Negotiating Citizenship(s) in Young Adult Speculative Novels

Abstract

The major objective of this study is to analyse in which ways a selection of speculative novels for adolescent readers represent, interpret, shape and encode different forms of citizenship. In setting this focus, this study takes up the assumption that highly conventionalised genres are drawn on especially in historic moments in which a recourse to known formulae is perceived as helpful or necessary in order to make sense of collective experiences that are difficult to interpret or to encode social values and norms, both aspects that can be found in recent and ongoing debates about citizenship. The genres of dystopia and post-/disaster, as well as a further highly conventionalised genre that is of importance in the context of this study, the Bildungsroman, are often employed to represent and negotiate societal crisis in various ways, for example a crisis of conceptualising citizenship (as a form of belonging, as participation and representation and as responsibility), of national and international security or of ecological and climate crisis. Even adolescence itself is constructed as a time of crisis (cf. Kristeva, “The Adolescent Novel” 9). Differing dimensions of citizenship, such as political, cultural or ecological, and the ways in which they are threatened, contested and negotiated are intricately connected to all of these crises. The main assumption of this study is that in the selected novels, citizenship positions are interrogated and challenged but also reaffirmed and that this occurs through the challenging of or compliance with genre conventions relating to aspects of space and memory. This study seeks to determine in how far the treatment of such conventions is relevant for the characters’, and by extension the adolescent readers’, movement towards enfranchisement and which forms of enfranchisement are imagined as necessary or possible at all, i.e. which ‘spaces’ are opened up (or closed down) for the performance of (differing kinds of) citizenship. Furthermore, this study examines to which extent the ideologies of citizenship provided for adolescent readers in these novels remain steeped in “patriotic senses of national particularity” as “[h]istorically [cultivated by] the Rights of Man and Bildung”, thus having rendered these concepts complicit “with nationalism and colonialism” (Slaughter, “Enabling Fictions” 55), or whether genre hybridisation in these novels manages to create an “impure […] genre […] that represents resistance to a hegemonic ideology” (Baccolini, “Gender and Genre” 18). A genre-theoretical provides a concise outline of the most relevant ‘genres’ or forms of writing in relation to the novels to be discussed. The emphasis is placed on explaining the discursive functions of these categories, especially with regards to adolescence and aspects of citizenship, but also at this point important notions of space and/or memory are addressed. With a view to the many female protagonists in the novels under discussion, this presentation of the generic framework also briefly discusses issues around the construction of adolescent female identity. The textual analysis is divided into three major chapters, each examining distinct forms or ideologies of citizenship and their ties to specific generic traditions through the representation of a range of spatial and memory-related aspects and issues. Due to the thematic emphases of the selected novels, the focused citizenship categories are political, cultural and ecological citizenship.