ABSTRACT
Taking its cue from the current history of migration across the Mediterranean Sea, this chapter attends to the emergence of the decolonial subjectivity of the citizen-xenos that conjures the two interrelated, albeit different, histories of dispossession in the long present, namely, the histories of the alienated citizen in democratic sovereignties that have subjected their political autonomy to the mandates of an economic model structured and regulated by neoliberal politics and its institutions, and of the dispossessed migrant. The conjunctural temporality of the citizen-xenos represents a new battleground where the struggle for rights, justice, and democracy rages against the forces of subjection that try to expropriate both the citizen and migrant. In this struggle, the practices and poetics of hospitality enable an alternative politics that engenders a decolonial praxis shared by citizens and strangers who find ways to live together through their collective and shared practices. Archived in contemporary documentary and art projects, the minor histories of the citizen-xenos conjure the specters of the Aegean in sites that host ancient and modern, old and new stories of migration and dispossession and become the fertile ground of a shared community poetics and politics. Through a constellation of decolonial thought, postcolonial history, and deconstruction, this article examines how the citizen-xenos can be a heuristic concept in the current theoretical efforts to rethink the rights of citizens and strangers as the rights of all.
