?You Will See My Family Became So American? - Columbia Law ...
?You Will See My Family Became So American? - Columbia Law ...
?You Will See My Family Became So American? - Columbia Law ...
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“<strong>You</strong> <strong>Will</strong> <strong>See</strong> <strong>My</strong> <strong>Family</strong> <strong>Became</strong> <strong>So</strong> <strong>American</strong>”<br />
Indian Immigration, Racial Visibility, and Specular Citizenship<br />
Sherally Munshi *<br />
Abstract. This paper explores the vexed relationship between legal form and personhood<br />
that arises in the context of Indian immigration and naturalization in the early twentieth<br />
century. In 1932, Dinshah P. Ghadiali received notice that the government was seeking to<br />
cancel his citizenship on grounds of “racial ineligibility.” In his self-published writing<br />
about the trial, Ghadiali wondered whether he been singled out for persecution by professional<br />
rivals. In fact, he had been caught in a larger campaign to denaturalize citizens of<br />
Indian origin after the Supreme Court, in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), determined<br />
that “Hindus” were racially ineligible for citizenship. I offer a reading of Ghadiali’s<br />
trial to explore the tension between rhetorical colorblindness, as an emergent idiom for<br />
equality, and the perceptible “common sense” of racial difference. I focus my reading on<br />
the photographs Ghadiali submitted to the Court to explore the imbrications of bodies<br />
and discipline, essence and performance in the context of immigrant naturalization.<br />
* Sherally Munshi, JD, PhD Candidate, Department of English and Comparative Literature, <strong>Columbia</strong><br />
University. skm2117@columbia.edu I wish to thank Marianne Hirsch, Saidiya Hartman, Patricia <strong>Will</strong>iams,<br />
Julie Peters, Bruce Robbins, <strong>So</strong>nali Thakkar, Jennifer James, Autumn Womack, Hawa Allen, Feroze Munshi<br />
and Patricia Arnillas for their generous insights and contributions.<br />
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2 Munshi [5/11/2013<br />
INTRODUCTION<br />
On the morning of October 13, 1932, Dinshah P. Ghadiali was at home in New<br />
Jersey eating breakfast with his wife and five sons when a “dignified gentleman” entered<br />
the room and, announcing himself as an officer of the Bergen County Court,<br />
presented Ghadiali with a notice of complaint. 1 The federal government was seeking<br />
to cancel his citizenship on grounds that it had been “illegally procured.” 2 As the<br />
complaint alleged, “Dinshah P. Ghadiali by reason of his not being a free white person<br />
or a person of African nativity or descent is, and was, ineligible racially for naturalization.”<br />
The complaint further alleged that, unless Ghadiali surrendered his Naturalization<br />
Certificate, which he had obtained fourteen years earlier, he would be perpetrating<br />
a “fraud” against the United States. 3 Upon reading the complaint, Ghadiali reflected,<br />
<strong>So</strong> I was not a White man and not a Black man either. What then<br />
was I? ... I looked ruefully at my skin, that unfortunate covering<br />
which had brought me into Court once more. I rubbed it to see<br />
what was underneath, but do what I could, no color wave that I<br />
could recognize other than White shone forth. 4<br />
In this early passage in his self-published Naturalization Case (1944), Ghadiali offers us<br />
a familiar, if idiosyncratic, expression of the problem of racial identification confronted<br />
by the new immigrant to the United States in the early twentieth-century.<br />
How does the new immigrant represent himself in language and within realms of visibility<br />
constructed along color lines? Ghadiali continued,<br />
I had presumed all along that I was White, of White father, White mother,<br />
White family, White ancestry, White nationality, White race, White through<br />
and though—in fact, I was always a Mr. White and here comes [this Naturalization<br />
Officer] and swears that I was not White, although he never saw me or<br />
shook hands with me. 5<br />
The repetition of the claim, of course reveals its urgency. It also calls attention to the<br />
ways in which racial identity is constituted through language and performance,<br />
through iterative speech acts and embodied behavior. Ghadiali’s self-reflexive representation,<br />
also raises for us, as readers, a series of questions about what Joan Scott has<br />
described as the problem of reading and writing “the history of difference, the history,<br />
1 DINSHAH P. GHADIALI, NATURALIZATION CASE CLEARING CONTESTED CITIZENSHIP 1 (1943).<br />
2 Id. at 12.<br />
3 Id. at 3.<br />
4 Id. at 5.<br />
5 GHADIALI, supra, at 6.<br />
