Legal Borderlands

by Dudziak, Mary L.; Volpp, Leti

• ISBN13: 9780801884146
• ISBN10: 0801884144
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-03-15
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr

Summary

This collection focuses broadly on the role of law in the construction of U.S. borders and takes up an important question raised by the global turn in American studies scholarship: once territory becomes less critical to scholarship in the discipline, what constitutes the frame of American studies? For this project, a "border" is not simply a territorial boundary. Borders are created through formal legal controls on entry and exit, through the construction of rights of citizenship and noncitizenship, and through the regulation of American power in other parts of the world. Where legal rights are at issue, borders and territory continue to play a powerful role, especially as certain spaces, such as Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are marked by the U.S. government as outside legal restraints on government power. Yet the law also extends the United States beyond its literal borders, through, for example, efforts to export democracy to the Middle East. This is the first collection to map the intersection of law and American studies, and it captures the excitement of interdisciplinary work at this intersection.

Author Biography

Mary L. Dudziak is the Judge Edward J. and Ruey L. Guiardo Professor of Law and History at the University of Southern California Law School and affiliated faculty in the Program in American Studies and Ethnicity. Leti Volpp is a Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley.

Table of Contents

Preface	vii
Marita Sturken
Introduction	1	(18)
Mary L Dudziak
Leti Volpp
Law's Borders
At the Boundaries of Law: Executive Clemency, Sovereign Prerogative, and the Dilemma of American Legality	19	(22)
Austin Sarat
Borders of Identity
Racial Naturalization	41	(26)
Devon W. Carbado
Notes toward a Queer History of Naturalization	67	(18)
Siobhan B. Somerville
Outlawing ``Coolies'': Race, Nation, and Empire in the Age of Emancipation	85	(26)
Moon-Ho Jung
Between ``Oriental Depravity'' and ``Natural Degenerates'': Spatial Borderlands and the Making of Ordinary Americans	111	(24)
Nayan Shah
Toward a History of Statelessness in America	135	(24)
Linda K. Kerber
In the Shadow of Nafta: Ytu mama tambien Revisits the National Allegory of Mexican Sovereignty	159	(28)
Maria Josefina Saldana-Portillo
Borders of Territory
The Edges of Empire and the Limits of Sovereignty: American Guano Islands	187	(26)
Christina Duffy Burnett
Romantic Sovereignty: Popular Romances and the American Imperial State in the Philippines	213	(26)
Andrew Hebard
Where Is Guantanamo?	239	(28)
Amy Kaplan
Borders of Power
Canton Is Not Boston: The Invention of American Imperial Sovereignty	267	(26)
Teemu Ruskola
Liberation under Siege: U.S. Military Occupation and Japanese Women's Enfranchisement	293	(26)
Lisa Yoneyam
Between Camps: Eastern Bloc ``Escapees'' and Cold War Borderlands	319	(32)
Susan L Carruthers
The Biopolitics of Security: Oil, Empire, and the Sports Utility Vehicle	351	(30)
David Campbell
``Setting the Conditions'' for Abu Ghraib: The Prison Nation Abroad	381	(26)
Michelle Brown
Contributors	407	(6)
Index	413