From the beginning, the story makes clear that the judicial system wants Memphis to be the perpetrator at all costs: "How he gonna slash some girl's throat and throw her in the Harlem River, and he ain' got no arms?  You reckon [they gonna say] Memphis scared that girl into slashing her own throat, and raping herself?" (Ringgold, *We Flew* 99, 255).14 Using rhetorical questions, the narrator emphasizes the absurdity of the allegations and tells the reader later that Memphis is imprisoned and will be executed "for a crime he ain' commit" (99, 255). In addition, the narrator suggests that there was not even a murder: "They been draggin' that river for one year now and ain' come up with no dead white girl yet – cause ain' none" (99, 256). Despite ample evidence that Memphis Cooly is not the perpetrator of the crimes, and despite the fact that there may not even be a case in the first place, he is imprisoned and sentenced to death.

In her memoirs, Ringgold comments that the "story is based on the premise that the black man's guilt, whether likely or unlikely, is almost always taken for granted long before it is actually proven" (255). She thereby points to the myth of the "Black male rapist" which early activist and journalist Ida B. Wells unveiled

14 I use the illustration on page ninety-nine and the transcript on page 255 and 256 provided by Faith Ringgold in her *We Flew Over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold* (1995). I use square brackets when significant text passages on the flag deviate from her transcript. I use the text from the flag, marked with square brackets, when I think it is relevant for the close reading.

and challenged.15 In Ringgold's story, the tenacity of this myth is heightened to the point that not even clear evidence stands a chance. The myth stands above the law. Ringgold's story shows just how powerful such myths are, even to the point of infiltrating the American judicial system.

The last line of the story reads: "If it hadn't been for that scheming wife of his, he wouldn't been jetting round in that fancy wheel chair bar-hoppin' till all hours of the night, when the police [they] be out there lookin' for a n[…] to pin some dirt on" (99, 256).16 Instead of a police force's duty to protect citizens, it is in fact the police who are endangering Black people—a statement that resonates with the police violence Black people have faced in the past and still have to endure today.The word "they" in the quilt also has an air of mob mentality, reminding the reader of the long history of lynching in the US.

Memphis' lack of full rights is then contrasted with the fulfilment of his duties when he was drafted for the Vietnam War. It was in this war that Memphis lost his arms and was paralyzed; quite literally fragmenting him: "Uncle Sam took [they fine boy, sent him off to Vietnam, and ship] him back all messed up and now this" (99, 255). This depiction is striking as the words "took," "sent off," and "ship" remind one rather of an object than a person, alluding to the Transatlantic slave trade and equating it with the drafting of Black Americans into war. When we take Memphis' fragmentation further and draw a connection to fragmentation grenades used in the Vietnam War which were also used for "fragging"—an act in which American soldiers attempted to kill their own superiors during the Vietnam War—the point of killing one's own fellow citizen is even further underlined (cf. "frag, v.")

According to the narrator, Memphis won "[ribbons and] medals of honor" (99, 256). He did not simply fulfill a citizen's obligation by going to war for his country, he also carried out extraordinary acts of valor which earned him a medal of honor but cost him his body. In contrast to the narratives by African American centenarians analyzed in Julia Velten's chapter, which emphasize how through hard work and assimilation you can belong, Ringgold's story quilt shows a more pessimistic picture. On the one hand, Memphis is asked to fight for his country and then rewarded for his service; on the other, he is imprisoned and killed for a crime he did not commit by the very country he was serving. A sentiment that goes hand in hand with civil rights activists' questioning the duty to fight for the US on the premise of "freeing"

15 In the 1890s, journalist and civil rights activist Ida B. Wells (b. 1862) reported on lynching in the US and exposed it and its myth of the Black male rapist as a way to oppress and intimidate Black people but especially successful Black business owners. She also called out white women's complicity in this white terror (cf. Cooper 177–178).

16 Ellipsis mine.

the people of Vietnam, when the US actually refuses freedom to a large number of its own citizens.17

Ringgold's story quilt is an alternative American flag. In American culture the national flag is treated as a kind of "holy" object, as suggested by the detailed directions as to its handling as well as the Flag Protection Acts of 1968 and 1989.18 Knowing that Ringgold was arrested for co-organizing and co-curating "The People's Flag Show" (1970), where the American flag served artists as means to protest social injustices and the Vietnam War, adds a revolutionary and certainly a political element to the artwork (Farrington 141). Her *Flag Story Quilt* was also not her first artwork in which she made use of the flag. Her famous paintings *The Flag is Bleeding* (1967) and *Flag for the Moon: Die N[…]* (1967–1969)19 very explicitly use the icon to expose and resist white violence. Patrick Hill argues that Ringgold was aware that such acts of appropriation were "especially threatening because access to it by a woman artist of color was perceived as an assault on citizenship entitlements defined as the singular province of whites" (29). Ringgold's acts of deconstruction and construction shed new light on a seemingly fixed object, making us aware of its materiality and its potential of attaining new meanings.

Ringgold's flag makes use of a cozy domestic object—a quilt—to mediate the same critique as in her flag paintings but adding another (gendered) layer of critique: "juxtaposing the American flag with signifiers of a distinctively feminist consciousness …, Ringgold extends the doubleness already contained in the flag …, effectively reclaiming it as a ground for both race- and gender-based critiques" (Hill 36). Furthermore, the story of Memphis massively clashes with the flag as symbol of American pride as well as with the quilt as a domestic object, exposing different notions of home and of citizenship in the US.  We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.  And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor" (King).

18 Although the Flag Protection Acts criminalize a person for burning or defiling the American flag, it was ruled in *Texas v. Johnson* (1989) that the act of burning the flag is in fact protected by the First Amendment (Brennan and Supreme Court of The United States).

19 Ellipsis mine.

thereby reinserting stories neither unfamiliar nor prominently featured in American history.20

Ringgold's text(ile)-image constellation mediates Memphis' fragmentation textually, visually, and materially.The visual medium celebrates diversity and creativity, while at the same time pointing to the long history of white violence against Black people. The textile medium adds to this tension through its association with home as well as through the American flag as an object of honor and pride. The text reinserts an African American experience into American history and further exposes the fragmentation and incompletion of African American citizenship in the US. In this sense, Ringgold's text(ile)-image constellation gives new meaning to mediation in that the fragmentation is mediated via multiple media all at once, virtually keeping the fragmentation intact, a fragmentation that can be read, seen, and felt.

#### **"Turn[ing] all the Ugliness of Spirit, Past and Present, Into Something Livable": Constituting the "Free Citizen" in the Series** *Coming to Jones Road*

Whereas Ringgold's *Flag Story Quilt* discusses a fragmented notion of African American citizenship in one single artwork, Ringgold's story quilt series *Coming to Jones Road* takes a different approach. The series consists of two story quilt parts and the second part also entails a tanka part.21 Each story quilt is composed of a large central canvas onto which Ringgold painted her subjects with acrylic and which is framed by pieces of fabric sewn together. Some of the story quilts use up to four different pieced frames and the text of the story is written onto the innermost textile frame using one line that circles the painted subject, thus creating an additional textual framework. Quilt stitches on the fabric surface create the effect of fragmentation.

Eight quilts produced between 1999 and 2000 comprise Part I of the series. Ringgold published a booklet containing an introductory text, images of the quilts, and a transcript for each quilt (cf. "Coming to Jones Road"). The narrative follows Barn Door and his wife Precious, her baby—born *en route* and named Freedom—and twenty-six other African Americans escaping slavery through the Underground Railroad. Their journey starts when Aunt Emmy appears as a vision before Barn Door, instructing him to come to Jones Road, Englewood, New Jersey and to look for her house which he will find by his own mother's star quilt on the roof.

20 In this context it is interesting to note that it was an African American girl who helped sew an American flag that would inspire Francis Scott Key to write lyrics that would later become the national anthem: "Black girls and women like Grace have literally stitched themselves into our nation's history in places of prominence and behind the scenes" (Berry and Gross 6).

21 *Tankas* or *thankas* are Tibetan paintings on fabric (Farrington 154).

In the introduction of her booklet, Ringgold explains that upon moving to Jones Road in 1992, she faced "hostile neighbors" and struggled with the town board "for more than six years"in order to receive permits to build her studio ("Coming to Jones Road" 352). This experience was "extremely traumatic" and inspired her to concentrate on African Americans who came to New Jersey before her. Ringgold explains in her introduction to the series that she "tried to couple the beauty of the place and the harsh realities of its racist history" in a series which "turns all the ugliness of spirit, past and present, into something livable" ("Coming to Jones Road" 351).

The first two quilts do not contain text. In the booklet, the artist explains that she started, in the first quilt, with the image of "a trail of shadowy figures under a moonlit sky stealing through the landscape in pursuit of freedom at Aunt Emmy's little white house on Jones Road"(353).The second quilt shows the same landscape in daylight, again depicting the shadowy figures and Emmy's white house in the background. Ringgold explains that she "needed to see the shadowy figures in a more positive view early on" and "envisioned them coming from church on a Sunday afternoon" (354). Thus, the first two works of art are set in the future when the group has already made it to Aunt Emmy's house. The series refers to the present (Ringgold's present), the past, and the future of the past.

These layers of time emphasize the role of history in understanding Ringgold's present experience of racism. Telling the story of enslaved people who came to Jones Road in the centuries before Ringgold in order to find freedom highlights the long history of incomplete citizenship for African Americans. Ringgold's experience of not being accepted in a white neighborhood in twentieth/twenty-first-century New Jersey furthermore illustrates the restrictions she still faces within a white space. Ringgold demonstrates, along the lines of Sara Ahmed's "A Phenomenology of Whiteness," that some spaces are "inhabitable for some bodies and not others" determining "who gets to be at home" and who does not (162).The quilt as a cozy bed comforter we associate with the home can emphasize this paradox of not "getting to be at home" and at the same time can be read as an alternative home constructed through the fictional fabric of a story, a home for the African American citizen.

Ringgold's third quilt depicts the character "Aunt Emmy" inspired by a photograph of Ringgold's "great grandmother, Betsy Bingham" ("Coming to Jones Road" 353). The rest of the quilts (number four to eight) all depict the "shadowy figures"—black silhouettes with a kind of glow outlining their bodies—amidst the woods. Rather small in comparison to the large trees surrounding them, these figures are always at the center of the paintings. The story ends with them arriving at Aunt Emmy's house with the Star Quilt on its roof, mentioned in the third quilt when Aunt Emmy appears in Barn Door's dream: "Look for an old white farmhouse with your dead Mama's star quilt on the roof " (355). The quilt is the last piece to look for on their journey, guiding them like the North Star. Because it is the quilt of Barn Door's mother, it is also a family heirloom passed on to other family members,

illustrating its importance as an object of African American heritage. The quilts from the first part use rather dark and heavy colors as they depict the characters walking through the woods at night. The paintings are framed with colorful fabric stripes which often also show different and multiple shapes. The painted trees' outmost leaves always overlap with and partly escape the frame.

Like the trees escaping their framing, the characters emphasize their quest for freedom. The words "free" and "freedom" appear in almost all the quilt texts and are especially frequently used in the last quilt when the children sing or cheer: "'We free! We free! Aunt Emmy got us now! We free! We free now! …'" (360). Precious' baby is named "Freedom" because "'this here baby is a freedom chile'" (358) and is furthermore declared a communal baby: "'she our baby too,' cause we all know she was born to be free" (358).The text mentions the struggles the characters face, but they are not shown in detail, rather it is Freedom's birth, a dinner in the woods, and the children playing at the end which are at the center of the story.The text gives the quilt an optimistic and joyous note; this perspective makes the dark color appear rather as calm and soothing.

Knowing from the first two quilts that they will make it to Aunt Emmy's house further adds to this calm atmosphere and emphasizes Ringgold's control over the narrative. Unlike many other stories from the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the story quilt's fictional tale ends happily.Ringgold's fictional historiographymakes us wonder about the many other tales of escape that remain unrecorded. Her story quilts not only offer an alternative viewpoint on (hi)story and (hi)story-telling but they further point to the quilt as an alternative object onto which stories of African Americans have been recorded for centuries.The act of piecing together this(hi)story is further embodiedin the series consisting ofmultiple artworks thatmay not always be exhibited together.

