Human rights only hold for those who hold citizenship in a nation.
Evidence
Those who have been trying to help Issa discover what both Douzinas and Agamben have remarked upon: that humanity comes to be equated with national citizenship and rights follow from this equation. Human rights are national rights. They do not exist without the guarantees only nations can give. As a stateless person, Issa falls outside this protection. The excluded have no rights. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 333
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- DEFINE: The Douzinas/Agamben point — humanity is equated with citizenship — is the core critical vocabulary for reading Changez’s post-citizenship crisis in The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
- XREF: Strongly connects both to Agamben’s ‘bare life’ and to the reader’s guiding question about statelessness. Directly relevant to Chang-Rae Lee and Mohsin Hamid’s novels.
- SEED: An essay angle: the stateless Muslim in post-9/11 fiction — how both Hamid and Naqvi literalize the Agamben point via characters who lose national belonging.