Necessary treason: allegiance and citizenship in transnational literature since mid-century

After the Second World War, calls for world citizenship were countered by increased demands for national loyalty and patriotism. Many newly formed or independent states configured definitions of citizenship along ideological, religious, or non-territorial lines. By contrast, the Charter of the United Nations (1945) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) propounded global allegiances and affiliations. The conflict between international and national allegiance is inherent to postwar global structures and their subjects. In the context of totalitarianism and other forms of colonialism, allegiance to the state constitutes a breach of the civil contract: the implicit endorsement of human and civil rights violations through allegiance runs counter to the dialectic of rights and responsibilities fundamental to citizenship. In such a context, non-state allegiance—which is to say, treason—becomes necessary in order to reclaim citizenship and salvage the civil contract.Attending to various modes of political resistance writing across the late-20th and early-21st centuries, “Necessary Treason” asks critical questions about demands for loyalty made both by states and by non-state actors and organizations since 1945. Across diverse social, political, and national contexts, I focus on writers and theorists who question the legitimacy of state citizenship and envision alternative modes of belonging and structures of affiliation. In prose that blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction, Rebecca West and Muriel Spark employ melodrama as an experimental mode for investigations of shifting Cold War loyalties. Writing against the Soviet regime in Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel and Milan Kundera formulate anti-political literary modes to undermine the state. In the context of apartheid South Africa, Mongane Wally Serote and Nadine Gordimer experiment with literary forms as essential supplements to their own anti-apartheid activism. Finally, Abdulrazak Gurnah and Caryl Phillips, challenging state sanctioned and institutionalized racisms, reject exclusionary community formation and advocate instead for transnational, multidirectional affiliations. In each case, literary modes operate in tandem with embodied forms of political activism, and therefore constitute a crucial component of resistance. Literary modes perform and challenge state-sanctioned categories of belonging and civic duty. In the context of oppressive state formations, literature makes way for alternative citizenships and relationships of responsibility among individuals.

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