Seeing Citizenship: Picturing Political Belonging in Multiethnic Graphic Literature

FAIN: HB-302712-25

Maite Urcaregui
San Jose State University Research Foundation (San Jose, CA 95112-5569)

Research and writing of a book examining the relationship between and among race, citizenship, and political belonging.

My book project, "Seeing Citizenship: Picturing Political Belonging in Multiethnic Graphic Literature," develops an emerging and significant nexus of literary and visual studies to examine the relationship between and among race, citizenship, and political belonging. In it, I analyze 20th- and 21st-century graphic literature by Asian American, African American, Arab American, and Latinx authors alongside contemporaneous visual archives and critical legal histories to underscore how these texts reveal and critique citizenship’s inconsistencies, inequalities, and exclusions. Recognizing citizenship as a fluid experience rather than a fixed category, the works I analyze do not simply seek inclusion within normative national frameworks. Instead, I argue that, by collaging text and images into new literary forms, they actively model, or picture, more flexible formations of political recognition and belonging.