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Theories of citizenship have relied both explicitly and implicitly on the concept of "standing." This article challenges "standing" as a metaphor of citizenship by contrasting it with that of "injury." Examining Claudia Rankine's Citizen elucidates a poetics of citizenship that both calls attention to what prevents many black citizens in the United States from standing and provides a basis for alternative practices of citizenship. Refusing a politics of ressentiment often tied to identification of social injury, Citizen prefigures a transformed citizenship of tarrying, listening, and transformative interruption of the racialized status quo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the renaissance of political realism has come an insistence that the study of politics be historically located. While many political realists trace their conception of historical inquiry to Thucydides, this article shows how Herodotus can offer a more realist approach to political phenomena. Herodotus crafts a self-conscious form of historical inquiry that foregrounds the actual activity of the historian as intersubjective, reflective, and particular. Herodotus thus models a historical investigation that shows its own limits while demanding the evaluation of its readers, offering a way to address criticisms of political realism’s singular and unacknowledged historical narratives. Moreover, Herodotus’s Histories exemplify a disposition toward open inquiry among others—what Herodotus calls wonder—that can invigorate responsive curiosity as part of the project of historical understanding essential to both political realism and contemporary democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay interprets Baldwin as continuing the Socratic practice of self-examination and social criticism while also shifting his Socratic undertaking by charting the limits of examination created by the harsh effects of race and slavery in the United States. The author argues that Baldwin’s Socratic practice inflects not only his essays—the center of previous analyses—but also his fictions. By transposing Socrates to issues of race in twentieth-century America and confronting the incoherent effects of a racialized society, James Baldwin thus carries forward and transforms a pivotal figure in the history of political thought. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]