Introduction: Against citizenship: Visual belongings and transnational affects

Abstract

This special issue “Against Citizenship: Visual belongings and transnational affects” gathers contributions that address the affective and transnational networks that position themselves against or confront the “fantasy” of an egalitarian citizenship, understanding that this notion is not only intrinsically segregating, but aleatory and artificial, in the same way that the creation and existence of states are. The framework of the issue is the possibility given by cultural practices to articulate and perform post-national, denationalized or transnational forms of citizenship in a world characterized by globalization, post-colonial societies and migratory movements. Through these cultural practices a variety of political communities try to solve the restrictions that the State imposes to differentiated types of citizenship or even to cross its limits, be them geographical or juridical, and a create a different sense of belonging and recognition. The struggles for the rights around intersections, such as race, gender or disability, that are fundamental to the internal exclusion of the “citizens” of a state, are key in questioning the political debt that citizenship has with its supposed cultural homogeneity, as post-colonial countries have experienced in the last years. In this sense, notions such as identity, belonging and affect motivate the needs and roadmaps of communities excluded from citizenship, but seeking precisely to provide radically opposite definitions and possibilities which guarantee the attenuation of vulnerability and, above all, the right to be, live and exist.