Virtual Library

Europe's imperial projects were often predicated on a series of legal and scientific distinctions that were frequently challenged by the reality of social and sexual interactions between the colonized and the colonizers. When Emmanuelle Saada discovered a 1928 decree defining the status of persons of mixed parentage born in French Indochina - the metis - she found not only a remarkable artifact of colonial rule, but a legal bombshell that introduced race into French law for the first time. The decree was the culmination of a decades-long effort to resolve the metis question: the educational, social, and civil issues surrounding the mixed population. Operating at the intersection of history, anthropology, and law, Empire's Children reveals the unacknowledged but central role of race in the definition of French nationality. Through extensive archival work in both France and Vietnam, and a close reading of primary and secondary material from the Pacific islands and sub-Saharan and North Africa, Saada has created in Empire's Children an original and compelling perspective on colonialism, law, race, and culture from the end of the nineteenth century until decolonization.

During the twentieth century, 80 percent of all famine victims worldwide died in China and the Soviet Union. In this rigorous and thoughtful study, Felix Wemheuer analyzes the historical and political roots of these socialist-era famines, in which overambitious industrial programs endorsed by Stalin and Mao Zedong created greater disasters than those suffered under prerevolutionary regimes.

Focusing on famine as a political tool, Wemheuer systematically exposes how conflicts about food among peasants, urban populations, and the socialist state resulted in the starvation death of millions. A major contribution to Chinese and Soviet history, this provocative analysis examines the long-term effects of the great famines on the relationship between the state and its citizens and argues that the lessons governments learned from the catastrophes enabled them to overcome famine in their later decades of rule.

Poverty amidst affluence, chronic unemployment, political apathy a cynicism, crime and corruption, sexism, racism, and a moral climate widespread hedonism-these are evils familiar to all of us. The abo is the first sentence in my recent book, Toward a Just Social Order. that book I use theoretical ideas from sociology and ethical philosop to locate and defend those institutional arrangements appropriate t just social order. My book is an exploration in social theory. More spcifically, it is a work in normative sociology. 2 What distinguishes this sort of social theory from the kind familiar most social scientists is where I begin, what I see as the aims of soc theorizing, and what I consider to be most relevant for the justification of social, political, and economic arrangements. I begin with the asumption that actual human needs-as experienced by people every where-ought to be an inescapable component in social theory. Th aim in normative theorizing, as I see it, is not only to explain the extence of various institutional regularities but also to specify the sorts o social, political, and economic arrangements required for meetin people's basic needs. It follows, then, that the justificatory test for a such arrangements is how well they meet the basic needs of moral equal human beings

Genealogies of Citizenship is a remarkable rethinking of human rights and social justice. As global governance is increasingly driven by market fundamentalism, growing numbers of citizens have become socially excluded and internally stateless. Against this movement to organize society exclusively by market principles, Margaret Somers argues that socially inclusive democratic rights must be counter-balanced by the powers of a social state, a robust public sphere and a relationally-sturdy civil society. Through epistemologies of history and naturalism, contested narratives of social capital, and Hurricane Katrina's racial apartheid, she warns that the growing authority of the market is distorting the non-contractualism of citizenship; rights, inclusion and moral worth are increasingly dependent on contractual market value. In this pathbreaking work, Somers advances an innovative view of rights as public goods rooted in an alliance of public power, political membership, and social practices of equal moral recognition - the right to have rights.

Over the past several decades, citizenship status has become more important in immigrant lives and communities in the United States. Undocumented adults who arrived as children, the 1.5 generation, comprise a growing percentage of the immigrant population. Although they are similar to children of immigrants born in the United States (the second generation) they face a variety of barriers to integration due to their lack of legal status. Based on over five years of ethnographic fieldwork with mainly 1.5 and second generation Mexican-American men during a period of major healthcare reform, this paper addresses how citizenship status and embeddedness within multi-status communities impacts immigrant experiences in the healthcare domain. In particular, I argue that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has contributed to an institutionalization of the status differences and a further differentiation in the social integration of these groups of children of immigrants. The novel methodological approach and the data which emerges through fieldwork reveals important insights into the process whereby healthcare reforms have consequences for immigrant communities which I show through highlighting the status-signaling event that is generated through various forms of direct and indirect interaction with the ACA. The implications of this extend beyond healthcare, and I discuss its impact on issues including ethnic identity and psychological well-being. This paper makes contributions to both our understanding of intergroup dynamics in immigrant integration and the health implications of immigration policies more generally.

