Archipelagic Citizenship: Arendt, Glissant, and the Politics of Displacement

This paper considers the intervention that Édouard Glissant makes in Hannah Arendt's discourse on political belonging, particularly as this takes shape in her analysis of citizenship. To this end, I consider how Glissant's analysis of the memory of the abyssal beginning of the Middle Passage complicates the promise of belonging that Arendt suggests citizenship makes for those who were once cast out. In view of this, I argue that Glissant provides a basis to reformulate citizenship and political belonging, not in terms of the bounded structure of the nation-state, but in terms of the relational structure of the archipelago.