Culture and Citizenship

Catalog description

What is the relationship between citizenship and culture? When and how do they overlap? How do the rituals by which our identities are conferred and regulated relate to either or both of these concepts? Are we simply born into citizenship? Into culture? When and how do these categories evolve? To what extent can works of art be said to "belong" to a country or culture or to contribute to the work of shaping national or cultural identities? Emergent literatures from what we might call nation-spaces are often subjected to simple deeds of ownership, albeit not without contestation. Indeed, the same texts, examined more carefully, may negate such casual attributions. What happens when memory exerts its brooding influence, upsetting the categorical claims of citizen that derive from the cultural field? This seminar draws on diverse genres of literature from a range of times and places - from ancient Greece to the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary Turkey, from eighteenth-century England to the unfinished business of the Biafra war of secession – to ask if there are any inherent and permanent values to be placed on household expressions such as Nation, Culture, and other like terms.