Session Abstract

The normative story of the transition to liberal, democratic modernity is structured by the emergence of the liberal individual and democratic citizen from a world marked by multiple encumbrances, chief among them, kinship.  This panel will explore the entwined politics of kinship and citizenship in political modernity in order to anatomize the ambivalent affects of liberal democratic formations.  Many accounts of liberal democratic national formation locate citizenship at the core of political order and kinship as an increasingly privative, apolitical social formation, one in which the political logic of affiliation is figured as pre-modern, feudal, and/or monarchical. Yet, both kinship and citizenship—despite their formal differences—overlap with one another in important ways for the delimitation of the liberal, democratic nation. The liberal nation-state, for example, becomes a metaphorical family, while “well-ordered” nuclear families become constitutive in narratives of national inclusion. Thus, as citizenship becomes the operative model of political affiliation in the nineteenth century, its norms of inclusion (endogamy, fraternity, nativism) are also social-political practices of exclusion.

Our panel demonstrates that, from the emergence of political modernity in the eighteenth century through to the twentieth century, distinctions between citizenship and kinship were central to defining and delimiting the geopolitical distribution of sovereignty: those societies and nations putatively without citizenship and organized through kinship were objects (and even presumptive beneficiaries) of imperial expansion by nations organized around the more “civilized” principle of citizenship.  This panel, then, seeks to interrogate the normative story of the emergence of liberal, democratic political modernity by problematizing the category and location of kinship.  We offer a cultural genealogy of the customary separation of citizenship and kinship, and shows the dire political consequences of this division.  Brian Connolly looks at an emergent pseudoethnographic discourse concerning Hindus and Muslims in the early republic, which figured these religiously grounded alternative kinship practices as a threat to the sovereignty of the liberal democratic citizen; Camille Robcis examines immigration and family law in France in the 1970s; Judith Surkis explores mixed marriage and naturalization in late nineteenth-century French Algeria; and Sara Pursley looks at the politics of family reform in mid-twentieth-century Iraq.  This panel will appeal to those historians interested in the relationship between modernity and kinship, the history of the family, the constitution of the political domain, legal history, and the history of religion and secularism.