Colloquia Series - Suspect Citizenship: Rethinking Belonging and Non-belonging in Plural Societies

 

Based on years of ethnographic research on France’s present antiracist movement and mobilization against state violence, I introduce a framework of “suspect citizenship” which demonstrates how ethnoracial minorities are constantly outside of the boundaries of full societal inclusion. I argue that postcolonial plural societies like France position a certain populations as suspect or suspicious, due to their ethnoracial assignment. I examine suspect citizenship at the nexus between active citizenship, belonging/non-belonging, antiracism at a macro level, and activism against state violence. I consider how certain populations are automatically rendered suspicious or suspect by virtue of their ethnoracial assignment on micro and macro levels, and how this construction of citizenship is not just a postcolonial formation. I discuss how we can understand how individuals resist their categorization as suspect through examining mobilization against state violence, as well as how suspect citizenship exists without state recognition of ethnoracial difference. Suspect citizenship is therefore a framework and mode for understanding and making sense of how colonial hierarchies are maintained in postcolonial or neocolonial societies.

 

 

Jean Beaman (she/her) is Associate Professor of Sociology in the Ph.D. Program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), and on leave from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research is ethnographic in nature and focuses on race/ethnicity, racism, international migration, and state violence in both France and the United States. She is author of Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France (University of California Press, 2017), as well as numerous articles and book chapters. She is also an Associate Editor of the journal, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power and a Corresponding Editor for the journal Metropolitics/Metropolitiques. She was a 2022-2023 fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and a Co-PI for the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar grant, “Race, Precarity, and Privilege: Migration in a Global Context” for 2020-2022.