Abstract
Since the 1990s, Dominican theater artists have been countering homogeneous and territorially bounded visions of national identity by staging stories of transnational migration. The scenarios of Dominican transnationalism dramatized in their stories, and the creative practices of the artists themselves, are situated in social fields that straddle nation-states, making evident how in the age of globalization increasing numbers of people belong at varying degrees to more than one society. Distinct from the one-way migration narrative of assimilation characteristic of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, today’s circular counterstreams of transnational migration exert pressure on both the sending and the receiving societies to extend frameworks of membership and to expand human rights. While the autonomy of the nation-state has been eroded by globalization, it continues to be the institution that guarantees rights of citizenship and the political framework in which immigrants form different senses of belonging such as rooted ethnic minority enclaves, transitory transnational circuits, and free-floating cosmopolitanisms. The stakes for developing new approaches to citizenship are high, for democracy cannot be maintained, let alone strengthened, in nations that have large populations of residents without citizenship. Any solution, suggest social scientists Stephen Castles and Alastair Davidson, “must lie in a mode of citizenship that reconciles the pressures of globalization with the reality that states will continue, for the foreseeable future, to exist as the most important political unit. One aim must be to dissolve the nation part of the nation-state and to replace it with a democratic state based on open and flexible belonging.