“You Are If I Say You Are”: Race, Citizenship, and Imperial Personhood

Abstract

One of Ancillary Justice’s remarkable achievements is the way that it illuminates the imperial nation-state’s central role in the production of race through the granting or withholding of citizenship as a legal category of personhood. On one hand, the novel offers a quasi-utopian vision of a setting where skin color doesn’t matter: all of the novel’s main characters are described as having “dark,” “brown,” or “almost black” skin, yet these descriptions are so subtle that many readers hardly notice them. Skin color, in other words, is largely inconsequential within the book’s imagined spaces.

Despite this, however, the Imperial Radch nonetheless depends upon processes of racialization that divide humanity into human citizens (who are regarded as persons with legal rights) and nonhuman non-citizens (who are denied legal personhood despite belonging to the same species as other citizens). Leckie’s portrayal of imperial racism, then, decouples race from skin pigmentation (just as she decouples gender from biological sex) in order to suggest that race is something that is produced—often at gunpoint—in order to create and sustain hierarchies of privilege within imperial regimes.