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that is, of the designation of the ‘other,’ of the attribution of characteristics that distinguish<br />
categories of people from some presumed norm.” 6 How can we read an account<br />
like Ghadiali’s without reproducing the terms of difference, without succumbing<br />
to the persuasions of sameness, without reproducing the self-evidence or “facticity”<br />
of racial identity? I want to suggest that Ghadiali’s histrionic insistence on being<br />
White, his rueful rubbing of the skin seem to call forth all of the ironies attending his<br />
awful predicament—one of identifying himself within an absurdist racial discourse<br />
masquerading under authority of science, law, and common sense—turning his predicament<br />
into a kind of parody, one that requires his readers and judges to produce an<br />
alternative scheme for addressing the question, “what then was I?”<br />
Ghadiali immigrated to the United States in 1911 with the hope of establishing<br />
himself as an important inventor. Instead, he earned notoriety as an irrepressible<br />
quack. He became a naturalized citizen in 1917, the same year that Congress passed a<br />
law banning further immigration from all of Asia. Ghadiali was arrested on several<br />
occasions for violating laws regulating the practice of medicine, but after marrying a<br />
white woman, in 1923, he became the target of increasingly racialized persecution. In<br />
1925, Ghadiali was arrested in Oregon, for violating the Mann Act, accused of “mesmerizing”<br />
women and inducing them into “white slavery.” He was sentenced to prison<br />
for five years. In 1932, when Ghadiali received notice of the government’s intent to<br />
cancel his citizenship, he assumed he was the victim of a conspiracy among professional<br />
rivals, or that he had been singled out for publicizing his wrongful conviction.<br />
In fact, he had been caught in a much broader campaign to denaturalize citizens of<br />
Indian origin, after the Supreme Court, in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923),<br />
had designated “Hindus” “racially ineligible for citizenship.”<br />
Ghadiali purchased a printing press early in his career to promote his inventions,<br />
but gradually repurposed the press to archiving the injuries and affronts that he suffered<br />
at the hands of so many police, newspapers, judges, and juries. Naturalization<br />
Case, like others of Ghadiali’s self-published volumes, re-presenting his legal trials, appears<br />
as a heterogeneous assemblage, an unresolved intercalation of official documents—trial<br />
transcripts, newspaper clippings, mug shots—and unofficial cries, quarrelsome<br />
correction, private narration. These unusual records of self-making are compelling<br />
not because they disclose some truth that lies outside of the law. Instead because<br />
they attest to the often unacknowledged ways in which law penetrates social being.<br />
Ghadiali’s insistence on being recognized as white and citizen attest to the imbrication<br />
of bodies and discipline, of essence and performance. 7<br />
6<br />
Joan W. Scott, Experience, in FEMINISTS AND THE POLITICAL 23, 23 (Judith Butler & Joan W. Scott,<br />
eds.) (parenthetical omitted).<br />
7<br />
I am indebted to Anne Cheng for this series of formulations.<br />
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Critical race scholarship of the last thirty years has yielded tremendous insights<br />
into the production and reproduction of social inequality in the United States. But<br />
the conception of “race” with which much critical race scholarship concerns itself is a<br />
primarily a formal legal construction. In the following section, I consider the relation<br />
between the formal legal construction of racial categories, within the context of immigration<br />
regulation in the early twentieth century, and the embodied experience of racial<br />
difference that often eludes racial representation, argumentation, and analysis, but<br />
nonetheless animates it.<br />
In Part 2, I trace the tension between discursive and embodied notions of racial<br />
difference through a critical engagement with “naturalization,” a curiously underexamined<br />
legal fabulation. How does something that is not already “natural” become<br />
natural? I consider the role that birthright citizenship, racialized restrictions to immigration<br />
and naturalization, and the regulation of sexual intimacy across racial boundaries<br />
have played not just in the formal construction of race but in the actual construction<br />
of the visual field, in producing whiteness as the natural embodiment of citizenship<br />
and <strong>American</strong> identity. Naturalization unsettles our understanding of citizenship<br />
