ABSTRACT
Constitutional texts are performative: they do not merely describe national spaces and communities, but rather bring them into being as legal and political entities. They affirm national sovereignty, interpellate citizens as national subjects and iterate national histories. All of these processes serve continually to reinscribe national identity as natural while, at the same time, constituting exclusions from its collective address. Constitutions also work retroactively to legitimate themselves and the law they establish. Such documents produce spaces in which national identities can be configured; they also, however, simultaneously produce spaces in which such hegemonic identities can be challenged, resisted and potentially reconfigured.
