The Fallacy of the Literary Citizen

Interview with Alina Stefanescu

“The idea of citizenship struck me as an extraordinary, unearned, and undeserved privilege…”

Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Recent books include a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020) and Dor, which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (September, 2021). Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Books Prize (2018). Alina's poems, essays, and fiction can be found in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, Poetry, BOMB, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as editor, reviewer, and critic for various journals and is currently working on a novel-like creature. Her new poetry collection will be published by Sarabande in 2025.

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KARAN

Where does the term “literary citizen” originate from? It’s hard to trace its origin. I feel like it was kind of forced into my vocabulary the moment I entered the academic-creative-crossover arena as a creative writer, and now, as someone who has been writing, editing, and publishing in literary magazines for close to three years, it’s ubiquitous across the literary world. Do you remember in what context you encountered it first?

ALINA

I can’t remember the first time I heard someone say “literary citizen,” or refer to “literary citizenship.” It wallpapers most rooms of literary life, and seems to indicate different things, depending on the room. But no one specifies what needs are addressed by the term—whether those needs are affective, labor-related, structural, etc.. 

Maybe it originated in proximity to poetics of witness? I’m thinking of how poetics of witness aimed to reconfigure ‘citizenship’ outside the power of nation-states and empires. Osip Mandelstam imagined a Republic of Letters to which writers belong, a republic of living and dead writers that lay claim to our allegiance. But Mandelstam’s view wasn't as expressly political, per se, as the idea of being a global citizen, a citizen of the world.

This century’s problems are collective: neoliberalism, billionaire-economics, and climate change, for example, require us to reimagine community and caregiving beyond the militarized borders of empire and neocolonial policies. 

As a concept, literary citizenship acknowledges the duties of citizenship (however those are constructed or interpreted) vis a vis the Republic of Letters, while downplaying the underlying inequality between various passports and citizenship regimes. Obviously, some literary citizens are freer than others—but the concept wallpapers over such distinctions.

It is, to me, a very American word that presumes its own power and pats itself on the back a bit too much. I worry that using it allows writers to speak from a neutral position that locates us outside the crimes of states.

Let’s imagine a concept of literary community that refuses the hierarchical power dynamics of states. A concept that reconfigures solidarities in defiance of nation-state citizenship rather than accepting that vision for the future. 

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KARAN

Contemplating Borges’ vision of Paradise as a library, I find myself pondering: In our quest to be exemplary literary citizens, do we risk sacrificing the solitude that often nurtures our creativity? 

ALINA

I'm not sure if it’s an either/or, Karan, but I love how you combine two thorny concepts—exemplarity and literary citizenship—in that single question whose difficulty reminds me that we are speaking about language, and using language in a way that commits us to unpacking what words connote as well as denote. 

The problem with Paradise is that it wants to formalize purity. Paradise fetishizes purity. In this way, it resembles citizenship, a status that fashions a space of formal purity.

The foregrounding of citizenship as a value creates a pure/impure dichotomy based on the accident of geographic birth. Citizenship reifies the contingent. Conceptually, it also purifies the subjects of the state; it overcomes anonymity and difference to create an identification.

But I would like to insist that the masses, the designated groupings of subjects, are complicated in both their construction and their existence. Some masses, for example, have better healthcare than others. There is no mass in the margins. Once a margin becomes massive, it takes over the page, it is no longer marginal but central—which is to say, it is part of the page. 

Isn’t there a sense in which the recent US elections reveal a discontent with multiplicity, and a distrust of difference?

To be hybrid is to be guilty of not choosing one side — and thus of playing both sides, of being promiscuous, manipulative, adulterous.

Failing to pick your team: is that the original sin? Wanting to taste the pleasure of the fruit? 

Since we’re still in Paradise, let's take a popular American past-time and imagine our responses to it. An NFL game in a large stadium. What are the conditions of participating and being part of such an event? Cultural bilingualism, or living and speaking two cultures proficiently, remains unacceptable to both sides of the football stadium. Let us note that the stadium itself has zero neutral space. Those in the stadium are there to cheer for a side in the stadium, and there is no reason to be present otherwise.

