Maite Urcaregui

This book examines the dynamic ways that authors and artists work at the intersections of literary and visual cultures to create new narratives of belonging—national, political, and otherwise. It analyzes graphic narratives by Asian American, African American, Arab American, and Latinx authors alongside contemporaneous visual archives and legal histories to underscore how these texts reveal and critique citizenship’s contradictions. These works comment on crises of citizenship that emerge just prior to WWII, a time of global conflict that threw the United States’s racial inequalities into sharp relief, through the contemporary moment in which citizenship continues to be a contested terrain marked by increasingly visible forms of violence. Recognizing citizenship as a fluid experience rather than a fixed category, the works do not simply seek inclusion within normative national frameworks. Instead, by collaging text and images into new literary forms, they actively picture more flexible formations of political recognition and belonging.