and national identity because it renders apparent the conventionality of political processes<br />
usually ascribed to nature. The naturalization of racialized others also renders<br />
apparent the entho-cultural origins of <strong>American</strong> national identity which otherwise<br />
seem to disappear into the imagined universality of <strong>American</strong> social and cultural<br />
forms. I argue that naturalization—as the legal process through which immigrants acquire<br />
citizenship—itself might be regarded as part of a two-tiered citizenship regime<br />
within which, for those who appear to embody <strong>American</strong> citizenship, rights and privileges<br />
flow as naturally, as if a matter of natural law; for those who appear otherwise,<br />
the rights and privileges of citizenship assume the form of a contract—they are conditioned<br />
on what I call adequate performance.<br />
In Part 3, I offer an elaboration of the terms and conditions of what I describe as<br />
the naturalization by offering an extended reading of the photographs Ghadiali submitted<br />
to the court to show “how my family became so <strong>American</strong>.” In my reading of<br />
these photographs, I explore the pressure under which the racially-marked immigrant<br />
finds himself to reproduce social forms that become defining of <strong>American</strong> identity,<br />
including certain forms of domesticity, racial affiliation and aversion, militarized patriotism,<br />
economic self-reliance.<br />
PART 1: RHETORICAL BLINDNESS AND RACIAL VISIBILITY<br />
The Naturalization Act of 1790 restricted citizenship to “free white persons” and,<br />
after the Civil War, to “persons of African nativity or descent.” 8 The law posed few<br />
8 Naturalization Act, 1 Stat. 103 (Mar. 26 1790).<br />
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hurdles to naturalization until the turn of the twentieth century, when immigration<br />
rates accelerated to their historical peak, bringing to the United States an unprecedented<br />
diversity of peoples. <strong>American</strong> courts then found themselves under new pressure,<br />
from labor organizations and anti-immigrant groups, to administer a more restrictive<br />
interpretation of “white.”<br />
Ian Haney Lopez, in his widely influential study of immigrant racialization, White<br />
By <strong>Law</strong>: The Legal Construction of Race (1996), observed that, in the first decades of the<br />
twentieth century, courts applying the racial restriction to naturalization generally followed<br />
one of two lines of reasoning to determine racial identity. 9 The first appealed to<br />
“common knowledge,” or popular conceptions of race and racial classifications. The<br />
second, based on “scientific evidence,” relied on the expertise of ethnologists. In most<br />
cases, both common knowledge and scientific evidence yielded the same conclusion,<br />
but confusion arise in cases involving immigrants from India and Arabia: common<br />
knowledge dictated that they were “brown” or “yellow”—belonging to a race of people<br />
distinguishable from what most <strong>American</strong>s recognized as “white”—while race scientists<br />
maintained that they were Aryan or Caucasian, descendents of the same ancestors as<br />
European <strong>American</strong>s. The question eventually rose to the Supreme Court. 10<br />
In United States v. Thind (1923), the Supreme Court was asked to determine<br />
whether Bhagat Singh Thind, “a high-caste Hindu, of full Indian blood, born at Amritsar,<br />
Punjab, India, is a white person within the meaning of [the Naturalization<br />
Act].” 11 The previous year, the Supreme Court had determined that a Japanese immigrant,<br />
though whitish in complexion, was not “Caucasian” and thus ineligible for citizenship.<br />
12 Thind argued that, because most scientist considered Indians to be Caucasian,<br />
he was eligible for citizenship. The Court disagreed. Justice George Sutherland,<br />
writing for a unanimous Court, acknowledged that while, among scientists, the word<br />
“Caucasian” had come to designate a the wide diversity of people linked by remote<br />
ancestry or linguistic inheritance, “the average well-informed white <strong>American</strong>” would<br />
be surprised to find that “the race to which he belongs is made up of such heterogeneous<br />
elements.” 13 Reversing itself, then, the Court announced a new litmus for racial<br />
identity.<br />
What we now hold is that the worlds ‘free white persons’ are words of common<br />
speech, to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common<br />
man, synonymous with the word ‘Caucasian’ only as that word is popularly un-<br />
9 <strong>See</strong> IAN HANEY LOPEZ, WHITE BY LAW: THE LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF RACE 37 (1996); <strong>See</strong> also,<br />