This fragmentation of (hi)story-telling is illustrated by a second part created ten years later, in 2009 and 2010.The series starts with a quilt depicting Ringgold's husband Burdette "Birdie" Ringgold and dedicating the series to Birdie with a statement of love and gratitude. Thus, Ringgold maintains the temporal fragmentation in this part of the series.The second quilt connects to the first part of the series, reiterating some of the text from the last quilt of the first part. The rest feature the same characters, depicting them in couples or groups, giving more information on the characters.This time, the fictional narrative is not as linear as in the first part, but rather sketches the characters' feelings and experiences. Whereas the quilts from the first part depict black silhouettes, the ones from the second part show all the figures in great detail.While still surrounded by nature, they occupy a larger part of the painting. Thus, the characters are now free to take shape as individuals with distinctive appearances and experiences within the group.

The second quilt of this part reiterates some of the text from the last quilt in the first part of the series but the image is different. The group who made it to freedom—including Baby Freedom swaddled in a quilt-like blanket—stands behind another quilt, a "welcome quilt" made by Aunt Emmy for the group (Ringgold *Part 2 #2*). This flag-shaped quilt features red and white alternating stripes onto which a large blue rectangle is sewn at the center with a white star with the year 1792 imprinted in red. In the story, 1792 is the year when the group made it to Aunt Emmy, achieving freedom. The artist's daughter, Michele Wallace, explains that Ringgold "chose this date, after the American Revolution and before the Civil War, to assign them *their* freedom" (27; emphasis mine). Ringgold creates a historical date for the fictional group of African Americans that is unconnected to any white historiography (especially because "New Jersey was one of the last states in the Union to free the slaves" [27]), for she is intent upon crafting a personal historiography.

Looking at this intradiegetic flag quilt, one immediately thinks of her *Flag Story Quilt*.Using the colors of the American flag but changing the design in order to highlight the personal history of the group illustrates the need for an alternative flag, an alternative conception of community, of belonging and thus also of citizenship. Together with the story, a story equally of hardship and joy and a story at the center of which freedom rests, Ringgold's quilt series pieces together the notion of the free citizen. Ringgold's personal story, which is interwoven in the first part of the series but also alluded to in the first quilt featuring Birdie, points to an "unequal freedom" she experiences in the twentieth/twenty-first century. Ringgold explains in an artist statement: "our white neighbors (unsuccessfully) sought to deny us the freedom to live there. Freedom, you know, is not free – It took me six years to realize my dream of a beautiful studio surrounded by a beautiful garden" ("Artist Statement").

This emphasis on both hardship and joy remains a focus in the last part. Each of the tankas illustrates an African American activist. One depicts Martin Luther King and an excerpt from his iconic "I Have a Dream" speech delivered at the March on Washington in 1963. Another depicts Sojourner Truth and some passages from her "Ain't I a Woman" speech from 1851. And another depicts Harriet Tubman and a description of some of her achievements. All three works feature the portrait framed in a rectangle with text in the background. Framing each portrait and text is a flowering bush and a pieced fabric border. These three famous activists emphasize both the hardship and the successes of African American communities.They embody the long tradition of African American activism and their fight for full citizenship.

Harriet Tubman, who used the North Star to guide her towards freedom, is mirrored in the story when the characters look for the Star Quilt placed on Aunt Emmy's roof in the first part of the series.The star, which can also symbolize a dream, is further visible in Martin Luther King's speech: "I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi … will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice" (Ringgold *Part 2 Tanka #3*). Drawing on history and looking into the future, Martin Luther King's dream has yet to fully come true; the ability to hold onto this dream of complete freedom is encapsulated in the quilts' frequent use of the word "freedom" as well as in Ringgold's need to look back in order to envision a future. Sojourner Truth adds a gendered dimension, reminding us that not only the sons of formerly enslaved people and enslavers but also their daughters must be included in this dream.

In this impressive series, the text(ile)-image constellations highlight fragmentation on different levels: through the quilt as a "piecemeal" object, the temporal fragmentation in the text, and the serial aspect visible in the different aesthetics Ringgold used. The series pieces together the past through a fictional yet familiar story and connects it with the present, reminding us that the fight for freedom is still ongoing. Ringgold constructs a story and a sense of identity by interweaving it with her own story.22 As cultural critic Stuart Hall reminds us, "the self is always, in a sense, a fiction" (45).The text(ile)-image constellations elucidate that identity has always been fragmented and such fragmentation offers new ways of piecing together a self, a (hi)story, a different world.

#### **Epilogue**

In 2020, when Ringgold turned ninety, she crafted yet another flag. The Rockefeller Center in Manhattan asked designers and artists to create flag designs which celebrate the city of New York which were theninstalled aroundThe Rink.Ringgold's flag uses as a background a red, a white, and a blue horizontal stripe. The words "We are the world" are imprinted onto the red top stripe in white and in the same color and font the words "the life & Breath of Freedom" are written on the lower blue stripe. In the middle, detailed images of people are drawn on a circle. They are diverse in age, gender, and ethnicity. All wear brightly colored and patterned clothing giving the impression of variety and joy. Around the circle in a black font are the words Native Americans, Africans, Asians, Caribbeans, South Americans, Europeans. To the right of the circle is written "love, Faith Ringgold" (Chan).

The use of the word "Breath" in 2020 is striking, immediately bringing to mind the murder of George Floyd—as well as other Black people before him—who uttered the words "I can't breathe" before being murdered by police officer Derek Chauvin on May 25, 2020 (Baker et al.).These words became a rallying cry for the many national and international Black Lives Matter protests, events that touched activist and artist Ringgold: "His breath was stolen by a system that threatens our freedom" (Ringgold

22 In fact, Ringgold's use of textiles in her art making is very much connected to telling her own story. Ringgold explains in an interview that when she had issues getting her autobiography published, she decided to write her story onto the quilts instead (Serpentine Galleries).

in Morris). Ringgold's flag once more points to white supremacist violence while at the same time reminding us what to fight for: a diverse and free community, a kind of citizenship that includes, protects, and belongs to all.

#### **Works Cited**

"About BLM." *Black Lives Matter*, 16 Oct. 2020, blacklivesmatter.com/about/.

Isin, Engin F. and Patricia K.Wood.*Citizenship and Identity*. SAGE Publications, 1999.

**Citizenship, Science, and Medicine**

### **"What the Eyes Don't See"** Medical Citizenship and Environmental Justice in Mona Hanna-Attisha's Medical Memoir

#### *Mita Banerjee*

Is there a connection between medicine and citizenship? At first sight, these two realms would seem to have nothing in common: medicine is the domain of health and healing, while citizenship is rooted in the sphere of the law. Where both domains can be said to converge, however,is in the idea of access.Citizenship regulates both the rights and the responsibilities of a nation's subjects. These rights include the right to medical care. This is nowhere as pronounced than in heated public debates surrounding the right of undocumented migrants to health care. In recent US history, a number of initiatives tried to exclude migrants from health care. In 1994, California passed Proposition 187, which banned undocumented migrants from access to public health care, schools, and social services ("California Proposition 187"). Opponents of suchinitiatives,on the other hand, claimed that thesemeasures would constitute a breach of human rights.

At the same time, the question of access to medical care is by no means limited to undocumented migration. Rather, what is at stake here is the idea that within a given nation state, the right to adequate health care may not be equally extended to all.These questions have loomed large in the debates surrounding "Obamacare."Under his presidency, Barack Obama proposed a bill to ensure that all citizens would be covered by health care; an initiative that his successor, Donald Trump, immediately set out to counter. Obama writes about his plan for universal health care in his most recent autobiography, *A Promised Land*. He notes how during his presidency, he was supported by his friend Teddy Kennedy:

Through seven Presidents, Teddy had fought the good fight. But, for all his power and legislative skill, the dream of establishing universal health care—a system that delivered good-quality medical care to all people, regardless of their ability to pay—continued to elude him…. My interest in health care went beyond policy or politics; it was personal, just as it was for Teddy. Each time I met a parent struggling to come up with the money to get treatment for a sick child, I thought back to the night Michelle and I had to take three-month-old Sasha to

the emergency room for what turned out to be viral meningitis. I remembered the terror and the helplessness we felt as the nurses whisked her away for a spinal tap, and the realization that we might never have caught the infection in time had the girls not had a regular pediatrician we felt comfortable calling in the middle of the night. Most of all, I thought about my mom, who had died in 1995, of uterine cancer. (368)

It is characteristic of Obama's autobiography that he personalizes the abstract issue of health care: he acknowledges his own privileged access to health care, and wonders what might have been if this had not been the case. What this passage does not quite say, however, is that access to health care may be determined not only by class, but also by race lines, since people of color work in lower-paying jobs to a disproportionate extent. At the same time, there is a sense in which Obama's description of the need for universal health care in the US is akin to the practice of narrative medicine. As a father, Obama speaks of his daughter's sickness and imagines what it might have been like had he not been able to pay for her doctor's bill. In Obama's account,illness is conveyed on the level of experience: Obama writes of himself as an anguished father trying to care for his baby daughter, and as a son who has had to watch his mother pass away. Narrative medicine teaches us that we should honor the stories of illness (Charon). Inaugurated by Rita Charon, narrative medicine seeks to bring the tools of literary analysis to the practice of medicine, urging physicians to engage in the close listening of their patients' narratives. Charon's expression that we should honor the stories of illness implies that patient narratives need to be considered in all their complexity: the complexity of the illness experience, its interwovenness with the patient's identity, as well as the social circumstances in which the patient is embedded. Ultimately, Barack Obama reminds us that we honor stories of illness if we empathize with those who have to watch their loved ones suffer and are unable to afford the medical care which would be needed to cure or alleviate this suffering. Under Obama's presidency, part of what he is trying to accomplish for US citizenry, then, is universal access to health care.

The intersection between medicine and citizenship, however, may not only be limited to an adequate access to medical care. It may also include the right to live in a non-toxic environment. At this juncture, medical rights—in the sense of an individual or communal access to health care—are closely linked to the right to well-being. This right, in turn, is tied up with the issue of housing. Whether one lives in a middle-class suburb or the inner city may have substantial consequences for one's health and life expectancy. To the extent that people live in environments that are unsafe for human health, they will run a much higher risk of illness. This environmental health risk, in turn, may be tied back to the question of citizenship. To what extent does a nation have to ensure not only the right to health care, but also the right to live in a non-toxic environment?

As my paper argues, this is a question which links medicine, citizenship, and social justice. Democracy may fail, I suggest, when the state not only fails to protect all its citizens from harm to their health and physical integrity, but when it looks on even after such health hazards have been uncovered. Mapping the question of civic failure onto the concept of health equity, this paper examines a particular case in recent US history: the Flint water scandal of 2016. In this incident, the state of Michigan devised a specific business venture. In order to attract new forms of investment, it proposed to entrepreneurs a scheme that focused on building new water pipes for the city of Flint, Michigan. While the new pipes were being built, however, the water supply would have to be switched from Lake Huron to the Flint River. As a CNN report describes it:

In 2011, the state of Michigan took over Flint's finances after an audit projected a \$25 million deficit. In order to reduce the water fund shortfall, the city announced that a new pipeline would be built to deliver water from Lake Huron to Flint. In 2014, while the pipeline was under construction, the city turned to the Flint River as a water source. ("Flint Water Crisis")

This switch, it would turn out, had disastrous consequences for the population of Flint, which was predominantly comprised of African Americans and poor white people. Due to corroded pipesin combination with the poor water quality of the Flint River, the inhabitants of Flint were exposed to massive doses of lead.The children in particular suffered acute cases of lead poisoning. The CNN report goes on to note:

Tests in 2015 by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Virginia Tech indicated dangerous levels of lead in the water at residents' homes. Lead consumption can affect the heart, kidneys and nerves. Health effects of lead exposure in children include impaired cognition, behavioral disorders, hearing problems and delayed puberty. ("Flint Water Crisis")

This paper considers how we can interrogate the Flint water scandal, and it explores the discursive frames within which such an interrogation might take place. I argue that the concept of "medical citizenship"may be key in examining the nexus between citizenship, racial and economic difference, and health equity.1 As Jenny Munro and Gerhard Hoffstaedter suggest,

[m]edical citizenship refers to acts, claims, and expressions of political belonging that revolve around health, healthcare, and responses to illness. The idea

1 For a discussion of how medical status can arbitrate the border between citizen and non-citizen, see Amina Touzos's chapter in this collection: "'You're My People Now': *The Last of Us* Series on the Question of Human Belonging and Citizenship during the Age of Pandemics".

is that actions and decisions in relation to health and disease are political acts that demonstrate, and generate, belonging or exclusion. This includes decisions about who has the right to health care and broader social protections, and what it symbolises when people follow health advice or contribute to the health of the broader community. (Munro and Hoffstaedter)

Looking back at the Flint water scandal, we may ask a simple question: would such a massive case of lead poisoning have happened, and would it have been allowed to continue for such a long time,if the inhabitants of Flint had not been predominantly African Americans and poor white folks? What, in other words, is the relationship between race and class, on the one hand, and the right to civic protection as medical protection, on the other hand?

