Sanctuary: African Americans and Empire by Nicole A. Waligora-Davis (review)

Nicole A. Waligora-Davis’s important book does for African American studies something akin to what Patrick Wolfe’s work has done for settler colonial studies: it gets us to think anew about how antiblack racism can be thought of as a structuring principle of U. S. history rather than an event within it. Sanctuary unfolds thematically, “in place of chronology,” around the recurring figure of the refugee, a figure that draws together histories of African American desubjectivation. Along the way, Waligora-Davis offers an insightful exploration of the ways that black alienation has given rise to petitions for sanctuary, which offer a critical lens on a liberal state that has held African Americans in the nation’s vestibule and at a remove from national belonging.

Sanctuary sets out with a discussion of Rosa Lee Ingram, a sharecropper arrested along with five of her sons in Georgia in 1947 after their armed white neighbor, John Ethron Stratford, was killed during an altercation ostensibly concerning wandering livestock. Several other scholars have looked at this chapter in the history of racial injustice, the Ingram family’s languishment in prison throughout the 1950s, and the Civil Rights Congress and the NAACP’s role in the Ingram family’s defense. But Waligora-Davis casts the case in a new light by arguing that the court’s inattention to Mrs. Ingram’s testimony made refugees of citizens who the liberal state is supposedly bound legally to protect. The Ingram family, then, was subject to the violence of their fateful encounter with John Stratford, as well as with the court convened to deliberate on it. This case exemplifies the familiar, “almost banal” violence deployed against African American individuals and communities, as well as the pleas for safety and the radical alternatives that have accompanied such episodes. With the Ingram case, Waligora-Davis introduces the themes that animate the remainder of her discussion.

The book then turns to consider W. E. B. Du Bois’s thinking on the relationship between segregation and colonialism, thus bringing into focus Sanctuary’s other preoccupation, “empire,” while connecting the domestic production of stateless refugees to transnational processes of racial subjugation. Waligora-Davis does not limit her analysis to a reading from one or two selections from Du Bois’s extensive œuvre, but instead draws insights from, for example, his writing on the significance of World Wars I and II, his interwar novel Dark Princess, and his reviews of early twentieth-century photography. This tour conveys a powerful sense of the variety and diversity of the kinds of appeals for sanctuary of which Waligora-Davis wants us to remain mindful as we join her larger exploration of the consequences of racial dehumanization in U. S. history.

In keeping with its approach to Du Bois throughout its five chapters and epilogue, Sanctuary offers a broadminded and erudite sampling of texts and events, each of which is thought-provoking, and all of which pile up to an impressive agglomeration of evidence for her overall claims. Through a reading of Herman Melville’s 1885 novella, Benito Cereno, we gain a deeper sense of the codification of the eradication of black rights under the order of racial slavery. Through a pairing of the U. S. occupation of Haiti that began in 1915 and Chicago’s Red Summer four years later, and representations thereof, we come to better understand how displacement and dispossession within the United States is of a piece with the ethos of overseas interventions. Through an analysis of Langston Hughes’s 1936 play Emperor of Haiti, we glimpse the ways in which demands for freedom and challenges to dominant caricatures have been perennial motifs in black letters. And through a consideration of race and rights in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, we are confronted once more with the perniciousness of the myth of “postracialism,” in which the relegations of African American humanity to something less than full citizenship are themselves relegated to events past.

The unfolding of Sanctuary’s arguments...