“Who Sings the Nation-State?” is a collaborative work consisting of a dialogue between Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, two of the most influential critical theorists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Published in 2007, the book emerged from a public conversation between the two scholars held at a conference, and it takes the form of an extended exchange on questions of sovereignty, citizenship, statelessness, and the politics of belonging in an era of globalization and heightened border enforcement.
The work is relatively brief compared to the major monographs of either author, but it is dense with theoretical insight and political urgency. The dialogue format allows Butler and Spivak to develop their arguments in conversation with one another, sometimes converging and sometimes diverging, as they grapple with fundamental questions about who has the right to have rights, how the nation-state produces and polices its boundaries, and what forms of political community might be imagined beyond or against the sovereign state.
The Central Questions and Framework
The title itself poses a provocative question: who has the authority or the standing to speak for, to represent, or to “sing” the nation-state? This question immediately opens onto a series of related concerns. If the nation-state claims to represent a unified people, who is included in that “we” and who is excluded? What happens to those who fall outside the boundaries of national belonging—refugees, stateless persons, undocumented migrants, those whose claims to citizenship are precarious or contested? And what forms of political voice or agency are available to those who cannot claim the protection of state sovereignty?
Butler and Spivak approach these questions from different but complementary theoretical traditions. Butler brings her background in continental philosophy, particularly her engagement with Foucault, Arendt, and psychoanalytic theory, as well as her ongoing work on precarity, vulnerability, and the politics of recognition. Spivak draws on her training in comparative literature, her foundational work in postcolonial theory and deconstruction, and her sustained attention to the figure of the subaltern—those who are systematically excluded from representation and whose voices are structurally unheard within dominant political and epistemic frameworks.
The conversation unfolds against the backdrop of specific historical and political crises. The post-9/11 security state, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the intensification of border controls and immigration enforcement, the proliferation of detention centers and camps for asylum seekers—all of these contemporary realities inform the urgency of Butler and Spivak’s exchange. They are writing at a moment when the question of who belongs, who is protected, and who is rendered disposable has become starkly visible in new ways.
Butler’s Contribution: Precarity, Statelessness, and the Right to Have Rights
Butler’s portions of the dialogue develop themes that run throughout her work of this period, particularly her thinking about precarity and vulnerability as fundamental conditions of human life that are nevertheless distributed unequally through political and economic arrangements. She is concerned with how the nation-state produces and manages populations, determining which lives are grievable and which are not, which subjects are recognized as fully human and which are cast outside the bounds of political community.
A key reference point for Butler is Hannah Arendt’s analysis of statelessness and her famous formulation of “the right to have rights.” Arendt, writing in the aftermath of World War II and the displacement of millions of refugees, argued that citizenship in a nation-state had become the precondition for having any rights at all. Those who lost their citizenship—or who never had it—found themselves in a condition of rightlessness, unprotected by any legal or political framework. For Arendt, this revealed a fundamental paradox: human rights were supposed to be universal, belonging to all humans simply by virtue of their humanity, but in practice they could only be claimed and enforced through membership in a particular state.
Butler takes up this Arendtian problematic but pushes it in new directions. She asks what forms of political claim-making are available to those who exist outside the framework of state citizenship. Can the stateless make claims? Can they constitute themselves as political subjects? And if so, on what basis? Butler is interested in moments when those who are excluded from the political community nonetheless assert themselves politically—when undocumented migrants march in the streets demanding rights, when refugees refuse the terms of their confinement, when stateless persons insist on their humanity and their standing to make claims.
These acts, Butler suggests, reveal something important about the nature of political subjectivity and political community. They show that the capacity to make political claims does not depend on prior recognition by the state. Rather, political subjectivity can be performatively constituted through the very act of making claims, even—or especially—by those who are not recognized as legitimate political actors. This is a form of politics that exceeds and challenges the framework of state sovereignty.
Butler also explores the violence inherent in the production and maintenance of state boundaries. The nation-state does not simply exist as a neutral container for political community; it actively produces the categories of citizen and non-citizen, legal and illegal, included and excluded. This production is always violent, always involves the drawing of lines that determine who will be protected and who will be exposed to harm. The contemporary intensification of border enforcement, the proliferation of detention centers, the increasing criminalization of migration—all of these represent the violence of the state’s boundary-making made visible.
At the same time, Butler is attentive to the ways that appeals to state protection can be necessary and important, even as we recognize the limitations and violence of the state form. Those who are most vulnerable often need the protection that citizenship and legal status can provide. The challenge is to think about how to secure protection and rights for vulnerable populations without simply reinforcing the sovereign power of the state to determine who belongs and who does not.