On amethodological level, I employ two frameworks through which the Flint water scandal might be viewed. First, I will refer to the idea of environmental racism, and second, I will explore the methodology of narrative medicine. Environmental racism argues that the right to live in a toxin-free environment is substantially inflected by racial difference; people of colormay be affected by environmental damage to a disproportionate extent. Narrative medicine, on the other hand, explores how "stories of illness" can be told from an individual perspective (Charon). Because illness is hence "told" through the perspective of lived experience, this telling can also highlight breaches of social justice which may have led to illness in the first place. Narrative medicine and social justice can thus be said to be intricately interconnected. As Sayantani Dasgupta puts it,

[n]arrative medicine, its practice and scholarship, is necessarily concerned with issues of trauma, body, memory, voice, and inter-subjectivity. However, to grapple with these issues, we must locate them in their social, cultural, political, and historical contexts. Narrative understanding helps unpack the complex power relations between North and South, state and worker, disabled body and able body, bread-earner and child-bearer, as well as self and the other (or, even, selves and others). If disease, violence, terror, war, poverty, and oppression manifest themselves narratively, then resistance, justice, healing, activism, and collectivity can equally be products of a narrative-based approach to ourselves and the world.

While all of these concepts and methodologies—environmental justice and environmental racism, narrative medicine, and social justice—have been discussed both separately and in connection to each other, their relevance to concepts of citizenship is only beginning to be explored. As this paper will try to illustrate, these questions may actually be at the forefront of what citizenship may mean in the twenty-first century. Medical citizenship, I suggest, may not be tangential to the notion of the citizen, but central to it.

#### **Environmental Racism and the City of Flint**

The concept of citizenship,it can be argued,includes the right to health and well-being. The state must protect all its citizens from harm in terms of life and liberty. While these concepts are at the core of modern constitutions, going all the way back to the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679,2 they may need to be revised in order to keep pace with the complexity of the social and political context of the new millennium.What, in other words, would the protection of life meanin the twenty-first century? I would argue that the very notion of "life itself " has become increasingly complex (Rose 3), particularly due to the expansion of industrial production and the proliferation of toxins polluting the environment as a side effect of this industrial production.

In light of these developments, the right to "life" may hence assume an entirely new dimension: It may include the right to live in a non-toxic environment. As Carl Zimring insightfully argues in his study *Clean and White: A History of Environmental Racism in the United States*, there is an intricate and troubling connection between waste and whiteness. He notes,

[w]aste is a social process. We usually consider waste as material we discard, relying on public and private systems to remove unwanted materials from our homes, neighborhoods, and workplaces. These practices are consequences of our decisions to classify particular materials as waste, employ people to handle those materials, and develop systems to dispose of them. Waste informs the construction of our social and cultural values…. The social dimensions of waste are visible in recent American history. The Environmental Justice Movement emerged in the 1980s as a response to hazardous waste sitting in or near communities of color across the United States. (1)

Zimring's argument has profound consequences for the discourse of rights. Seen from his perspective, the right to a clean environment is inextricably tied to whiteness. While Zimring discusses the practices of waste dumping in the history of the US, I would suggest that his argument also has key implications for analyzing the Flint water scandal. Applying Zimring's line of thought to the events of Flint, Michigan, we may argue that the nexus between cleanness and whiteness also pertains to the right to clean water flowing from non-corroded water pipes. In other words, whiteness may ensure not only the right to dump one's waste elsewhere, but also the privilege of living in houses with safe plumbing. This right, on the other hand, was

2 The Habeas Corpus Act is commonly seen as the beginning of the juridical premises of modern states. Ratified as an act of parliament in England in 1679, "habeas corpus" meant that no-one could be detained by state authorities without reason, and that the lawfulness of such detention had to be examined immediately by a court. The act thus protects citizens from an arbitrary use of power by the state (Fallon and Meltzer).

denied to the inhabitants of Flint once the business venture was under way. As the CNN report observes, "Soon after the switch [of the water pipes], residents reported changes to the water's color, smell and taste" ("Flint Water Crisis").

Following Zimring's argumentative trajectory, we may thus inquire not only into the history of waste, but also into the history of whiteness.Where Zimring's interlinking of whiteness and cleanness is so intriguing is that he does not only refer to class to explain questions of what may be termed "medical disparity," but he suggests instead that such disparity arises from differences in both race and class. Whiteness, it can be proposed on the basis of Zimring's argument, is closely aligned with both medical rights and the concept of citizenship.

At this juncture, it may be interesting to briefly revisit the history of citizenship and its relationship to whiteness. Historically, citizenship was closely tied to whiteness in the US. As Matthew Frye Jacobson has argued, the right to naturalization was granted only to "free white persons" (13). Jacobson notes, "Citizenship was a racially inscribed concept at the outset of the new nation: by an act of Congress, only 'free white' immigrants could be naturalized" (13). In US legal history, this premise led to a series of remarkable court cases, the so-called "racial prerequisite cases." In these cases, immigrants had to prove before a court of law that they were in fact white and hence eligible for naturalization. What was unclear, however, is just what feature of their identity claimants had to refer to in order to "prove" their whiteness. As Jacobson goes on to say, referring to Tom Ellis, a petitioner from Syria, "in identifying Ellis as [white], the judge … could have been referring to any of a number of things … —Ellis's social bearing, his proficiency in English, his dress, his manner, his style, his demeanour" (Jacobson 239). As the racial prerequisite cases illustrate, then, citizenship was the prerogative of white citizens.3

At first sight, the racial prerequisite cases seem to have nothing to do with the Flint water scandal. While these cases concern the discourse of nineteenth-century naturalization law, the Flint water crisis does not concern immigrant communities but rather those of African Americans and poor whites in small town Michigan. I would argue, however, that both scenarios can be said to hinge on the connection between citizenship and whiteness. In nineteenth-century naturalization law, citizenship was itself based on the prerequisite of whiteness. In the twenty-first century, as I will illustrate below, citizenship continues to be tied to whiteness. In its current incarnation, this connection concerns the right to live in a non-toxic environment, as Zimring notes in his investigation of whiteness and cleanness.

These considerations also have methodological implications. If we follow Zimring's argument,aninvestigation of toxinsininner-city neighborhoods not only falls

3 For further discussion on the intersection of race and citizenship, particularly regarding Indigeneity, see Vanessa Evans's chapter in this collection: "'You've Heard it Now': Storytelling and Acts of Citizenship in Cherie Dimaline's *The Marrow Thieves*".

into the domain of medicine, but also that of cultural analysis. "Waste," Zimring suggests, "is a social process" (1). As I will argue in more detail as this paper progresses, waste, whiteness, citizenship and medicine are intricately connected. As the Flint water scandal sadly illustrates, the connection between citizenship and whiteness, which was so bluntly evident in the nineteenth-century racial prerequisite cases, continues into the twenty-first century. Here, communities of color may be said to bear the burden of pollution and the dumping of toxic waste. It is here that medicine comes into play. Medical citizenship, seen from this angle, implies the right to live in a non-toxic environment.

As Joni Adamson et al. have suggested, this right to live in an uncontaminated environment has been unevenly distributed, with sixty percent of African Americans currently living in neighborhoods that constitute health hazards. According to Adamson et al.,

[studies] found race to be a leading factor in the location of commercial hazardous waste facilities and determined that poor and people of color communities suffer a disproportionate health risk: 60 percent of African American and Latino communities and over 50 percent of Asian/Pacific Islanders and Native Americans live in areas with one or more uncontrolled toxic waste sites. (4)

This implies that social and economic status may have an impact on the extent to which the right to health and well-being is actually put into practice. Moreover, Adamson et al. have introduced the concept of race to further problematize this uneven access to non-toxic environments. They refer to the idea of "environmental racism" in this context. According to Adamson et al., environmental racism can be defined as "racial discrimination in environmental policy making and the enforcement of regulation and laws, the deliberate targeting of people of color communities for toxic waste facilities, [and] the official sanctioning of the life-threatening presence of poisons and pollutants in our communities …" (4). To put it differently, racial difference may thus in fact entail a health risk. Racial disparity, in combination with economic disenfranchisement, may result in a lack of access to housing in non-toxic environments.

Yet, how would the concept of citizenship be relevant in this context? I propose that the role of citizenship rights lies not only in guaranteeing specific rights on paper, but also in enforcing these rights in concrete social practice. What happens, in other words, once a breach of rights has been detected? This paper examines the role of spectatorship as well as of representation in this context. It looks at how the Governor of Michigan and other elected officials "looked on" as the Flint water scandal came to light. Moreover, it investigates the specific media and genres through which the Flint water crisis was eventually "leaked" to public discourse. In the latter context, it focuses on one author in particular: Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, a local pediatrician in the city of Flint, who eventually became the whistleblower exposing the extent to which the state and the nation had failed to protect its own citizens. What happens, Hanna-Attisha asks in her book *What the Eyes Don't See*, when the state poisons its own citizens? She writes,

[t]he crisis manifested itself in water—and in the bodies of the most vulnerable among us, children who drank that water and ate meals cooked with that water, and babies who guzzled bottles of formula mixed with that water…. But this is also a story about the deeper crises we're facing right now in our country: a breakdown in democracy; the disintegration of critical infrastructure due to inequality and austerity; environmental injustice that disproportionately affects the poor and black; the abandonment of civic responsibility and our deep obligations as human beings to care and provide for one another. (13)

This passage may well be said to refer to the concept of medical citizenship. Hanna-Attisha explicitly links the Flint water crisis to a breakdown of democracy. For her, the exposure of the inhabitants of Flint to lead-contaminated water constitutes a failure of "civic responsibility" (13). It is this failure of the state to protect its citizens from what might be called medical harm that Hanna-Attisha goes on to expose. For her, this uncovering and exposure of the Flint water scandal is her duty both as a physician and a citizen.

### **"What the Eyes Don't See": Environment, Health, and Social Justice**

At the core of the Flint water scandal, thereis anintersection betweenmedical justice and environmental justice. As Hanna-Attisha writes in her memoir, written about the events of Flint in retrospect, the longer the inhabitants of Flint were exposed to the lead in the corroded water pipes, the more symptoms of sickness they began to show. It is this disparity—a disparity which is both social and medical—that Hanna-Attisha set out to bring to light as she became the whistleblower on what she saw as a blatant breach in the civic responsibility of both the state of Michigan and the nation.

One of the questions at the heart of the Flint water incident, then, is through what channels the whistle may be blown. It is crucial to note in this context that Hanna-Attisha emphasized the scandal of the Flint water switch not only in the media, through interviews and features, and by writing letters to politicians and health officials. She also proceeded to write a book. *What the Eyes Don't See*, as I will argue below,is both case report and the autobiography of a pediatrician who has to witness her young patients getting sick due to tap water that is no longer safe for drinking.

