From Citizens to Aliens
Plotting Against American Citizenship in P. Roth’s The Plot Against America
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2025.i25.1619Keywords:
Citizenship, Constitutive Story, Philip Roth, Laws, DemocracyAbstract
This article analyzes how Philip Roth in The Plot Against America (2004) explores the ephemerality of US citizenship by providing examples of legislative ebbs and flows as they adhere (or not) to the constitutive story the nation makes about itself. Throughout the article, I will highlight how the Roths “fall from grace” from Americanness into Jewishness in the government’s eyes as they are gradually stripped of their rights as American citizens and progressively turned into aliens in their own home through a series of government initiatives, such as Just Folks, Homestead ’42, and the Good Neighbor Project. I will do so by framing these initiatives within a broader US legislative context, as well as by drawing parallelisms with historical instances that bear striking similarities to the same initiatives. I will also point out how the constitutive story of the nation framed within the novel should interact with the historical and contextual complexities around citizenship and its practices, thus showing how the novel provides commentary not only on the story the nation tells about itself, but also on how such a story can be improved.
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