed of anyone who wants to fundamentally change the organizing structure of the place where they live.