The question of genre, in turn, is closely linked to the field of the so-called environmental humanities. One of the issues at the heart of the environmental humanities is the question of how the practice of sustainability might be enforced. What texts, what forms of representation might we use to convey to the public, but also to politicians on local, national and transnational levels the necessity of protecting the environment and of reducing the level of toxicity in our life worlds? As Adamson et al. have argued, there is a certain didacticism inherent in both the environmental humanities and in the literary texts which it examines. How might a literary text, a memoir, or a poem be especially suited to change readers' minds when it comes to matters of environmental sustainability? As studies have shown, reading literature can enhance empathy in the reader. Danielle Spencer and Maura Spiegel have referred to

the clinical applications of literary knowledge. A recent study published in *Science* found that subjects performed better on tests measuring theory of mind, social perception, and emotional intelligence after reading literary fiction. Notably, those who read nonfiction or popular fiction did not perform as well. (16)

Such empathy, in turn, may be especially powerful when it comes to witnessing the effects of environmental pollution on human health. While an autobiography is not a work of fiction, it may similarly seem to enhance readers' awareness of a breach of social (and medical) justice. Autobiography, as Alfred Hornung has argued, verges on fiction in a number of ways. It selects certain events and dismisses others for the sake of constructing a "storyline"; it enables the reader to delve into a world of characters who are fictionalized even as they are rooted in the "real" (Hornung).

It is in this context of creating empathy through narrative that I now discuss Mona Hanna-Attisha's *What the Eyes Don't See*. Where the text is so powerful is in its defiance of categorization, participating in a number of genres at once. First, *What the Eyes Don't See* is an unsparing account of the Flint water scandal and hence partly non-fiction. Second, however, it is also the life narrative of its author, Mona Hanna-Attisha, who came to the US as a refugee from Iraq when she was still a child (Hanna-Attisha 7). Third, it is also a book which could be called a biography of the inhabitants of Flint, Michigan: a biography which, fourth, might also be read as a medical case report. It is these multiple registers, I claim in this paper, which make Hanna-Attisha's narrative a powerful vehicle through which the right to medical citizenship might be enforced.

As a medical case report, *What the Eyes Don't See* can also be seen as a detective story. As Hanna-Attisha writes at the outset of her narrative, she was initially confronted with symptoms that she could not quite explain. Parents were reporting itches on their children's skin. Crucially, Hanna-Attisha writes in her medical memoir that while parents suggested that the switch of the water pipes might have something to do with their children's symptoms, she herself ruled out this possibility. Her certainty, in turn, was ultimately rooted in a belief in the system which ensures the safety of drinking water for all citizens.

[Grace] planned to switch to powdered formula mixed with water but had some concerns. "Is the water all right?" she asked, looking skeptical. "*I heard things*." The water. I'd been asked about it before.

"Don't waste your money on bottled water," I said, nodding at Grace with calm reassurance, the way doctors are taught. "They say it is fine to drink." (18)

One of the aspects that looms especially large in Hanna-Attisha's narrative is the pediatrician's relationship to both the children and the parents. The passage quoted above can be read from a number of perspectives, all of which are mutually complementary. First, there is at the heart of Hanna-Attisha's relationship to her young patients and their parents theidea of the pediatricianimmersing herselfinto her patients' life worlds. Medical practice, for Hanna-Attisha, is social practice. This idea of linking medicine to patients' lived realities, in turn, is also at the core of narrative medicine. As Hanna-Attisha observes,

Years ago we talked about these environmental factors as "social determinants of health." Today we call them "adverse childhood experiences" (ACEs) or "toxic stress." … This new understanding of the health consequences of adverse experiences has changed how we practice medicine by broadening our field of vision—forcing us to see a child's total environment as *medical*. (24–25)

Moreover, the passage quoted above could also be read through the concept of "citizen science." As Vohland et al. describe, "Citizen science broadly refers to the active engagement of the general public in scientific research tasks. Citizen science is a growing practice in which scientists and citizens collaborate to produce new knowledge for science and society" (1). As it will later turn out, Grace's suspicion about the quality of the water was not at all unfounded. What emerges in this passage is the idea that by word of mouth, the citizens of Flint form an alliance. They communicate their suspicion to each other: "*I heard things*," Grace tells her pediatrician (18; italics original). It is a testimony to Hanna-Attisha's form of medical practice, which is strongly inflected with elements from narrative medicine, that she begins to trust in the parents' intuition. Ultimately, she enters a coalition with her young patients and their parents. In keeping with the paradigm of citizen science, the community collects evidence which proves the quality of Flint water to be harmful. It is this evidence which will eventually lead to the full disclosure of the Flint water scandal. As Hanna-Attisha emphasizes, "For all the villains in this story, there are also everyday heroes: the people of Flint. Each one has a story to tell—100,000 stories in all—about

months of pain, anger, betrayal, and trauma, along withincredible perseverance and bravery" (14). Hanna-Attisha's narrative can be said to fuse the elements from citizen science with those of narrative medicine. What she emphasizes in *What the Eyes Don't See* is that the citizens of Flint gather evidence to counteract the assurance by city officials that Flint water is safe to drink. Yet, this evidence is not only provided on the cognitive level, but it has an emotional content as well: it is also evidence of "pain, anger, betrayal, and trauma" (14). The concept of citizen science, it could be suggested, takes on particular resonance in the context of the Flint water scandal. This scandal arguably took place only because the inhabitants of Flint were denied their full citizenship rights. In a form of what may be called citizen science, then, they proceeded to reclaim those rights by getting the university to test the quality of their drinking water.4 As Brian Palmer notes,

Citizens groups partnered with scientists from Virginia Tech in the summer of 2015 to show the city how the testing should have been done. In their first sample of 252 homes, the Virginia Tech researchers found that 10 percent of samples exceeded 25 parts per billion—40 percent higher than the federal action level. One of the samples exceeded 1, 000 parts per billion. (Palmer)

The initiative taken by Flint residents strongly corresponds to the model of citizen science. Flint residents thus distrust the evidence provided by health officials that their drinking water is safe; they go on to provide their own evidence. Through the collaboration between Flint inhabitants and scientists from Virginia Tech, the Flint water switch is eventually revealed as a blatant case of systemic racism and a denial of medical citizenship.

At the intersection between citizenship and medical practice, however, it is at first important to note that initially, Hanna-Attisha assuages the parents' doubts about the quality of the Flint water. She does so, she notes in retrospect, because of her trust in the system of American democracy and the system of public health. It is here that citizenship and medicine are intricately connected: for Hanna-Attisha, the principle of American democracy ensures that the state protects its citizens from harm, personal as well as medical harm. As Hanna-Attisha bluntly asks, "If we stop believing that government can protect our public welfare and keep all children safe, not just the privileged ones, what do we have left? Who are we as a people, a society, a country, and a civilization?" (14).

Where the narrative is so powerful, then, is that it focuses not only on the riddle that needs to be solved but also on the medical detective herself.This reference to the

4 A discussion of citizen science and scientific citizenship is traced through the origin of modern science from its roots in the so-called "Scientific Revolution" by Jessica Gray in her chapter: "Foreign Relations: Utopian Fictions and the Birth of Scientific Citizenship."

pediatrician-detective's own identity is closely connected to her own understanding of her civic duty. She owes it to the children and to her civic responsibility as an ordinary citizen, Hanna-Attisha notes, to solve the riddle of why the children are getting sick. In this context, the narrative speaks in great detail about Hanna-Attisha's medical role and her vision of being a pediatrician. She notes,

A crying baby gives me a sense of mission. Deep inside I have a powerful, almost primal drive to make them feel better, to help them thrive. Most pediatricians do. For some of us, that sense of protectiveness becomes much more powerful when the baby in our care is born into a world that's stacked against her and her needs aren't being met—a world where she can't get a nutritious meal, play outside, or go to a well-functioning school, all of which will diminish her health. (20)

What is so remarkable about Hanna-Attisha's particular understanding of her role as a pediatrician, however, is that for her, this medical care includes an attention to her young patients' social and economic environment. In order to truly care for the children, Hanna-Attisha writes, she has to immerse herself into their world, to step into their shoes. What emerges from this scenario could not be more central to the practice of medicine. Medicine, in Hanna-Attisha's narrative, is both a scientific and a social practice. At this point in her narrative, her account is deeply in line with the concept of narrative medicine. As a practitioner of a form of narrative medicine, Hanna-Attisha listens not only to the medical stories, but also to the social narratives that the children and their parents tell. It is this notion of care that she also stresses in the program she runs at Hurley Medical Center:

[s]o at the beginning of the Community Pediatrics block, residents go on a tour of the city and learn the history of Flint…. They record the number of blighted neighborhoods, liquor stores, neglected playgrounds, and boarded-up schools…. Residents also meet with community leaders and activists, and they visit nonprofits and schools and daycare centers. They are sent to home visits, to court hearings and trials, to state protective services and community events…. My objective … is to get the residents out of the hospital and into the city, into the lived experience and environment of our kids. (26–27)

What emerges from the act of listening could not be more central. In fact, if she had not listened to their social stories, Hanna-Attisha might not have been able to uncover the scandal of Flint, Michigan.

What is central to Hanna-Attisha's narrative, however, is not only the fact of her work as a medical detective, but also her reasons for becoming a medical detective in the first place.Why, she asks herself in the narrative, did she go to such great lengths to uncover why the children of Flint kept getting sick? Her motivation, Hanna-Attisha stresses, was not only her role as a physician dedicated to the local community, but also the story of herself as an immigrant from Iraq. As Hanna-Attisha notes in an interview with filmmaker Michael Moore in the film *Fahrenheit 9/11*,

Hanna-Attisha: I wasn't born here, and we came to this country very much for that American Dream.  The American Dream worked for us, it worked for me and my family the way that it does not work for the kids that I take care of in my clinic every day. They are literally waking up to a nightmare. A nightmare of injustice, poverty, lost democracy. And that is another lesson that we learn from Flint.

Moore: Maybe that's why it's called a dream, because it's not a reality for everybody.

Hanna-Attisha: No, it's not. Moore: Right? Hanna-Attisha: No, there are multiple Americas. (*Fahrenheit* 9*/11*)

Similarly, at the core of *What the Eyes Don't See*, there is the medical narrative of the American Dream (Paul 367). In Hanna-Attisha's rewriting of the myth of the American dream**,** the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness include the concept of health justice and environmental justice, and the right to live in an uncontaminated environment.

Hanna-Attisha describes not only the lengths that she goes in order to finally solve the riddle of the children's sickness, but also the cost of acting as a medical detective in the first place. She recalls watching her two daughters play:

Nina and Layla were playing together when I got home, arranging stuffed animals in a make-believe zoo…. One day, a month or so back, the stuffed animals were all over the floor, in groups of two and four, multiplied.

"What's going on, my little squid monkeys?" I asked.

"Parent-teacher conferences."

"Okay," I said, sitting on the floor, grabbing a stuffed animal, and joining in the playacting.

But not this weekend. When I saw them playing, my heart tugged to join them, but I was soon distracted by more thoughts of lead-tainted water. (108–109)

In many different senses,*Whatthe Eyes Don't See*is a quest narrative. It is a quest narrative which is both a personal memoir of migration and a medical detective story.

At the same time, *What the Eyes Don't See* is also a scathing critique of the state of American citizenship at the turn of the twenty-first century. As Hanna-Attisha writes, "This is the story of the most important and emblematic environmental and public health disaster of this young century. More bluntly, it is the story of a government poisoning its own citizens, and then lying about it" (12–13).This critique in turn is framed in terms of spectatorship. How can the state, Hanna-Attisha asks her readers, simply look on as the children are being poisoned by massive doses of lead? Hanna-Attisha observes,

[b]ut even when lead exposure is demonstrated across a population, it is almost impossible to *prove* causation. Did lead in the water cause Brandon's ADHD? We will never know for sure. Did water cause Jasmine's rash? Maybe. Exposure to environmental toxins usually doesn't come with glaring symptoms, like purple spots or even a rash. The symptoms are things like learning disabilities that have a time lag. Sometimes they don't show themselves for years or even decades. For a pediatrician on the front lines, often the most you can hope for is establishing a correlation. The more I thought about it, the angrier I got. (98; emphasis original)

This is where the title of Hanna-Attisha's memoir, *What the Eyes Don't See*, hits home: if indeed the Flint water scandal constitutes a public health scandal, this, Hanna-Attisha knows, will be hard to prove. The point is not only that lead in the water is invisible to the human eye, but also that evidence of the causal effects of lead poisoning is hard to attain. This may be even more devastating in a community like Flint, which is predominantly African American and poor white. Both these groups have historically been stigmatized as being unwilling to work and as being intellectually inferior (Wray; Taylor).This is where lead poisoning seems all the more devastating: how will Brandon be able to prove that his ADHD was caused by the water? The situation, as Hanna-Attisha emphasizes, is all the more devastating because she had alerted health officials from the very beginning that there seemed to be something wrong with the Flint water. She remembers, "in an effort to be persistent but pleasant, I added: I never heard back from anyone. 'I would love to discuss this further to see what we can do to protect and prevent lead poisoning in our kids.' But the county health department was silent"(106). Eventually,it would take another year for the officials to finally take action. In this context, the role of racial and economic difference and disenfranchisement looms particularly large. When, Hanna-Attisha's narrative asks, do we condone a breach of citizenship rights in terms of health justice, and when do we sanction it?