Angela P. Harris, Equality Trouble: Sameness and Difference in Twentieth-Century Race <strong>Law</strong> 88 CAL. L. REV.<br />
1923 (2000).<br />
10 <strong>See</strong> LOPEZ, supra, at 47-55.<br />
11 U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204, 206 (1923); see also Ozawa v. United States, 260 U.S. 178<br />
(1922).<br />
12 <strong>See</strong> Ozawa, 260 U.S. 178 (1922).<br />
13 Id. at 211.<br />
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derstood. As so understood and used, whatever may be the speculations of the<br />
ethnologist, it does not include the body of people to whom [Thind] belongs. It is<br />
a matter of familiar observation and knowledge that the physical group characteristics<br />
of the Hindus render them readily distinguishable from the various groups<br />
of persons in this country commonly recognized as white.<br />
Justice Sutherland, himself a naturalized citizen, added, “it is a matter of familiar observation<br />
and knowledge that the physical group characteristics render them readily<br />
distinguishable from the various groups of persons in this country commonly recognized<br />
as white.” Hindus were visually inassimilable, and thus could not be naturalized.<br />
Notwithstanding the ruling in Thind, at his own trial, held in a federal district<br />
court in New Jersey in January of 1933, Ghadiali presented various forms of “scientific”<br />
evidence to assert that he belonged to the small religious community of Parsi<br />
Zoroastrians and was not Hindu. 14 He cited British “experts” who identified Parsis as<br />
descendants of the original “Aryans” who, since emigrating from Persia, preserved<br />
their racial purity. Parsis were distinguished from their “native” counterparts, not only<br />
in terms of their skin and stature, but by their own sense of racial superiority: Parsis<br />
kept to themselves and practiced strict endogamy. And they distinguished themselves<br />
with their enthusiastic Anglophilia. Ghadiali supplied the Court with an entry from<br />
the Encyclopedia Britannica, illustrating:<br />
The Parsis have shown themselves most desirous of receiving the benefits of an<br />
English education; and their eagerness to embrace the science and literature of<br />
the West has been conspicuous in the wide spread of female education… [their<br />
having] taken to the professions of law and medicine. 15<br />
That colonial administrators in India allowed Parsis into certain “white only” accommodations,<br />
Ghadiali also cited as evidence of kinship with white <strong>American</strong>s: “We ride<br />
in European railway cars in India. They are not put into Hindu cars. We are White<br />
Persons.” 16<br />
But since Thind provided that “common sense” was the preferable litmus for determining<br />
racial identity, Ghadiali found himself in the peculiar position of having to<br />
prove that he looked white. In one especially startling moment in his text, Ghadiali<br />
interrupts the usual transcription of trial argument to narrate an incident as an aside<br />
to the reader. “At this point,” he writes, “I laid bare my left leg and requested the<br />
14<br />
GHADIALI, supra at 36-44.<br />
15<br />
Id. at 45-49.<br />
16<br />
Id. at 47. Indeed, one of the stranger aspects of racial formation among Parsi Zoroastrians in India<br />
stems the status Zoroastrianism assumed within the nineteenth-century European imaginary, as the direct<br />
descendants of the mythic Aryan race.<br />
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Judge to look at it as well as to feel it and note the smooth texture of the skin.” 17 The<br />
judge did so, according to Ghadiali, and evidently to the satisfaction of both men, as<br />
they both thanked each other decorously, and Ghadiali proceeded with his argument.<br />
What are we to make of such an episode? Visual inspection of the body was not<br />
entirely new to the <strong>American</strong> courtroom—Ariela Gross, in her study of race trails in the<br />
antebellum <strong>So</strong>uth, on the contrary, describes it as something of a commonplace. 18<br />
The respondent in at least one other racial pre-requisite case, an Afghani immigrant of<br />
“dark complexion” and “delicate” feature, is reported to have been asked to “pull up<br />
[his] sleeves” to reveal not only that covered skin was “several shades lighter than his<br />
face and hands” but that it was “sufficiently transparent for the blue color of his veins<br />
to show very clearly.” 19 But what kind of information about his racial identity did<br />
Ghadiali expect to communicate by exposing his skin not just to visual inspection but<br />
to touch? What, in turn, did the judge feel? And when we speak of the judge’s feeling,<br />
do we restrict ourselves to the notion of a tactile exchange of information, or does the<br />
