The accidental citizen: acts of sovereignty and (un)making citizenship

Abstract

How are citizens and foreigners made and unmade? This article addresses this question by taking Paul Virilio's recent theorizing on the accident as its point of departure. Virilio rethinks the received wisdom that says that the accident is solely that which is unexpected and contingent. According to Virilio, the invention or production of any technology is simultaneously also the production of its accident. To invent the train, he says, is to invent derailment; to invent aircraft is to invent the air crash. Technologies, therefore, can be assessed on the basis of the accidents they produce. In this article, I shift the focus of theories of the accident to the topic of citizenship. What is the primary accident of technologies of citizenship? What exclusions are enabled when the ‘accident’ is employed as a political category? These questions are addressed through an analysis of the discourse on ‘accidental citizenship’ in the United States. Accidental citizenship is a pejorative way of describing the ‘birthright’ citizenship of individuals who were born on US territory to non-citizen parents. I argue with reference to the case of the so-called ‘second American Taliban’ (Yaser Esam Hamdi) that the discourse of ‘accidental citizenship’ is being employed as a strategy for making and unmaking American citizenship. Accidental citizenship involves discursive technologies that enable an exceptional logic to be applied to legally normalized subjects, with the effect of excluding those who are included. Consequently, by focusing on the figure of the ‘accidental citizen’ in post-9/11 United States we can better understand the acts of sovereignty by which citizens and foreigners, friends and enemies are made and unmade.