Ultimately, the riddle to be solved is not only a medical riddle, but also a social one. It is here that we seem to have come all the way back to the concept of environmental racism.Would the Flint water scandal have continued to happen, we may ask with Hanna-Attisha, if the inhabitants of Flint had not been African American and poor white? In other words, in what particular contexts may the state fail to protect the rights of some of its citizens, and enforce the rights of others?

What is so crucial in Hanna-Attisha's account, is that it refuses to understand the scandal of Flint, Michigan, as an isolated incident. Rather, what the narrative uncoversis a systemic failure.*Whatthe EyesDon't See*is thus clearly connected to what has been called "systemic racism" (Feagin). As Melissa Denchak notes,

[a] story of environmental injustice and bad decision making, the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, began in 2014, when the city switched its drinking water supply from Detroit's system to the Flint River in a cost-saving move. Inadequate treatment and testing of the water resulted in a series of major water quality and health issues for Flint residents—issues that were chronically ignored, overlooked, and discounted by government officials even as complaints mounted that the foul-smelling, discolored, and off-tasting water piped into Flint homes for 18 months was causing skin rashes, hair loss, and itchy skin. The Michigan Civil Rights Commission, a state-established body, concluded that the poor governmental response to the Flint crisis was a "result of systemic racism." (Denchak)

Ultimately, the situation in which contaminated water severely affected the health of Flint residents was allowed to continue for two years. Nearly 9,000 children were exposed to lead-infected water.Moreover, due to aninsufficient supply of chlorinein the water, Flint experienced a severe outbreak of Legionnaires' disease. As Denchak goes on to observe, "The third-largest outbreak of Legionnaires' disease recorded in U.S. history—as well as the discovery in 2014 of fecal coliform bacteria in city water—was likely a result of the city's failure to maintain sufficient chlorine in its water mains to disinfect the water." In the end, the dramatic situation ended only after the inhabitants of Flint filed a petition to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which failed; they then went on to sue the city and state officials, and in 2016, they finally won. As Denchak concludes:

A more momentous win came the following March with a major settlement requiring the city to replace the city's thousands of lead pipes with funding from the state, and guaranteeing further funding for comprehensive tap water testing, a faucet filter installation and education program, free bottled water through the following summer, and continued health programs to help residents deal with the residual effects of Flint's tainted water. Even after this settlement, however, Flint residents continue to struggle for the measures to be enforced (Denchak).

The very nature of systemic racism is that it is deeply embedded into different social and institutional structures, including the medical system. In order to uncover such systemic racism, Hanna-Attisha reminds us, it needs a physician who takes their patients' place. As a whistleblower, Hanna-Attisha becomes a spokesperson for the children of Flint, who have become "vulnerable subjects." As Thomas Couser has noted, "Conditions that render subjects vulnerable range from the age-related (extreme youth or age), and the physiological (illnesses or impairments, physical or mental) to membership in social or culturally disenfranchised minorities" (xii). According to Couser, "vulnerable subjects" are authors who are as yet unable to write their own life narratives (ix). It is here that other "surrogate" authors may need to step in (Couser xi): it is this surrogate authorship that Hanna-Attisha assumes. She writes a medical case report on the children of Flint which she then turns into a social justice narrative.

Theidea of systemic racism can also be foundin the title of Hanna-Attisha'smedical memoir. As scholars from the field of Critical Race Theory have argued, privilege is often transparent in that it remains unseen. Privilege is so deeply embedded into the social and institutional structures that we are unable to see it (Crenshaw et al.; Gotanda). Ian Haney López speaks of the "transparency syndrome" in this context (111). This concept of "transparency syndrome" takes on multiple meanings Hanna-Attisha's narrative: social privilege is also the right to living in a non-toxic environment. Thus, as Zimerling also argues, whiteness, citizenship and the right to live in a "clean" environment may all be juxtaposed. In keeping with López's idea of transparency, then, white privilege as the right to live in a non-toxic environment remains unseen. What is visible to the eye, in other words, is only the location of whiteness in a certain neighborhood. What remains unseen, on the other hand, is the *health privilege* that such a neighborhood may carry.

At the same time, in Hanna-Attisha's memoir, the dichotomy between visibility and invisibility takes on yet another dimension. The most blatant breach of social and medical justice, she argues, is the politicians' deliberate un-seeing of the Flint water scandal even after the whistle had long been blown, both by Hanna-Attisha and others.The "eyes"of local politicians refused to see that the children of Flint were getting sick: even as the effects of lead poisoning on the children were already becoming visible, they continued to "look on." As Hanna-Attisha emphasizes, "A disaster of this scale does not happen completely by accident.Many people stopped caring about Flint and Flint's kids. Many people looked the other way" (13). Hanna-Attisha's narrative is thus also a form of witnessing: she bears witness to the state's crime of looking on, of letting medical injustice continue to happen. The failure of the state, as the guarantor of full citizenship rights, is hence also a medical failure.

#### **Conclusion: Shared Authorship, Resilience, and the Future of Citizenship**

What does this contextmean for the notion ofmedical citizenship? Crucially,it could be argued that the concept of citizenship is in need of adjectives which describe and qualify it only when it has been shown to *fail* in certain contexts. There is a need for further qualification only where citizenship as a universal concept has already broken down. Medical citizenship, seen from this perspective, is already a diagnosis of failure.

However, it is interesting to note in this context that Hanna-Attisha's groundbreaking medical memoir also has a subtitle: *A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City*. In writing the biography and the medical case report of the citizens of Flint, Hanna-Attisha also testifies to their resilience. As she notes at the end of her memoir,

I will share with you a few stories of my Flint kids. They are my inspiration. To protect their privacy and dignity, I have changed or modified their names and identities…. They are strong, smart, beautiful and brave—and so resilient…. Resilience isn't something you are born with. It isn't a trait that you have or don't have. It's learned. This means that for every child in a toxic environment or unraveling community—both of which take a terrible toll on childhood development and can have lasting effects—there is hope. (14)

It is here that the pediatrician shares her authorship and speaks not about or for, but *with* the people of Flint. In this collective authorship, theinhabitants of Flint blow the whistle not only on the medical system, but also on a nation who has failed to protect all its citizens.The people of Flint de-individualize their illness by emphasizing that what is at stake here is a systemic failure born of environmental racism. The people of Flint blow the whistle not only on the politicians and the corporate interest that caused the Flint water scandal in the first place, but also on the concept of failed citizenship itself. The future resilience of the concept of citizenship, Hanna-Attisha implies, will lie in its ability to heed the sound of this whistle.

#### **Works Cited**

Charon, Rita. *Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness*. Oxford UP, 2008.

Couser, G. Thomas. *Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing*. Cornell UP, 2004.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé, et al. *Critical Race Theory: The Writings that Formed the Movement*. New York: New Press, 1995.

Feagin, Joe. *Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression*. New York: Routledge, 2006.

### **Foreign Relations**

### Utopian Fictions and the Birth of Scientific Citizenship

*Jessica Hanselman Gray*

The circulation of terms like "citizen science" and "scientific citizenship" underscore the political logic by which both academics and the general public conceive of regimes of knowledge. These terms imply rights and responsibilities associated with access to certain forms of knowledge about the natural world.1 "Scientific community" generally refers in a limited sense to researchers, practitioners, and other professionals involved with the institutional production and application of a narrow array of sciences; the phrase posits and defends a friendly but distinct border between those credentialed professionals and the general public. "Scientific citizenship," on the other hand, is a plastic term that sometimes extends rights and responsibilities of the scientist to the public—rhetorically, if not practically, democratizing science—and sometimes figures the scientist as a sort of supercitizen of the larger society, encouraging responsible application of their inherently powerful position. It most often refers to communications and exchanges (of knowledge, trust, and credit) at the border between the scientific community and the general public, often troubling that boundary as it attempts to invoke it—a logic that also obtains in political rhetoric.2 Appropriating the political category of citizenship to imagine a separation between science and the rest of society serves to justify the institutional priority of defending that border from erasure even while it narrates its intention to reach across it.

The implications of this metaphor and its intimate connection with authority, truth value, and political power can be better understood by tracing the origin of modern science's culture of citizenship to its roots in the so-called "Scientific Revolution." The seventeenth century's milieu of political and social contexts gave rise

1 See Mita Banerjee's chapter in this volume, "'What the Eyes Don't See': Medical Citizenship and Environmental Justice in Mona Hanna-Attisha's Medical Memoir," for an investigation into how citizen science and narrative medicine converge during the water crisis in Flint, Michigan.

2 For more on the implications of social exchanges that happen at the disciplinary boundary imagined between "science" and "non-science," see Thomas F. Gieran.

to both our modern understanding of citizenship and the institutional reorganization of authority over natural knowledge. At that time, the emerging discipline of experimental science was writing itself into being as the exclusive arbiter of truth about the natural world—grounded, ostensibly, in its method, which relied explicitly on observation and experimentation and implicitly on self-selecting investment of credit and authority.3 This method,modeled upon Francis Bacon's vision of scientific orthopraxy, gave rise to amodern notion of authority over nature that would end up being crucial for modernity and its increasingly secularized claims about states, sovereignty, and citizenship. Both rely on invoking an imagined separation between the public and private spheres, producing and reproducing a narrative that valorizes objectivity while investing real authority and power in specific bodies.

This essay considers two works of seventeenth-century fiction, written by authors of scientific treatises, that focus on voyagers' discoveries of hidden societies and their engagement with the scientific knowledge production happening in each. Both Bacon's *The New Atlantis*(1627) and Margaret Cavendish's *The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World* (1666) narrate border-crossing adventures in which travelers enmesh themselves ritually, tediously, and imperfectly into new worlds. Both present models of organized, methodical inquiry into the natural world; both assign high importance to border control, connecting it intimately with conditions of knowledge production.While Bacon generates an austere and straightforward vision of masculine authority, later so pivotal for science's self-conception, Cavendish raises troubling questions about which bodies can be included in the production of authoritative knowledge and why. These two fictions reveal a tension between disciplinary gatekeeping and the very language of authority that writes this emerging discipline into being. In considering Bacon and Cavendish's tales alongside their antipodal relationships to the Royal Society of London, I focus on the implications of the figuratively reproductive body (and its strategic rhetorical erasure) on the early negotiation of what will come to be called "scientific citizenship." Our contemporary scientific community still struggles to overcome these implications as we wrestle with an array of life-or-death challenges that occupy the intersection of scientific knowledge, authority, and global politics.

#### **Public and Private**

Hannah Arendt posits a theory of citizenship that relies upon producing and maintaining the spatial and functional separation of the public sphere from the private.

3 For continuity and brevity, I am using the terms "science" and "scientific" somewhat anachronistically throughout this essay as a shorthand for activities and products that would have, in the seventeenth century, more properly been called "natural philosophy."

