By For Collective with Thy Phu
Debates on forced migration often assume that one is either a refugee or a citizen. To put it more starkly, refugees supposedly want nothing more than to relinquish their refugeeness and become instead, citizen. Accordingly, photographic representations of the journey of transformation and self-reinvention, in emphasizing a trajectory from refugee to citizen, take for granted the power of the nation-state in defining citizenship. However, migrant justice activists, Indigenous activist-scholars, and theorists whose protest against and refusal of “border imperialism” are dislodging the concept of citizenship from the exclusive purview of the nation-state. This presentation considers the visual forms that such an action might take, especially in creating the possibility of “refugee citizenship,” a concept that critic Donald C. Goellnicht invokes to denote alternative forms of citizenship that challenge nation-state frameworks.