In February 2018, the mission statement of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a federal agency charged with immigrant affairs, was radically changed, and the words “America’s promise as a nation of immigrants,” promoting “an awareness and understanding of citizenship” along with “ensuring the integrity of our immigration system,” were deleted, to be substituted with the intimation that the immigration policy of the USA must tend towards “adjudicating requests for immigrant benefits” while “protecting Americans” and “securing the homeland.” This stark opposition between “immigrants” and “Americans” tells a lot about the recent and brutal dismantling of what since the founding of the first English Colonies in North America has always been one of the central tenets of the American concept of national identity, citizenship, and civil rights – i.e., the inextricable interconnection between the endless flow of migration waves and the necessity to accomodate them in a social and political structure inevitably bound to continually redefine itself and the set of duties and rights upon which belonging to “America” as its citizens is based.
The special section aims at exploring the complex and contradictory development of this dynamics, and the ways in which it has been represented, celebrated and criticized by American culture. All disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches are welcome, and topics may include, but are not limited to:
Early European migrations to North America
Citizenship in Colonial British America
Inner migrations before the Revolution
The American Revolution and transatlantic mobilities
Migrations in the early Republic
The new American citizen
Forced migrations – slavery and (non-)citizenship
Racial theories, migrations and removals in Jacksonian America
Manifest Destiny and westward movements
The redefinition of citizenship before and after the Civil War
Postbellum inner migrations
The new technologies of mobility and the moving citizen
Early 20th-century mass migrations and the “melting” of American citizenship
20th-century American Imperialism, migrations and citizenship
Migrations between the two World Wars
Citizenship on the front – military mobilities
The Cold War and the “fixing” of Americannes
The mobility of the Civil Rights movement(s)
Ethnicities on the move – global diasporas and American citizenship
The “mobile” postmodern citizen
Virtual mobility and virtual citizenship
Migrants and citizens in the Trump era
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If you are interested in submitting an article, please send to vmdeangelis@gmail.comand madtirabassi@gmail.coma title, a very brief abstract of the article (10 lines max), and a short biographical sketch by December 10, and we will get back to you by December 24. The deadline for article submissions by authors whose titles and abstracts have been accepted is April 15, 2019.