Plural Citizenships

Singular identities is also an illusion, because we all have a multiplicity of voices inside.[1]
—Elif Shafak

In today’s world, exile and citizenship no longer feel like opposites. The promises that once defined the citizen—protection, participation, belonging—feel conditional. Rights once assumed to be permanent now seem uncertain, as access to housing, healthcare, mobility, and security becomes increasingly provisional, reversible, and unevenly distributed. What does citizenship mean within such a world?

A person waits between competing systems of recognition, living inside the words if, when, and until. In this suspended space, plural forms of citizenship are already lived, long before they are ever named. The same condition, expressed in another form: the ‘citizen of nowhere’. Despite the politically charged use of the term by some, to be a citizen of nowhere is not to be without belonging. It is to learn that belonging is something that one does; a practice rather than a status, a mode of rather than a privilege.

When seen through the lens of heimaten, this suspended state takes on a deeper meaning. Heimaten is not the possession of a home but the slow and careful work of making one. In this sense, heimaten belongs to what Hannah Arendt calls labour: the work that sustains life without leaving behind something solid or lasting. In The Human Condition, Arendt writes: ‘Labour is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body… The human condition of labour is life itself.’[2]

For Arendt, labour is bound to necessity, yet the very activity that keeps us alive so easily slips from political recognition. Today, the labour that sustains bodies and cities is often carried out by those whose own lives are held in administrative uncertainty—temporary visas, expiring contracts, provisional housing. The tension is stark: you sustain the world while your right to remain within it is never fully secure. Arendt points out that ‘the calamity of the rightless … is that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever’.[3] This reminds us that exile is not only about borders crossed, but about being cast outside the circle of recognition.

This is where Plural Citizenships departs from. The programme involving readings, talks, conversations, and performances understands citizenship not only as a matter of passports, legal documents, or constitutional rights. But as something that is a democratic practice exercised through the daily maintenance of the common world. Plural citizenship cannot mean only multiple identities or cultural affiliations. It must confront the unequal conditions under which life-sustaining labour is performed and valued.

Plural Citizenships takes shape as a series of encounters, where writers, poets, translators, and thinkers come together to test the limits of belonging and to imagine new grammars for living together grounded in participation and mutual recognition. The evenings are not designed as answers but as shared rooms, places where the questions raised can breathe among others: how home becomes metaphor and memory, how violence hides inside language, how family stretches across borders, how class and the body shape one’s place in the world, how labour becomes a form of citizenship, and how heimat might be understood as something unfinished and still possible.

 

[1] Elif Shafak, ‘The Revolutionary Power of Diverse Thought’, DailyGood, 28 February 2022, www.dailygood.org/story/1852/the-revolutionary-power-of-diverse-thought-elif-shafak.

[2] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 7.

[3] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books, 1962), 295.