Citizenship’s Insular Cases, from Ancient Greece and Rome to Puerto Rico

Dan-El Padilla Peralta

doi:10.3390/h8030134

Abstract

Engaging equally with ancient Greco-Roman and contemporary Euro-American paradigms of citizenship, this essay argues that experiences of civic integration are structured around figurations of island and archipelago. In elaboration of this claim, I offer a transhistorical account of how institutions and imaginaries of citizenship take shape around an “insular scheme” whose defining characteristic is displacement. Shuttling from Homer and Livy to Imbolo Mbue and Danez Smith, I rely on the work of postcolonial literary critics and political theorists to map those repetitive deferrals of civic status to which immigrants and refugees in particular are uniquely subject.

Highlights

Engaging with ancient Greco-Roman and contemporary Euro-American paradigms of citizenship, this essay argues that experiences of civic integration are structured around figurations of island and archipelago
Donne’s presumption of island insularity would not pass muster among contemporary practitioners of what has come to be known as the new thalassology, for whom the very notion of the island as a self-contained and bounded entity—shorn of any connective ligatures—is dead on arrival; “only connect” is the principle to which many students of island networks nowadays subscribe
Attentive to the quilting of these strands within the fabric of citizenship, this essay will move from a brief overview of frustrations with the terminology and baggage of Euro-American citizenship (Section 3) to a recuperative reading of the “repeating island” paradigm as voiced separately by a Homeric refugee and by a Roman historian (4) and to a closing exercise in psycho-biography and autoethnography that shuttles between the lessons of contemporary fiction and poetry on one end and the lessons of personal experience on the other (5)

Summary

Introduction

“No man is an island,” the seventeenth-century poet and cleric John Donne memorably mused (Meditation 17). It is this institution that sublimates, and in the process mystifies, the myriad human transits from one insular civic body to another. The dance of repetition commences at the very moment of arrival on the liminal shore, where the migrant—naked, Odysseus-like, before the searching gaze of a prospective host community—has to earn the polity’s trust. This dance’s choreography is describable both as a historical process and as an ideational phenomenon; the opening section of this article briefly considers the affordances recoverable from each. 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

The Island Condition

Definitions of Citizenship

The Repeating Island and the Repetitive Refugee

46 De n these lines

49 For a list of “obligatory exiles”

The Fever Dream of Civic Belonging