Let us note that the very act of cheering keeps the stadium in business and implies the complicity of everyone who is holding a hot-diggity-dawg while extolling the team their family has handed down in the pageant of heritage-allegiance. 

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KARAN

Barthes’ perspective that a text’s vitality springs not from the author but from the active engagement of the reader raises a compelling question: Does the concept of literary citizenship, with its focus on writers’ responsibilities and community involvement, inadvertently perpetuate the myth of the author as the central figure in literature? How can we reconcile this with the belief that a text’s true significance is unlocked by the diversity of its readership? Do we need to? Should we even try?

ALINA

I suspect the centrality of the author is sustained by notions of literary citizenship, though its original cause might be traced back to the Romantics. Because you stated that a text’s “true significance is unlocked by the diversity of its readership,” and because I agree with this statement, it seems fair to provide a bit of an embarrassing backstory.  My initial discomfort with the “literary citizens” was prompted by a letter I wrote in 2019 to the trustees of the  “Amy Lowell Scholarship for American Poets Traveling Abroad.” Drawing on the tradition of the open letter, I mailed a copy to them and then shared my words online. Although the topic wasn’t  literary citizenship, per se, the word “citizen” (and the idea of citizenship) was central to the letter's complaint. 

A week later, I received a response from the trustees that included my own words—and there, in my own phrasing, the word “citizen” spat at me. Migrant children were being forcibly taken from their parents by border patrol and given to American foster families as their parents' deportation went through the courts. Alabama was using old prisons unfit for human habitation to create carceral spaces for undocumented Mexican workers.

The idea of citizenship struck me as an extraordinary, unearned, and undeserved privilege accorded by the happenstance of birth and then leveraged by politicians to enact racist policies that punished residents for not being born in the US.

Fury and disgust made the word grotesque somehow, and this feeling has only increased as the world’s un-citizened persons are disproportionately targeted by militaristic states. Even now, Israel knows that Palestinians in Gaza lack a state to protect them.

In the absence of  state citizenship, humans become permanent refugees without an official identity that enables them to travel, to demand legal redress, to exist in the world of nation-states. 

If literary discourses tend to absorb and replicate cultural hierarchies, queer theory commits itself to asking how what we say overdetermines what we imagine. Lauren Berlant, for example, noted that  “the same pseudo-scientific rationales” responsible for maintaining “white supremacy in the performance of U.S. citizenship” were also central to the shaping of reproductive law. Their thinking on citizenship rebuffs the temptations of neutrality. Berlant defines citizenship as both “the practical site of a theoretical existence” that permits the legal regulation of everyday life and “an abstract idea on behalf of which people engage in personal and political acts.”

Whenever we invoke citizenship, we reify the concept of sovereignty, as defined by militarized nation-states. We presuppose that national sovereignty should regulate the citizen-subject's relationship to their own physical and mental autonomy.

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 KARAN

One of my all-time favorite quotes is by Toni Morrison: “If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.“ How might this redefine the role of literary citizenship, especially in the context of advocating for diversity and inclusivity? How does this call to create the unwritten and unheard challenge the conventional duties of literary citizens and expand their role beyond mere promotion and support to active creation and representation?

ALINA

Toni Morrison’s light does not stop. She was — and is — a literary giant who shaped publishing as well as the world of letters. These questions require continuous revisiting and re-imagining because social invisibility isn't static; it tends to shift and expand or contract.

I wonder if we ask too much of each other. Or if we ask without giving in return, and how that sort of asking is transactional rather than relational. How do we imitate the nation-state in our constructions of allegiance? How do our silences grow louder as the “normal” grows more unsustainable or untenable? 

I’m thinking about allegiance and citizenship, and how silence presumes agreement with those in power. And how power, in the U.S., is often accorded by virtue of being normal, liking baseball, knowing the latest trending product, being part of consumption. The power to be normal is the power to be like us, to be one of us, to be acceptable. What dances do we do in the name of acceptance? There was an essay by Laila Lalami in Harper’s where she defined “conditional citizens” as “people whose rights the state finds expendable in the pursuit of white supremacy.” The other side of this conditionality is history. “There is nothing more American than forgetting about the past. But conditional citizens will insist on remembering,” Lalami adds. What conditional citizens remember does not align with the notions of heritage they are expected to repeat.