In the public sphere,4 like the idealized conception of the Athenian *polis*, citizens interact and exchange ideas; the public represents a conceptual and literal space for discourse, a constructed "space of appearance" where people come together, recognize each other, and through reason make responsible joint decisions (198).The public sphere permits and encourages plurality, because it functions as a space where people can represent themselves to each other as individuals, irrespective of the social categories of identity that they inhabit by virtue of their bodies.This spatial distinction structures Arendt's concept of citizenship as being bound to a public-facing context, and political metaphors like "scientific citizenship" rhetorically extend this conception to disciplines of science. Distinct from other categories of political identification and belonging, "citizenship" generally implies reciprocity of duty that infuses rights with responsibilities—expectations as well as privileges, often viewed as mutually constitutive. In the Global Citizenship Observatory's definition, citizenship confers "rights and duties" and is both "a legal status and relation"—sometimes idealized as a way of being, an attitude, and a relation, while at the same time it is policed as a received/assigned condition ("citizenship"). Citizens are distinct from subjects in this way, and the status benefits from the term's connotation of merit, which is to say that citizenship is imagined as a set of ideal behaviors as well as an assigned or otherwise passive condition. The status requires relational duties.

For all of these reasons, citizenship is implicitly bound up with policing borders and with categorizing bodies. The category of citizenship relies on imagining the body as a repository of the essential quality of belonging, as is evident in policies surrounding citizenship through descent, or*jus sanguinis* ("right of blood"), and birthright citizenship, *jus soli* ("right of soil").The notion of "naturalized citizens" reveals the extent to which both forms of citizenship are imagined as organic states of being rather than artificial, rhetorically authorized conditions; implying that the body holds a "natural" citizenship obscures the agency involved in establishing this condition.And yet citizenship clearly also denotes a *relation* between the private body and some external public which can determine its membership. Some boundary, in other words, must precede the authority required to adjudicate a person's relationship to it. Since authority to define inside/outside must come from inside, this rationale often requires an origin story—a history that establishes the founding condition or event from which the governing body derives authority to delimit citizenship. However arbitrary geographic political boundaries may be, an origin myth provides

4 Jürgen Habermas introduced this term into scholarly discourse with *The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere*. His work generated substantial debates, especially among critics informed by feminist theory, such as Nancy Fraser; see, for example, Craig Calhoun, *Habermas and the Public Sphere*; Seyla Benhabib, "The Embattled Public Sphere."

a guiding rationale, 5 a narrative of how and why the current conditions are right and natural. Heritage, heroism, or divine prerogative: there is always an Excalibur. Scholars agree that narrative fiction was ofteninvestedin naturalizing theillusion of a clear and stable boundary between the public and private spheres. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, for example, has shown how eighteenth-century fiction served as public reasoning documents, which circulated within an ostensibly disembodied "public" space while depicting the "private" realm on the page, discursively reproducing and naturalizing the split between public and private. This same naturalization of public and private, I argue, structured even earlier fictional explorations of scientific praxis, shaping the form of knowledge production that we will come to call "science."

Disciplines of knowledge production must also be constituted by imagined boundaries, which require policing much as state borders do. Geopolitical metaphors are commonplace in intellectual histories, especially science studies; Michel Foucault and Bruno Latour, for example, organize their critiques around figuring disciplines as "regimes" and "fiefdoms" and other political power centers, stressing the extent to which scientific discourse relies on narrative to justify (often-concealed) practices of inclusion and exclusion (Foucault 133; Latour 8). But while the body has long served as a physical space and as an imagined entity that posits a boundary between private and public in political and scientific discourses, feminist critics have revealed this boundary to be constructed and unstable,6 a division historically and conceptually reinforcing a gendered hierarchy of power that served to reconcile Enlightenment ideals of individual liberty with the reality of social difference and patriarchy. The "scientific community" depends on practices rooted in the "Scientific Revolution," a sea change in practices of knowledge production that culminated in the calving of science from philosophy in the seventeenth century. Yet modern science's origin myth takes an overtly gendered view of the mind and its products, one that is predicated on the public/private divide, and it relies on the naturalized hierarchy of gender to elevate some perspectives above

5 I am applying the idea of origin myths as Mircea Eliade conceives of them in *Myth and Reality*, in terms of their social function as primarily a way to account for, naturalize, and make sense of present conditions.

6 There is a wealth of scholarship that participates in this conversation: see, for example, Nancy Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere"; Joan Wallach Scott's landmark *Gender and the Politics of History*, which argues that the relegation of women to a feminized domestic sphere, separate from the political, is a tool of subordination; Catharine McKinnon, *Feminism Unmodified,* which explores gender, the body, civil rights, and the law; *Feminism, the Public and the Private*, edited by Joan Landes, which offers feminist critiques from multiple disciplines; *Languages and Publics*, edited by Susan Gal and Kathryn Ann Woolard, which examines "the public" as a "language-based form of political legitimation" that is connected to the construction of authority (4).

others. Although exclusion is usually naturalized with an official rationale, the history of the academy includes countless examples of how the body often forecloses belonging. Juxtaposing fictional narratives by Bacon and Cavendish foregrounds this naturalization and its fault lines: Bacon, the imputed "father" of empiricism, imagines the abstraction of pure unmediated reasoning, while the marginalized Cavendish, as we will see later, engages with the myriad ways in which some bodies must be excluded in order to sustain that fantasy.

#### **The Royal Society: Citizens of a Public Science**

In seventeenth-century England, The Royal Society of London, modeled on Bacon's prescriptions, sought to claim for a self-selecting group of wealthy, well-connected men authority over natural knowledge.7 In what Eve Keller calls their institutional "myth of origins," Thomas Sprat, a Fellow of the Society, writes a fawning history, apology, and virtual hagiography in language that vigorously and sometimes defensively argues for both the indispensability of the Society's founding and the natural fitness of its members to serve as arbiters of such authority ("Producing Petty Gods" 447). The urgent need to mark this line by establishing an organization, and to promote it in this way, suggests that the boundary and the authority it conferred were not otherwise extant. In fact, there was considerable skepticism, even among their learned peers, about the Society's program. Proponents of experimental science strove to present it as a new discipline that was distinguished from others specifically by virtue of its methodological difference. Bacon's experimental model promised to correct the perverting influences of bodies and minds on the study of nature. They promoted these methods as a way to produce knowledge uncorrupted by subjectivity: in this vision, the person was not the source of knowledge but rather a witness to the experiment's trial of nature. The knowledge was disembodied, separate from the subject—public reason operating operating independently of the private body that offers, as Steven Shapin puts it, a "disengaged and nonproprietary presentation of authorial self " (179).

Claiming authority as a purportedly objective witness, however, requires creditability, some pre-existing belonging. The Royal Society grew out of an "invisible college" of natural philosophers who were already gathering before the official establishment of the Society ("History of the Royal Society").The term suggests an implied, "invisible" culture of citizenship that eventually became formalized—not only visible but sanctioned by the King and populated entirely through election, creating

7 For a thorough analysis of the connection between the institutional aims of the Royal Society and the historically specific priorities of the English upper class in connection with the Restoration, see P. B. Wood.

a closed pipeline controlled by current members. Envisioning the early Royal Society as a culture of citizenship reveals that its explicit and implicit conditions of inclusion center the body in determining belonging. In his *History of the Royal Society*, Sprat makes an argument for the qualifications of Society members based on what he lauds as a kind of diversity—that they admit "Men of all religions" and "Of all countries" and "Of all professions (64–65).8 However, other parts of the *History* offer qualifications to these categories: he had earlier called for "all civil nations" to join arms against the "common enemy of Christendom"; other context confirms that by "all religions" he means only sects of Christianity and by "all countries" he means only those nations that he deems "civil" (57).9 He follows this section with one entitled, "It consists chiefly of gentlemen," which argues, essentially, that wealth inoculates against corruption. According to Sprat, the Society ought to include only "such men, who, by … the plenty of their estates, and the usual generosity of noble blood, may be well supposed to be most averse from such sordid considerations" (67). Sprat argues here that containing authority within a group made up primarily of men with inherited wealth solves the otherwise insurmountable problem of corruption in knowledge production.10 He explains that wealthy men are "free, and unconfined," which he says protects against "corruptions" such as profit motive and institutional hierarchies (67). Exemplifying the logic of Engin Isin's theorization of *acts of citizenship*, the Society's founders were determined to "call established forms of responsibilization into question" and replace scholastic authority with their own form of gatekeeping (37). It was important to tether the logic of this gatekeeping to characteristics of the individual rather than to method, because, as Deborah Harkness and Pamela Smith have shown, the work of science largely developed out of practices of observation and craft already commonplace in the domestic lives of everyday folk. Inclusion and authority did not follow naturally from that labor and expertise: the Society's exclusion of women as Fellows was a given, and Sprat takes no pains to offer an explanation or apology for it.11 By the time Margaret Cavendish—a prolific natural philosopher in her own right—became the first woman to attend a meeting in 1667, she was crossing a well-defended border as an acknowledged outsider. Her

8 Note on spelling: I have silently modernized spelling and punctuation in the seventeenth-century texts for ease of reading.

9 For further discussion on how citizenship has been deployed as an arbiter of the false boundary between the civilized and the uncivilized with regard to Indigenous Peoples, see Vanessa Evans's chapter in this volume: "'You've Heard it Now': Storytelling and Acts of Citizenship in Cherie Dimaline's *The Marrow Thieves.*"

10 For a treatment of how the Royal Society evaluated reports from outsiders, including travel narratives and cases where only a secondhand report was available, see Barbara J. Shapiro, *A Culture of Fact: England 1550-1720*, especially Ch. 3, "Discourses of Fact," and Ch. 5–6, "The Facts of Nature [I and II]."

11 The Royal Society did not admit any women Fellows until 1945.

body rendered her alien even to an emerging field being defined by its attempt to separate authority over knowledge production from the body of the practitioner.

The rationale for exclusion centers qualities connected to one's imagined fitness for participating in the public sphere, underscoring the importance of that division to the Society's gatekeeping. Sprat pits private against public explicitly in describing the impact of the Reformation on textual archives:

The first thing that was undertaken, was to rescue the excellent works of former writers from obscurity. To the better performing of this, many things contributed about that time. Amongst which … the dissolution of abbeys: whereby their libraries came forth into the light, and fell into industrious men's hands, who understood how to make more use of them, then their slothful possessors had done. (23)

This characterizes the takeover of knowledge from scholastics not in terms of a democratization of that knowledge but rather as a process by which self-described "industrious" men claimed control over resources in order to "make more use" of them than their animal-like former stewards. Sprat's language obscures agency: he begins with passive voice, then has an unnamed entity "rescue" texts, before shifting agency to the knowledge itself and finally to nature—the libraries "came forth" and then "fell" into the right hands. Both the texts and nature itself seem to be choosing sides rather than being acted upon.This romantic fable positions scholastics as private hoarders of knowledge and the Society as a well-lit public square—but, given that the Society's membership was also closed and maintained a secrecy code, this "rescue" of archives seems more a colonizing move than a democratizing one.

The priorities for this new method of inquiry, and its implied restriction to an aristocratic, masculine authority, were given their iconic articulation by Bacon. In *Novum Organum*, Bacon sets forth his plan for a reworking of the methods of natural philosophy, which he characterizes as aiming to extract truth from matter in order to reclaim mankind's domination over nature. Sprat's *History* celebrates the experimental method as a corrective for specific defects of thought, the "idols" that Bacon enumerates in*Novum Organum*. But Bacon's program of experimental philosophy was an explicitly masculinist one, and one project of the Royal Society was to make that gendered separation key to what its members saw as a productive and socially beneficial hegemony over the production of natural knowledge. Sprat's introductory material makes explicit the Society's investments in masculinizing philosophy; its dedicatory poem even muses that the personified Philosophy, gendered "she"in the classical tradition,ought to be "he,"andit definesitsintellectual products as "masculine" in opposition to the "feminine" mode of poetry: "[A]s the feminine arts of pleasure, and gallantry have spread some of our neighbouring languages … so the English tongue may also in time be more enlarged, by being the instrument

of conveying to the world, the masculine arts of knowledge" (129). Unlike feminine language that invents or creates, their masculine language simply "conveys."The implicit claim of experimental science, then, is that Nature is telling its own story and that these "masculine" methods convey that narrative unmodified; in this way, their role in its construction is rendered invisible.

