Troublesome Indigestion: The “Return” of Omar Khadr and Post-Racial Politics of Citizenship in Canada

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This article examines the relationship between legal, political and media discourses surrounding the much publicized return of Canadian Guantánamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr. Three main figures of return appear here: first, Khadr’s literal return to Canada, his country of birth, in September of 2012. This homecoming has sparked lively political, legal and public debates about Canadian citizenship, which lead to a second form of return: the return of racism, in its contemporary “post-racial,” colour-blind and/or civilizationalist forms, that permeate debates surrounding Khadr’s (and his family’s) membership in Canada. Finally, I consider what happens when Khadr is neither successfully assimilated nor “excreted” by the state or by its imaginary community of citizens. This return, which I figure as a kind of troublesome indigestion, is revealed on the rare occasions when Khadr’s own words have been made public, when he insists on speaking as a rights-bearing citizen and a normal Canadian young person, despite relentless legal, political and discursive attempts to cast him out. I suggest that these can be read as moments when that which has been deemed “indigestible” makes a claim for incorporation within the imaginary and civic community, thereby revealing the mechanism of expulsion as in fact constitutive of national or civic identity.