Ethnicity, immigration, empire, nation, subject

According to Lauren Berlant, “the contradiction between the sovereignty of abstract citizens and the everyday lives of embodied subjects” has been shaped in the United States by a number of different systems and hierarchies, including those of white supremacy, class consolidation, the value and requirements of labor, and the management of state power over individual sovereignty (Keywords, “Citizenship”). Berlant uses words like “performance” and the legal and cultural “availability” of status markers to describe the place of “citizenship" in the consolidation of a nation-state’s geographic and ideological borders. With specific reference to passages from at least one of the texts we’ve discussed in class, examine the contradiction Berlant describes. To what extent does the text you’ve chosen demonstrate the complexities of citizenship “as an aspirational concept" (Keywords 42)? What attitude does the text appear to have towards the idea of citizenship as either a formal standing or a lived experience, or what tensions between those two ideas is evidenced in your chosen text?