Beyond Recognition: Emotional Citizenship in Twenty-First-Century Postcolonial Fiction

Abstract

Postcolonial criticism has largely theorized belonging through migration, diaspora and the territorial politics of the nation-state, treating citizenship as a legal status to be granted, withheld or revoked. This article argues that a significant strand of twenty-first-century postcolonial fiction articulates a rival jurisdiction of belonging, which it names emotional citizenship: membership constituted through care, grief, touch and sustained attention rather than through documentation, descent or state ratification. Reading Kamila Shamsie's Home Fire (2017) alongside Mohsin Hamid's Exit West (2017) and The Last White Man (2022), it develops an analytical framework that brings Fanon's account of colonial misrecognition and Butler's work on grievability into contact with Ahmed's cultural politics of emotion and Berlant's theory of affective attachment, drawing on Said and Bhabha to situate the racial and cultural grammars these novels contest. The article contends that emotional citizenship in these texts is not a consolation for legal exclusion but a claim advanced against it, enacted through the body and legible only to those willing to be addressed by it. Each novel stages an antagonism it declines to resolve: Shamsie's protagonist makes an affective claim the state can read only as a criminal one; Hamid's migrants improvise relational publics that no polity ratifies; and the collapse of racial legibility in The Last White Man leaves recognition dependent on the slow labour of intimates. Emotional citizenship thus names both an alternative to the politics of recognition and its most exacting critique, since affective belonging carries no enforcement and remains vulnerable to sentimental capture.