Maybe representation could shift towards including the histories of conditional citizens without necessarily foregrounding their marginality? Pain is a symptom that gets conflated into the definition of a person.

How do publishers and editors enshrine marginalization rather than contest it (if at all)? 

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KARAN

With the rise of social media, the landscape of literary citizenship has dramatically expanded, incorporating not only the traditional acts of reading, reviewing, and promoting literature but also the continuous maintenance of a public persona online. This digital dimension introduces complex dynamics around visibility, engagement, and the representation of one's authentic self. Can you compare the current expectations of literary citizenship with how writers engaged with their communities in the past? How do you think the literary landscape has shifted in the last decade and half or so because of, say, Twitter? 

ALINA

I’m not sure. Is there such a thing as an “authentic self” across time?

Selfhood, or subjectivity, seems to be constructed from loyalties and affiliations. The details which evoke these loyalties are also the source of tension in human relations. 

Henry Miller once said that, as writers, we are “underwriting an era with our lives.” We commit ourselves to thinking, erring, recording, challenging, and making new worlds from language. Digital hot-takes happen in language — they are challenges to our use of language— and there are reasons to be grateful for that. Twitter, for example, makes the context of our conversations about literary citizenship palpable and actionable. Writers Against the War On Gaza is a fantastic example of how a literary community forged from solidarity creates new ways of being and being-alongside through direct action. WAWOG improvises — it learns as it goes, and in so doing, expands the context of knowledge as well as possibility.

Neoliberalism commits us to dreaming our privatized dreams and investing in careerism, but WAWOG re-envisions solidarity in the moment, in relation to the moment we are given.

And the labor of this collective vision refuses the usual hierarchies. Collective labor holds tears alongside laughter: it is radically committed in its refusals, and radically creative in its visions. 

Writers cannot be Party animals. Poets cannot be propagandists. There is nothing immanent or divine about a political party. Or a politician. There is no such construct worthy of our deepest allegiance.

The only commitment worthy of its stanza breaks is hope in the magnificent thing we can't even imagine.

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KARAN

I’m interested in hearing about the economic aspects of literary citizenship, especially in relation to buying books from indie-presses as opposed to Amazon, having litmag subscriptions, attending events, or participating in workshops, etc.? Do you think this creates undue financial pressure on writers and readers alike? And are we then inadvertently excluding certain individuals or groups from the literary community, perhaps due to socioeconomic status, geographical location, or other factors?

ALINA

I love this question because it takes us back to the lived experience denied by abstract concepts, and asks us to think about the discursive limitations of “rights.”  In the U.S., a fetus has a “right to life” without a corresponding “right” to healthcare. From the minute an American fetus is born, or gains an existence apart from its parent's body, it  has fewer rights than it did in the womb.

What Lauren Berlant called “the contradiction between the sovereignty of abstract citizens and the everyday lives of embodied subjects” is structured by these financial and physical inequalities that normalized, and  made to seem natural to the human condition. 

Legally, citizenship administrates class hierarchies and legitimizes them as collective goods. For example, a corporation ‘needs’ a tax break in order to provide ‘jobs’ so that the economy won't ‘fail;’ or, the defense industry ‘needs’ a new war in order to keep that lottery known as ‘retirement accounts’ functioning. Neoliberalism ensures that certain individuals or groups will be excluded from the literary community for the reasons you mention.

The economic aspects of ‘literary citizenship’ can't be separated from the social and cultural ones. 

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KARAN

If you could propose an alternative to the current model of literary citizenship, what would it look like? How would it better support the needs and well-being of creative writers and professionals in the literary world?

ALINA

O Karan, I wish I had an easy answer to this question. In “Critique of Violence,” Walter Benjamin warned against the pervasiveness of “lawmaking violence.” All the “creative” lawmaking violence of myth, “is pernicious,” he said. “Pernicious, too, is the law-preserving administrative violence that serves it.”

There is always this question of who we are serving.

Since “citizenship” celebrates something that is rarely chosen, I prefer to think of what we do as living in community with one another — and creating communities, an act that  implies consent, inclusivity, shared labor, and an openness to exit and entry. Community is less overdetermined; the emphasis is on making the form we need. 