In his utopian fable *The New Atlantis*, Bacon makes this rhetorical erasure of subjectivity into one of the defining characteristics of Bensalem, where he will imagine a society built around his principles and practices of knowledge production. Bensalem, explains the narrator, is "known to few, and yet knew most of the nations of the world," situated in a "secret conclave of a vast sea," where it is hidden from the sight and knowledge of other nations (272). The islanders strictly enforce their entry policies with the narrator's company of travelers, first keeping them cloistered indoors and thereafter giving them freedom to roam only within a tightly controlled distance from the Strangers' House where they are lodged. The islanders explain that they prioritize "preserving the good which cometh by communicating with strangers, and avoiding the hurt" (280). They maintain strict secrecy when interacting with foreigners abroad or on their own shores, even obscuring their national identity when traveling, and they employ an armed patrol to guard their borders and control entry. They also tell of their own regular explorations overseas, through which they maintain the power advantage gained by the island's hiddenness: "we have twelve that sail into foreign countries, under the names of other nations, (for our own we conceal); who bring us the books, and abstracts, and patterns of experiments of all other parts" (297). They send out explorers to report back "knowledge of the affairs and state of those countries … and especially of the sciences, arts, manufactures, and inventions of all the world" (288). The narrator wonders at this asymmetrical invisibility, which does not seem humanly possible: "[I]t seemed to us a conditioner and propriety of divine powers and beings, to be hidden and unseen to others, and yet to have others open and as in a light to them" (275).This aspect of Bensalem's project—no less than "finding out of the true Nature of all things"—is essential to understanding Bacon's vision of an intellectually responsible praxis for producing natural knowledge; it also underscores the extent to which the story tacitly acknowledges the intimate connection between knowledge and political power.

In the apparent climax of the tale, the group elects the narrator to receive a private audience with one of the "Fathers" of Salomon's House, the pride of Bensalem, a learned (patriarchal) Society that would directly inspire the founders of the Royal Society.One Father regales the narrator with a "relation of the true state of Salomon's House": structured like a scientific paper,it includes "the end of our foundation," the "preparations and instruments we have for our works," the "several employments and functions whereto our fellows are assigned," and finally the "ordinances and rites which we observe" (290). The Father enumerates these elements—introduction, materials, methods, references—at length; over 100 sentences begin "we have" or "we make," detailing the resources, instruments, and labor that Salomon's House employs. Interestingly, the narrator witnesses none of this himself; all of the knowledge of Salomon's House derives from the relation he hears in private after his group elects him to serve as witness.

#### **Reproducing Knowledge**

Bensalem's careful attention to controlling narratives and dissemination of knowledge echoes the commitments to the masculinized system that Bacon sets forth in *Novum Organum*. He admonishes scientists to avoid false "idols" of thought which arise in part from the "mode of impression" (40). His aphorisms on the idols betray a deep mistrust of the role of language in knowledge production: "it is by discourse that men associate, [but] ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding" (41). In Bacon's view, language is a means by which a subject imposes form upon the matter of thought, and the violence that he perceives in this imposition is reflected both in his choice of metaphors and in his expressions of concern over the use of metaphors. He bemoans that words are unstable vessels of meaning, and especially the way they leave potentially contagious marks of subjectivity upon ideas.These concerns about "impression" are deeply connected with early modern ideas about gender and the body: in seventeenth-century England, there was widespread belief in "maternal impression," the idea that a pregnant woman's mind could physically mark the body of her fetus as a result of something she imagined, saw, or desired. This idea circulated among physicians and in print materials that purported to educate readers about the mysterious mechanisms of human reproduction.The pseudonymous *Aristotle's CompleatMaster Piece*, for example, advises: "[T]he imagination of the mother works forcibly upon the conception of the child. Women therefore ought to take great care that their imaginations be pure and clear, that their children may be well formed" (46). Such warnings reveal anxieties not only about the power of a mother to physiologically shape another body but also about the possibility that what happens in the hidden, secret interior space of one body can have a lasting and material influence on future generations. Maternal impression is figured as an act of inscription, a form of authorship, and because authorship is a generative act that neatly aligns with the process and function of biological reproduction—giving form to what is "inside" the body and then putting it "outside" into the public sphere—they are effortlessly analogous, and reproductive metaphors of authorship are ubiquitous.

In discourses about the "new science" in seventeenth-century England, experimental philosophers were invested in making their subjectivity invisible to the receiving public; they claimed authorityin part by purporting to transmit Nature's own narrative unmodified, uncorrupted by the private, embodied individual. Anxieties about authoritative knowledge often surface in metaphors of reproduction not only because both deal with bringing what is "inside" the body "out," but also because both threaten to pass on undesirable traits—errors or defects—by impressing them into new bodies or minds, thus carrying patterns of deformity forward through time. It is not surprising, then, that prescriptions for preventing monstrosity by controlling "impression" pervade the discourses surrounding both the production of knowledge and the production of bodies. Such metaphors alternately structure and challenge both Bacon's practical advice to natural philosophers and his work of fiction: echoing the above advice to pregnant women, he insists on the need to "fortify" one's mind against corruption to keep the mind "clear" (40). He also signals general concerns about potentiallymonstrous generativity,which Sprat later repeats. Salomon's House demands "pure" descriptions of nature, absolutely disallowing, "under pain of ignominy and fines," any portrayal that is "adorned or swelling" or bears any "affectation of strangeness" (297). According to Sprat, the Royal Society maintains "primitive purity" in its descriptions, with a "mathematical plainness" and a "close, naked, natural way of speaking" (113). They share a horror of the "swelling" and figurative generativity that they associate with impurity—and with the language of the "feminine" arts.

A similarly gestational logic structures the way the travelers in *The New Atlantis* receive knowledge about Bensalem—gradually, and on a strictly regimented time scale. When the sailors wash up on the shores of Bensalem, the islanders prescribe several distinct stages of concealment and confinement that the travelers must follow before entering the public space and gaining access to the rituals and knowledge therein. This economy of time echoes Pseudo-Aristotle's timeline of fetal development: "The forming of the child in the womb of its mother, is thus described: Three days in the milk, twice three in blood, twelve days form the flesh, and eighteen the members, and forty days afterwards the child is inspired with life" (49–50). The narrator characterizes the travelers' situation during this waiting period as a space "between death and life, for we are beyond both the old world and the new," a figuratively gestational liminality overlaid with a geopolitical framework (270).That implicitly gestational logic structures the strictly controlled conditions under which they (and we) eventually gain access to Bensalem's public square and gain access to the relation of Salomon's House, Bacon's vision of an ideal regime of knowledge production.

A reproductive framework for understanding knowledge production thus shapes the logic of Bacon's vision. It is significant that the gendered nature of this division resonates with the gendering of public and private spheres, especially when considering the question of how the "citizenship" in "scientific citizenship" should be understood. In *Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life*, historians of science Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer argue that the Royal Society constructed a new understanding of scientific knowledge by creating a new *social technology* for evaluating knowledge claims, one which appeared to operate as a sort of public square along the lines of Arendt's model, and a new *literary technology* by which the attendant witnesses disseminate their narrative. They point out that the experimental method, now naturalized and widely regarded as *the* scientific method, had to be striven for, argued for, and defended from criticism.

Feminist science studies scholars have shown that the "objectivity" at its center also had to be constructed and naturalized, and that myths of gender provided a foundation. In<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Donna Haraway deconstructs the "modest witness" figure at the center of the Baconian ideals of the Royal Society, calling attention to the subject position that makes it possible. She points out that the mode of pass-through witnessing that rendered knowledge "objective" was only possible for a small subset of people—white, upper-class gentlemen—and suggests that Shapin and Schaffer's account of the Society's method is limited by their failure to fully unpack the implications of subject position (including gender, race, class, and national origin) on the construction of authority in seventeenth-century experimental science. Certainly, these categories come in and out of view in Sprat's *History*: for example, he emphasizes the importance of elevating "experiences" over "imagination," right after laying out an argument for excluding most people from access to those experiences based on elements of social identity (117). And as Haraway points out, it was precisely these embodied categories of identity that allowed some men's subjectivity to be obscured, thereby producing the authority that we call objectivity.

#### **A View From Somewhere**

Enter Margaret Cavendish. The Duchess of Newcastle was an enthusiastic autodidact keenly interested in natural philosophy. As a royalist, her situation during and following the English Civil War and Interregnum heavily influenced the attitudes toward political power and authority that both her fictional and philosophical writings reveal.After returning to England upon the restoration of themonarchyin 1660, Cavendish published (among other texts) *Philosophical and Physical Opinions* (1663), *Philosophical Letters* (1664), and an expansive critical commentary on scientific theory and practice titled *Observations upon Experimental Philosophy* (1666), which was printed together with a short novel entitled *The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World*, a work of fancy/fiction that served as a companion piece to the serious treatise. Bound together, these two texts represent a gendered dyad, stereotypically masculine and feminine modes of delivering similar central arguments. Like Bacon's *New Atlantis*, Cavendish's *Blazing World* is preoccupied with discourses of natural knowledge and exploring how authority obtains both through relations among people across borders and through relations of knowledge, history, and intelligence.12 Both feature travel narratives with utopian elements, both follow the adventures of strangers in a previously unknown land, and each explores a society centered upon the production of knowledge about the natural world. But Cavendish's *Blazing World* responds from a self-consciously outsider perspective not only to Bacon's work but to many of the prominent figures and practices of the new experimental methods of natural philosophy.

From the outset, *The Blazing World* evinces a complex relationship with storytelling, gender,and political boundaries.The story opens with a border-crossing that illustrates the implications of being an outsider: "A merchant, traveling into a foreign country, fell extremely in love with a young lady; but being a stranger in that nation, and beneath her in both birth and wealth, he could have but little hopes of obtaining his desire"(154). Rather than a first-person relation, with the narrator purporting to tell his own story, as in *The New Atlantis*, Cavendish gives us a third-person omniscient narrator, adding a degree of removal between the events and the reader. The first person that the narrator mentions is the merchant: we hear about his identity, his desires, his companions, his intentions, his enumerated resources, his plans, and the obstacles in his path. It appears to be his story—until a few pages later when, after abducting the young lady and sailing off with her, he dies of exposure and abruptly exits the tale. It turns out that this is not his story at all; it is hers. While the polar cold kills everyone else on board, the lady survives "by the light of her Beauty, the heat of her Youth"—the same qualities that had incited her kidnapping, suggesting value and virtue entangled in an embodied form of subjectivity that is sometimes erased from agential control (162). After drifting through a small portal that connects the poles of her world and the Blazing World, she encounters a group of Bear-Men, who lift her from the boat and convey her a great distance to the palace, where the Emperor, also taken with her beauty, marries her and grants her absolute power over the Blazing World. To this point she has exhibited no agency at all; her passivity is exaggerated, and her body's status as an object of men's desire—rather than her own subjectivity or intention—moves the story along until she transforms instantaneously from cargo to absolute dictator without ever being simply a participant.

After achieving political power through the only means available to her, marriage, the newly-appointed Empress sets her sights on knowledge, expressing her

12 For this multilayered understanding of the term "relation," I am indebted to Frances E. Dolan, whose 2013 book *True Relations: Reading, Literature, and Evidence in Seventeenth-Century England* takes up various connotations of the word—narration, reporting, association, connecting and being connected—to explore how both writers and readers invest texts with meaning, as well as the role that social relations play in constructing truth.

desire "to be informed" (163). Her first act is to establish schools and societies, encouraging her subjects—various races of man-animal hybrids—to engage in academic occupations according to their "nature" (163). She solicits briefings on their religion and politics—like Bensalem, the people of the Blazing World are enthusiastic monotheists, monarchists, and patriarchists—and she commands "true relation[s]" of natural phenomena, synthesizing and adjudicating the diverse perspectives that the various "vertuosos" provide (165). Unlike Bacon's, this model depicts knowledge-making as discursive, situated, and relational, while also highlighting the role of political power in producing authority over truth claims. The story portrays the dissemination of knowledge as similarly fraught. When the Empress feels she's discovered (read: decided) enough about the natural world, she resolves to publish a book of knowledge and asks the spirits that live in her world to find her a learned scribe. When she suggests a series of celebrated philosophers—Newton, Helmont, Descartes, etc.—the spirits remind the Empress that these men would never agree to record a woman's knowledge, and they instead nominate the Duchess of Newcastle (Cavendish's semi-autobiographical avatar; for clarity, I will continue to refer to the author as Cavendish and will reference the character as the Duchess). Far from erasing the authorial function of narrative-making, Cavendish writes herself into the story as a border-crossing, fourth-wall-breaking character who travels between her own world and the Blazing World to serve as the protagonist's scribe, best friend, and sidekick. The two begin a sprawling series of negotiations and adventures that lead them in and out of various social and political situations, culminating in an invasion of the Duchess's world (using submarines for stealth), where the Empress burns cities to the ground in order to establish her native "ESFI"—a nod to Charles II's kingdom of English, Scotland, France, and Ireland—as "absolute monarchy of all that world" (241). While Cavendish's story nakedly advocates for the indispensability of a singular final authority—monarchism, monotheism, monism—it is full of scenes of consultation and collaboration, in which the Empress relies on intelligence reports from her subjects as well as counsel and reasoned discourse. It also calls repeated attention to its narrator being both a disembodied voice and animmutable human body.*TheBlazingWorld* explores limits that exist both physically and conceptually over knowledge production, especially the ineluctable body.