Nazism triumphed in Germany during the high era of Jim Crow laws in the United States. Did the American regime of racial oppression in any way inspire the Nazis? The unsettling answer is yes. In Hitler's American Model, James Whitman presents a detailed investigation of the American impact on the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi regime. Both American citizenship and antimiscegenation laws proved directly relevant to the two principal Nuremberg Laws--the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law. Contrary to those who have insisted otherwise, Whitman demonstrates that the Nazis took a real, sustained, significant, and revealing interest in American race policies. He looks at the ultimate, ugly irony that when Nazis rejected American practices, it was sometimes not because they found them too enlightened but too harsh. Indelibly linking American race laws to the shaping of Nazi policies in Germany, Hitler's American Model upends the understanding of America's influence on racist practices in the wider world.

The racial and gendered politics of the 1996 welfare reform movement incorporated an anti-immigrant stance that fundamentally altered non-citizens' access to public benefits. This article focuses on community mobilization efforts to reframe the discourse of the “immigrant welfare problem” in order to restore benefits in the aftermath of the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. Drawing from two years of participatory research in community organizations, I found immigrant rights groups engaged in a variety of counter-rhetorical strategies. These strategies invoked a rhetoric of moral reasoning in order to promote the en-titlement of non-citizens to remain eligible for public benefits. Utilizing social movement framing perspectives, I examine the claims-making strategies that appeal to common beliefs about aging, frailty, disability, and the obligation of the United States to its veterans. However, collective action frames comprised moral constructions of human rights for only specific immigrant groups that lost specific benefits. I consider the broader implications of such findings for immigrant and welfare rights movements. This case illustrates the significance of, and the dilemmas confronting, counter-framing strategies within community mobilization efforts.

This book traces the origins of the illegal alien in American law and society, explaining why and how illegal migration became the central problem in U.S. immigration policy--a process that profoundly shaped ideas and practices about citizenship, race, and state authority in the twentieth century. Mae Ngai offers a close reading of the legal regime of restriction that commenced in the 1920s--its statutory architecture, judicial genealogies, administrative enforcement, differential treatment of European and non-European migrants, and long-term effects. She shows that immigration restriction, particularly national-origin and numerical quotas, remapped America both by creating new categories of racial difference and by emphasizing as never before the nation's contiguous land borders and their patrol.

Adopting a long-term historical perspective, this article examines the growing complexity and the internal tensions of state protection in Western Europe and North America. Beginning with Charles Tilly's theory about state building and organized crime, the discussion follows with a critical analysis of T. H. Marshall's article on citizenship. Arguing that state protection has become far more multifaceted than what Marshall's triadic model suggests, the article shows how this protection frequently transcends the logic of individual rights while increasing the reliance of citizens on the modern state. The last section formulates a critique of the idea formulated by theorists like Manuel Castells that globalization favors a rapid decline of state power. Yet, state protection may not necessarily grow indefinitely, and tax cuts, for example, the ones recently enacted in the United States, could seriously jeopardize a state's capacity to raise revenues and effectively fight older and newer forms of insecurity.

This article examines the effects of an uncertain legal status on the lives of immigrants, situating their experiences within frameworks of citizenship/belonging and segmented assimilation, and using Victor Turner's concept of liminality and Susan Coutin's "legal nonexistence." It questions black-and-white conceptualizations of documented and undocumented immigration by exposing the gray area of "liminal legality" and examines how this in-between status affects the individual's social networks and family, the place of the church in immigrants' lives, and the broader domain of artistic expression. Empirically, it draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among Salvadoran and Guatemalan immigrants in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Phoenix from 1989 to 2001. The article lends support to arguments about the continued centrality of the nation-state in the lives of immigrants.