Americans Without Law: The Racial Boundaries of Citizenship

Preface

Preface This book contributes to the literature on American conceptions of race and citizenship from the perspective of the cultural history of law. My aim is to depict a specific language through which the racial character of civic belonging in the United States was understood from the late-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, a way of speaking and thinking that I call “juridical racialism.” In sketching the contours of this civic language, I seek to highlight not only its role in the transformation of what historian David A. Hollinger has called “the circle of we,” but also its place within changing elite views of the relation between the individual self and the expanding apparatus of the liberal state. In addition, I wish to offer a window onto how the rise of the concept of culture associated with anthropologist Franz Boas entered U.S. constitutional law and influenced American conceptions of national identity. Americans without Law addresses students and scholars in American studies, political science, history, law, and related fields in the humanities and social sciences. Although it appears after the publication of my book Black Trials: Citizenship from the Beginnings of Slavery to the End of Caste (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), it is, in fact, my first book-length study. Readers of both works may discern the affinity between juridical racialism and my treatment of the concept of a “people of law” in Black Trials , and indeed the research undertaken for this first book lay the conceptual foundations for the second. At the same time, this study takes a more expansive and theoretically generalizable approach to issues of citizenship by placing the history of juridical racialism in a comparative racial frame, as well as by exploring issues of subjectivity, state formation, and modernization. I wish to thank the Social Science History Association for awarding the manuscript of Americans without Law the President’s Book Award of 2000, an honor I will always treasure. I also wish to thank Dean Stuart ix L. Deutsch of Rutgers School of Law-Newark, who provided the assistance of the Dean’s Research Fund so that I might prepare the manuscript for publication; my colleagues at Rutgers, particularly my fellow legal historian Gregory Mark; a group of exceptional senior scholars in American studies, legal history, and law and society who supported this project through their intellectual and personal generosity, especially JeanChristophe Agnew, Rogers M. Smith, William E. Nelson, Robert W. Gordon , William E. Forbath, John Brigham, and Christine B. Harrington; the librarians and library staff of Yale University, the Houghton Library at Harvard University, the Library of Congress, the New York Zoological Society, and the National Archives; my friends Mitchell A. Orenstein, Thomas Hilbink, and Mark Atwood Lawrence, who gave early encouragement to my work; and Adam Goldman and Monica Moore for heroic editorial assistance at the final hour. This book is dedicated to my wife, Stephanie Kuduk Weiner, for all her love. x | Preface ...