In her critique of the "modest witness" figure, Haraway unpacks the gendered history of "modesty," showing that this word connoted different qualities in men and women. Masculine modesty implied gentility and sophistication, an inclination in public to subordinate one's private self. This kind of modesty served to establish credibility for the gentlemen of the Royal Society: Sprat boasts of their "fair, and equal, and submissive way of registering nothing but histories and relations"—claiming authority through this purported passivity (116). Feminine modesty played out differently: it was about staying out of masculine realms, being

relegated to the private domestic sphere—a physical erasure rather than a rhetorical one. In Bacon's *New Atlantis,* the narrator recounts in exhaustive detail the ritual Feast of the Family, which honors any man in Bensalem who can boast "thirty persons descended of his body": during the Feast, this patriarch is paraded before the crowd "with all his generation or lineage" for an excessive display of pomp, the florid description of which encompasses a significant portion of Bacon's text. Toward the end of a breathless description of this extravagant ritual, the narrator mentions, briefly and in passing, that "if there be a mother, from whose body the whole lineage is descended, there is a traverse placed in a loft above … where she sitteth, but is not seen" (283). In publicly addressing "his" descendants during the celebration of his social impact on Bensalem's community, the father refers to himself as "the man by whom thou hast breath and life," while the mother, her influence confined to her private body, is relegated to silence and invisibility in the rafters (283). This scene effects a clear distinction between the function of public and private spheres, and unlike Cavendish, Bacon does not call further attention to that erasure in his narrative.

Their fictions, the texts subordinated to secondary "feminine" status, help to complete the picture of their respective views on philosophy, providing missing vantage points that reveal how "objectivity" requires erasure. Their inclination to imagine a shift in methodology through a rupture of political and geographic borders, with the travel narrative genre, underscores the inherently political logic of knowledge making. And it is intriguing that both Bacon and Cavendish use the utopian form, in particular, to sketch out their visions: *Utopia* means "no place," and the genre is freighted with implications of impossibility, naïve idealism, and self-conscious attention to artifice. It is striking that these serious natural philosophers, who also wrote technical and scholarly works, chose to explore these ideas through this specific mode. Like Salomon's House's elaborate artificial trials of nature, speculative fiction allows for experimentation in a controlled environment: an imaginative "what if?" exercise. Whereas Bacon carefully glosses over the authorial role in that thought experiment—having his unnamed protagonist stumble upon it and report back—Cavendish openly paints herself as the inventor of both the Blazing World and her philosophy, creating and forming them into being "[out] of the most pure … rational matter" of her mind, not hesitating to reveal the manifold marks of her own authorship (*Blazing World* 250). She is transparent about the formative power of the storyteller as maker and about narrative's implicit dual function of relation and invention13. Utopia's denotation of "no place" also serves as a fictional illustration for the topological fiction that Haraway critiques as the impossible "god

13 For a close look at the connection between these two fictional texts and changing understandings of "invention" at this time, see Frédérique Aı̈t-Touati, "Making Worlds: Invention and Fiction in Bacon and Cavendish."

trick of seeing everything from nowhere" in science's construction of objectivity ("Situated Knowledges" 581). Bensalem's almost-magical geographical situation and its strict maintenance of a one-way flow of intelligence that figures them always at the center are rehearsed in the Royal Society's claim to special authority: Sprat invokes Bacon's *New Atlantis* by name in claiming for London the natural right to serve as the "constant place of residence for that knowledge, which is to be made up of the Reports, and Intelligence of all countries" (87). He argues that Nature has uniquely positioned English gentlemen to produce a "universal intelligence," as evidenced by the "situation of England … in the passage between the northern parts of the world, and the southern" (85). This pronouncement encapsulates the un-self-conscious absurdity of "objectivity": England only lies between the north and south from the perspective of England itself. Cavendish pushes against this kind of claim in her *Observations*. In discussing Robert Hooke's experiments with microscopy, in which he notes that different lighting conditions and angles produce wildly different images, Cavendish asks, "which is the truest light, position, or medium, that doth present the object naturally as it is?" (17). This inquiry gets at the crux of the problem of so-called objectivity: the authority to decide which perspective offers the most accurate view constitutes the power to decide what is true. It is now commonly accepted that knowledge is always partial and situated, thanks to scholars like Harding, Keller, and Haraway, but Margaret Cavendish was spilling it out into view and fretting over it in multiple genres and forms as early as 1666, using fiction to show truths that "nonfiction" obscures. Long before terms like "sociology of scientific knowledge" or "situated knowledges" began circulating, she was reflecting on positionality and interrogating the social and political conditions of natural knowledge production.

From the very beginning of *Observations*, Cavendish calls attention to the way that knowledge production depends upon access and authority. The preface bluntly acknowledges gendered differences in access to the resources of knowledge production, apologizing for the shortcomings of her prose, which she attributes to gender inequity in education: "many of our sex may have as much wit, and be capable of learning as well as men; but since they want instructions, it is not possible they should attain to it: for learning is artificial, but wit is natural" (11). Cavendish's ideas were not particularly marginal,14 but her body still functioned to alienate her from the "learned body" and revealed the limitations of their purported commitment to diversity of perspective. This is not to suggest that Cavendish's fiction manages, or even attempts, to make visible all of the implications of individual subjectivity in

14 For an analysis that corrects earlier characterizations of Cavendish as an anti-experimentalist whose views on natural philosophy were fundamentally at odds with the Society's, see Emma Wilkins, "Margaret Cavendish and the Royal Society."

knowledge production, nor to suggest that it advocates for democratization or equity: it is fundamentally a conservative vision centered on patriarchal and absolutist ideals. However, both Cavendish's *Observations* and her playfully satirical fiction offer a stranger's perspective that helps to complete the picture precisely because her analysis, as Eve Keller points out, is "spoken from outside the discursive and institutional forums it explores" ("Producing Petty Gods" 450). Cavendish enacts in *The Blazing World* the same unpacking and disrupting of the Utopian mythology that Haraway's "god trick" and "view from nowhere" critiques will perform; the intransigence of bodies serves to reveal much of what Bacon's tale obscures about how knowledge production really operates: it is messy, partial, politically fraught, and unable to maintain stable boundaries. Where Bacon's fiction attempts to erase subjectivity and obscure the centrality of the body, Cavendish answers this with a focus on the impossibility of disembodied knowledge: she shows how reporting and inventing are inextricable, and that a story can never really be told from the outside by someone who is themselves inside that story, as humans are inside of nature. Precisely because of her familiarity with exclusion,Cavendish offers a portrait of knowledge production that is more honest about the forms of erasure that keep outsiders out, and about the messiness—connections, shortcuts, partiality—of what goes on inside. Her layering of worlds and narrators performs a metafictional exploration of the permeable boundary between imagination and reason that also rehearses her critique of the selectively permeable boundary that purports to uncouple "science" from philosophy. As the outsider, she provides a missing vantage point that makes visible the relationship between outsiders and insiders and highlights the ways in which the Baconian vision relies on erasure and exclusion.

This essay has sought to show how anxieties about the provenance of knowledge, and especially the embodied nature of its synthesis and reproduction, pervade the Royal Society's overtly political autobiography. These same anxieties surface in Bacon's and Cavendish's fictions, both of which narrate models of ideal knowledge production in strikingly political terms, with an otherwise unsupportable obsession with political border crossing and defense. Both stories enact and reflect these connections and offer insight into the construction of what institutions have since naturalized as a disciplinary border constituted by method rather than identity and the body. The extent to which border crossings and political negotiations drive each story underscores how questions of who belongs on which side of a boundary, who controls that boundary, and by virtue of which embodied qualities, have always been central to establishing scientific authority.This kind of self-erasing witnessing, and the implied transparency of certain bodies, were crucial to the way that the burgeoning scientific community atitsinception established the boundaries that continue to define scientific inquiry and regulate what counts as objective truth to this day. The limiting conditions of "objectivity" (and by extension, one's fitness to practice scientific citizenship) remain tied to the body and its relationship to inherently political

boundaries. In elevating what they called a "masculine" method, the Royal Society attempted to naturalize a rationale by which wealthy English men make uniquely competent scientific citizens, their unmarked identities permitting the "universal modesty" that makes some private bodies transparent.

Sprat was correct when he posited "an agreement, between the growth of learning, and of civil government": making knowledge, whether citizen science or scientific citizenship, runs into the same body-centered boundary policing as voting, jury service, and other citizenry functions (29). Enlightenment political ideals and the experimental program of the new sciences both relied on discursive erasure of how regimes produce citizens primarily by excluding based on the body. Calls to democratize knowledge, diversify access, or attend to issues of identity and subject position and the political conditions under which knowledge is produced sometimes draw accusations of "politicizing science"—as if a self-selecting community claiming to report objectively from No-Place were not already inherently political. Knowledge production and political power have always been intertwined, and both derive their authority through narrative-making. The scientific community will need to recognize and confront those connections as we struggle with a multitude of challenges that require their participation and leadership, as many of the threats currently facing the global community constitute a test not only of our sciences but also of our willingness to reimagine our relationship to boundaries.15

#### **Works Cited**

15 See Amina Touzos's chapter, "'You're My People Now': *The Last of Us* Series on the Quesvideo game studies is engaging with one such threat to humanity and the complications it presents for citizenship and belonging. tion of Human Belonging and Citizenship during the Age of Pandemics," for a look at how

Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, 1624?-1674. *Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy* (1666). Edited by Eileen O'Neill, Cambridge UP, 2001.

Shapiro, Barbara J. *A Culture of Fact: England 1550–1720*. Cornell UP, 2000.

### **"You're My People Now"**

*The Last of Us* Series on the Question of Human Belonging and Citizenship during the Age of Pandemics

*Amina Antonia Touzos*

#### **Introduction**

Typically, when we think of video games, we might associate them with popularized discourses about aggression levels in players or the fear of an increasingly isolated society glued to their screens. However, as the academic field of video game studies has established over the last decade, video games are not only a cultural, even economic, capital but also narratives which deserve to be explored and experienced (Bourgonjon and Soetaert 2013; Domsch 2013). Video games' role in society extends further than their mere entertainment stereotype, as they could also be dubbed a communal culture—as demonstrated by MMORPGs (massively multi-player online role-playing games) or other forms of online play. The communities which are formed here often reach beyond the online spaces from which they originate (Mäyrä 172), while the narratives presented by the games could also be interpreted as communal narratives themselves. Video games, as both a genre and a lifestyle, seem to achieve this notion of communal belonging in two ways: on the one hand, the "shared playful activities experienced … promote the formation of close and long-standing friendship bonds between a player and the other members of their online community that are not traditionally found in other mediated channels" (Kowert 96),1 on the other hand, at the core of most narrative-based games lies a conflict of belonging which the players experience through their characters' continuous struggles to achieve a state of security and stability.2 One could argue that

1 However, it should be noted that online-offline spaces originated from online multiplayer games are sometimes also toxic environments (Hilvert-Bruce and Neill 2020).