Time and the Figure of the Citizen
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Time and the Figure of the Citizen Anne McNevin 1 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract
This article reflects on the relationship between time and the figure of the citizen, where the citizen is understood in relational terms to the migrant. The article examines a stalled or interrupted flow of time that characterises the experience of certain migrants and citizens alike. This is time experienced as waiting for the fulfillment of citizenship. The article goes on to show how a progressive temporal narrative of citizenship-to-come obscures the effective denial of citizenship. While citizenship remains a key aspiration for those who lack its full or partial protections, it may not represent the ultimate horizon for struggles concerned with questions of border justice. With this proposition in mind, the article speculates on alternative horizons that may be emerging organically within struggles that refuse the citizen/migrant divide as a basis for imagining collective political futures. Keywords Time . Temporality . Citizenship . Migrants . Borders This article reflects on the relationship between time and the figure of the citizen. What might temporal analysis reveal about the lines drawn between citizens and non-citizens and how those lines are transgressed? What is politically generative about the temporal dimension of the figure of the citizen and its others? By politically generative, I mean productive of ideas, practices, and discourses that challenge the givenness of subjects (citizens) and institutions (citizenship, the state) or that question whether those subjects and institutions must take the established forms they currently take. While I am most interested in challenges that counter the hierarchical qualities of the citizen-non-citizen relation, not all that is politically generative moves in that direction. The migrant is a key figure against which citizenship is defined. This is at least partly because there is so much anxiety connected to migration in terms of its effects on the nationstates to which citizens belong and in terms of the degree to which citizens understand themselves to be in control of changes brought about via migrants and migration. This article examines time and the figure of the citizen with these relations in mind. There are, of course, * Anne McNevin [email protected]
1
Department of Politics, New School for Social Research, New York, NY, USA
McNevin
different kinds of citizens and migrants; their relation is dynamic and may be more usefully conceptualised in terms of a spectrum, rather than a binary. I want to suggest that thinking beyond the citizen-migrant divide may be increasingly necessary both analytically and politically, and that reflections on time provide entry points to do so. In what follows, I argue that a stalled or interrupted flow of time characterises the experience of certain migrants and citizens alike. This is time experienced as waiting for the fulfillment of citizenship. I also show how a progressive tempora
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