Cynthia Weber

Citizenship and how it functions in the US ‘melting pot’ are some of the most taken-for-granted aspects of US public life.  Yet as the international War on Terror and the domestic War on Illegal Immigration demonstrate, not all US citizens receive equal treatment in the US – legally, socially, or culturally.  By documenting first-person testimonials by US citizens caught up in the post-9/11 security and immigration crossfire, this project stands as a visual ethnography of the limits of liberal tolerance as it is practiced in the US and what this means for the practice of contemporary US citizenship.

Cynthia spent 6 years on and off filming first-person interviews in the US, Mexico, and Canada. She edited these interviews into a series of short documentary films and A1-sized framed photographs.

Five further films from the project are viewable at: http://www.youtube.com/user/opendemocracyteam

Modern liberal citizenship is supposed to equate being a good citizen with being a good human.  Yet as RBJ Walker reminds us, ‘the modern compromise in political life is that we are citizens first and humans second’ (Walker 2007).  This project not only contributes to chronicling the violence and injustice required to make this compromise work on behalf of the modern nation-state.  It suggests that because the US state (like any state) reserves for itself the power to determine who among its citizens is “safe” or “unsafe” and to reverse this decision at any time, this modern liberal compromise of humanity for citizenship is a compromise too far.  This is not only because citizenship can never guarantee one’s safety.  More importantly, this is because citizenship not only cannot but wilfully does not guarantee one’s humanity, much less the humanity of those whose differences do not easily melt into the state’s ideal of itself as ‘one people’.