Spivak’s Contribution: The Subaltern, Planetarity, and the Limits of Representation
Spivak’s contributions to the dialogue bring a different set of concerns and a different theoretical vocabulary. Her thinking is shaped by her long engagement with postcolonial theory and her attention to the global South, to the legacies of colonialism, and to the ways that contemporary forms of globalization reproduce colonial patterns of exploitation and exclusion.
A central concept for Spivak is the figure of the subaltern, which she has theorized throughout her career. The subaltern, in Spivak’s usage, refers not simply to the oppressed or the marginalized, but specifically to those who are systematically excluded from representation—those whose voices cannot be heard within dominant frameworks of knowledge and politics. The subaltern is not just someone who is not speaking, but someone whose speech cannot register as speech, whose claims cannot be recognized as claims.
In the context of this dialogue, Spivak is concerned with how the nation-state produces its own subalterns—those who fall outside its frameworks of recognition and representation. But she is also attentive to the ways that even critical or progressive politics can fail to hear or recognize the claims of the most marginalized. The challenge is not simply to give voice to the voiceless, as if the problem were merely one of access to platforms or channels of communication. Rather, the problem is more fundamental: it concerns the very structures of intelligibility that determine what counts as a political claim, what counts as a grievance, what counts as a subject worthy of recognition.
Spivak introduces the concept of “planetarity” as an alternative to globalization. While globalization, in her analysis, represents the extension of capital and the homogenization of culture under the sign of the market, planetarity gestures toward a different way of imagining our collective existence on Earth. Planetarity is not about sameness or unity, but about recognizing our radical diversity and our shared inhabitation of a finite planet. It involves a kind of ethical relation to alterity—to otherness—that does not seek to assimilate or comprehend the other within existing frameworks.
This concept of planetarity offers a way of thinking beyond the nation-state without simply reproducing the logic of globalization. It suggests a form of political and ethical imagination that is not organized around sovereignty, borders, and the policing of belonging, but around a more fundamental recognition of our interconnection and our shared vulnerability.
Spivak is also concerned with the question of education and the formation of political subjects. She argues that critical thinking and the capacity for ethical imagination must be cultivated through education, and that this cultivation is particularly important in the global South, where the legacies of colonialism continue to shape educational institutions and practices. The question of who can speak, who can be heard, and who can make political claims is not just a matter of formal rights or institutional access, but of the formation of subjects who are capable of certain kinds of thought and certain kinds of relation to others.
Points of Convergence and Divergence
Throughout the dialogue, Butler and Spivak find significant common ground, but they also mark important differences in emphasis and approach. Both are concerned with the violence of the nation-state and with the situation of those who are excluded from its protections. Both are interested in forms of political claim-making that exceed or challenge state sovereignty. Both are attentive to the ways that contemporary global capitalism produces new forms of precarity and vulnerability.
However, their theoretical orientations and political emphases differ in important ways. Butler’s analysis tends to focus on the performative constitution of political subjectivity, on the ways that subjects can constitute themselves as political actors through their very acts of claim-making. She is interested in moments of political agency and resistance, in the ways that even the most vulnerable can assert themselves politically.
Spivak, by contrast, is more cautious about claims of agency and voice. Her concept of the subaltern emphasizes the structural limits to representation and the ways that even well-intentioned efforts to speak for or give voice to the marginalized can reproduce patterns of domination. She is more attentive to the ways that the most vulnerable may not be able to constitute themselves as political subjects in the ways that Butler describes, and to the ethical and political challenges this poses.
These differences reflect deeper philosophical commitments. Butler’s work is rooted in a phenomenological and performative tradition that emphasizes embodiment, action, and the constitution of meaning through practice. Spivak’s work is rooted in deconstruction and a more skeptical approach to questions of presence, voice, and agency. Where Butler sees the possibility of political transformation through performative acts, Spivak sees the need for a more patient and difficult work of attending to what cannot be heard or represented within existing frameworks.
The Question of Singing
The metaphor of singing that appears in the title runs through the dialogue in various ways. To sing the nation-state is to give voice to it, to represent it, to speak in its name. But who has the authority to do this? The official answer would be: the sovereign, the government, the legitimate representatives of the people. But Butler and Spivak are interested in how this authority is contested and challenged.
When undocumented migrants sing the national anthem at protests, when they wave the flag and claim belonging, they are performing a kind of singing of the nation-state that challenges the state’s own determination of who belongs. They are asserting a claim to membership that the state does not recognize. This is a performative act that both invokes and challenges the nation-state’s authority.