In Defacing the Monument, Susan Briante writes: “Citizenship is a construct, a shelter that was never constructed to cover everyone equally.”

Invoking the word subconsciously assumes the inequality of citizenship by writing it into our model.

Even in a democracy, even among ‘citizens,’ those inequalities characterize our experience of citizenship. 

There is a status hierarchy within citizenship. Naturalized citizens are not equal — we can't run for president or vice president; we aren't trusted enough to lead this land. My friend who spent time in prison is not an equal citizen — he doesn’t have the right to vote in an election, and he has been effectively disenfranchised from participation due to the legal system and our definitions of a crime.  

By its nature, citizenship depends on documents, and documentation, on paper evidence, on official approval.

I imagine the work we do as writers aims to challenge those official sources of power. 

As poets, we cannot change the past. We can only reconfigure our relationship to the future through language.

Aren’t we the ones who believe that language matters? This is our ontological and ethical commitment. 

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KARAN

I am a Virginia Woolf fan for her prose, but also for her advocacy for a “room of one’s own“ where she underscores the necessity of physical and financial independence for writers (in her time, particularly women, and today we can take that to accommodate all marginalized creators) to create meaningful literature. This principle, when juxtaposed with the modern context of the MFA, invites a critical examination of how these academic institutions contribute to or detract from the ideal of literary citizenship. Given that MFA programs are often gatekeepers to professional networks, publication opportunities, and literary communities — do you feel MFA programs democratize access to the literary field, providing the metaphorical room and resources Woolf deemed essential, or do they reinforce existing barriers to entry and perpetuate elitism within literary communities? 

ALINA

Rather than formulate a generalization and then argue for something that can only be true under limited and very specific conditions, I will acknowledge that these situations vary by person, as does the significance of academic degrees. But gatekeeping is real: it forms (and deforms) literary life, publishing, academia, literature, and social life. Denying the existence of the gates doesn't make it any easier for the people who feel left out of them.

If we talk about literary citizens, then we have to address the literary refugees excluded from the state-centric definition. If we borrow the power of the state, then we borrow its crimes as well.

And the documents – the degrees, the MFA, all the papers that certify value—are front-loaded in our third person biographies.

I want to imagine a way in which having received a fellowship doesn’t make it more likely that you will receive another one, but rather, ensures that others who haven't been supported are considered more closely. I want the gaps in a resume to signify life rather than failure. Even more drastically, I want to imagine a world where failure is considered central to the well-examined life, and the absence of failure or gaps is read as a sort of irresponsibility.

Maybe I’m a contrarian. Why do we accept the values and valorizations established by the very institutions and power structures we wish to critique? 

We should weave words in relation to the burning, devastated world and the creatures who share it with us. We should translate those fires alongside the text. We should re-imagine what language does. We should be fools for that imagining— and risk it.

What if we focused our efforts on indicting those who wield power rather than being good Americans and litigating individuals? What if we stopped believing that privatized, individual solutions can solve massive social and structural problems? What would it mean to live by, and in relation to, that? 

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KARAN

I am also curious about the “Americanism“ of this literary citizen phenomenon. Does it exist outside of our larger North American echo chamber? Are you aware of other global perspectives on literary engagement that contrast with the American approach to fostering a literary culture, and can we adapt them in some way(s)?

ALINA

What a wonderful question. And yet, I don’t have an answer for it. This makes it even more wonderful somehow. 

But poetry imagines the impossible. The labor of poetry’s “we” is ongoing, contiguous, and infinite. I will let poetry speak. Among Fady Joudah’s translations of Mahmoud Darwish’s late work, there is a poem that strings the lyre of this moment for me. Darwish dedicated this poem, “Counterpoint,” to Edward Said, and there is perhaps a melody that emerges between two Palestinian writers in exile (and their Palestinian translator).

When Darwish asks Said if he is prone to “the affliction of longing,” Said replies: “My longing is a conflict over a present / that grabs tomorrow by the testicles.”

The sounds of New York surround them; Said is being treated for cancer. “I am the plural” passes between them like a refrain, a limbo of rain. And then, near the poem’s closing, Darwish writes:

Then he said: If I do before you do,

I entrust you with the impossible!

I asked: Is the impossible far?

He said: As far as one generation.