But there is also the question of those who cannot sing, who are excluded not just from citizenship but from the very possibility of making their claims heard. The subaltern, in Spivak’s sense, is precisely the one whose singing cannot register as singing, whose voice cannot be heard as voice. The challenge, then, is not just to expand the circle of those who are recognized as legitimate singers of the nation-state, but to question the very framework that determines what counts as legitimate political voice.
The metaphor of singing also evokes questions of harmony and dissonance, of collective voice and individual expression. The nation-state imagines itself as a unified chorus, singing in harmony. But the reality is always more cacophonous, more dissonant. There are always voices that do not fit, that disrupt the harmony, that challenge the terms of collective belonging. Butler and Spivak are interested in these dissonant voices and in what they reveal about the violence and exclusions that underlie the nation-state’s claim to represent a unified people.
Contemporary Relevance and Political Stakes
The dialogue between Butler and Spivak takes place in a specific historical moment, but the questions they raise have only become more urgent in the years since the book’s publication. The global refugee crisis, the rise of nationalist and anti-immigrant politics in many countries, the increasing militarization of borders, the proliferation of detention centers and camps—all of these developments underscore the continued relevance of their analysis.
The question of who belongs, who is protected, and who is rendered disposable remains central to contemporary politics. The COVID-19 pandemic made visible new dimensions of this question, as states closed borders, as migrant workers were left without protection, as the unequally distributed vulnerability that Butler and Spivak analyze became starkly apparent.
At the same time, we have seen new forms of political mobilization by migrants, refugees, and other marginalized groups. The movements that Butler and Spivak discuss—undocumented migrants marching in the streets, refugees refusing the terms of their confinement—have continued and expanded. These movements raise precisely the questions that Butler and Spivak explore: what forms of political claim-making are available to those who are excluded from formal citizenship? How can those who are not recognized as legitimate political subjects nonetheless constitute themselves as political actors?
The dialogue also speaks to ongoing debates about the future of the nation-state and about alternative forms of political community. In an era of globalization, climate change, and transnational migration, the nation-state increasingly appears inadequate to address the challenges we face. Yet the nation-state remains the dominant form of political organization, and efforts to imagine alternatives often founder on practical and conceptual difficulties. Butler and Spivak’s exchange offers resources for thinking about these questions, even as it acknowledges the difficulties and contradictions involved.
Theoretical Context and Significance
“Who Sings the Nation-State?” represents an important moment in the development of both Butler’s and Spivak’s thought. For Butler, it is part of a broader body of work from this period focused on precarity, vulnerability, and the politics of grievability. This work includes her books “Precarious Life” and “Frames of War,” which develop many of the themes that appear in this dialogue.
For Spivak, the dialogue continues her long-standing engagement with questions of subalternity, representation, and the politics of voice. It also reflects her increasing attention to questions of planetarity and to the need for new forms of political and ethical imagination in the face of global capitalism and climate change.
The dialogue format itself is significant. Rather than presenting finished arguments in monograph form, Butler and Spivak engage in a more open-ended exchange that allows for disagreement, for the development of ideas in conversation, for the acknowledgment of uncertainty and difficulty. This format enacts a kind of intellectual practice that is itself political—a practice of thinking together, of listening to difference, of working through difficult questions without rushing to resolution.
The book also represents an important contribution to debates about cosmopolitanism, sovereignty, and global justice. Against liberal cosmopolitan approaches that imagine a world of universal rights and global citizenship, Butler and Spivak offer a more critical and nuanced analysis. They are attentive to the ways that appeals to universality can mask particular interests and to the ways that global frameworks can reproduce colonial patterns of domination. At the same time, they resist a simple retreat to nationalism or particularism. The challenge is to imagine forms of political community and solidarity that are neither falsely universal nor narrowly exclusionary.
The dialogue has been influential in several fields, including political theory, postcolonial studies, migration studies, and critical theory more broadly. It has shaped debates about citizenship, sovereignty, and belonging, and it has provided conceptual resources for activists and scholars working on issues of migration, refugees, and statelessness.
In the years since its publication, the questions that Butler and Spivak raise have only become more pressing. As the nation-state continues to assert its sovereign power to determine who belongs and who does not, as borders become more militarized and migration more criminalized, as new populations are rendered stateless and rightless, the need for critical analysis of the kind that Butler and Spivak provide becomes ever more urgent. Their dialogue offers not answers or solutions, but a way of thinking about these questions that refuses easy resolutions and that remains attentive to the voices and claims of those who are most marginalized and most vulnerable.