scene compel us to imagine the exchange of another kind of feeling or affect? 20 These<br />
are not questions that we can even pretend to answer here, but I want to suggest that<br />
the scene of inspection that Ghadiali describes in his aside directs our attention to the<br />
vast and quiet realms of vision and sensation that often exceed representation of race<br />
in legal analysis—but nonetheless animate it.<br />
For Haney Lopez and other critical race theorists, the racial pre-requisite cases remain<br />
significant for the ways in which they reveal the role of law in the social construction<br />
of racial categories. As Haney Lopez has written, “the Court’s eventual embrace<br />
of common knowledge confirms the falsity of natural notions of race, exposing race<br />
instead as a social product measurable in terms of what people believe.” 21 But how<br />
does the average person come to recognize racial difference and to believe that such<br />
differences are incommensurable with <strong>American</strong>ness? In Haney Lopez’ reading, the<br />
Court in Thind seemed to reject one system of racial classification, based on “scientific”<br />
knowledge, to embrace another, based on “common knowledge,” thus revealing the<br />
arbitrariness and contingencies of both. But where does that leave us in terms of understanding<br />
how we come to see, feel, or believe in the forms of difference that, however,<br />
arbitrary, continue to affect the lives of those touched by their designations?<br />
In a preface to a recently revised edition of White By <strong>Law</strong>, Haney Lopez admits<br />
that while his analysis is closely attentive to the “formal legal construction of race,” or<br />
the way in which law as a formal matter, either through legislation or adjudication di-<br />
17 GHADIALI, NATURALIZATION CASE, supra at 21.<br />
18 <strong>See</strong> ARIELA GROSS, WHITE BY LAW: THE HISTORY OF RACE ON TRIAL IN AMERICA (2008).<br />
19 In re Feroz Din, 27 F.2d 568, 568 (N.D. Cal. 1928).<br />
20 I am indebted to Tina Campt for opening up this realm of inquiry, into the haptic, in her IMAGE<br />
MATTERS: ARCHIVE, PHOTOGRAPHY, AND THE AFRICAN DIASPORA (2012).<br />
21 LOPEZ, supra at 79.<br />
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rectly engages in legal definitions,” his study leaves relatively unexamined what he describes<br />
as “racial dynamics” or the “informal mechanisms” through which law participates<br />
in the production of racial differences and hierarchy. 22 The illustrations he offers<br />
are of discretionary policing and practices of informal segregation that restrict access<br />
to material goods and thus produce a system of racialized economic subordination.<br />
I want to take Haney Lopez’ analysis in a slightly different direction—to consider<br />
the relationship between the formal legal construction of race and the appearance or<br />
experience of racialized difference. For instance, in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme<br />
Court acknowledged a formal equality between “the two races” but, notoriously,<br />
maintained that law could do nothing to erase the natural differences between them. 23<br />
The Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment established “a political equality between<br />
the two races, but in the nature of things… could not have been intended to<br />
abolish distinctions on the basis of color or to enforce [social equality] …. Legislation is<br />
powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based on physical difference.”<br />
24 Here, the effects of law—the appearance of difference, social inequality,<br />
racial aversion—are mistaken for and described as “the nature of things.” Today, to<br />
recognize that race is a social construction has become something of a commonplace.<br />
But I want to argue that critical race scholarship that limits its critique to the social<br />
constructedness of race risks reproducing the error in Plessy, which is assert a distinction<br />
between the formal construction of race, or what we understand to be the effect of<br />
law, on the one hand, and the apprehension of race, or what passes as prior to law, on<br />
the other.<br />
Justice Harlan, in his celebrated dissent in Plessy, rejected the open racism accommodated<br />
by the majority and offered what has become the prevailing paradigm for<br />
equality—colorblindness. The majority’s conception of equality was one that—however<br />
disingenuous—could tolerate the recognition of differences. The prevailing paradigm<br />
of colorblindness, on the other hand understands legal equality to be conditioned in<br />
prior sameness. Colorblindness does not know what to make of the differences we<br />
see. Of course, one of most irritating legacies of colorblindness is the erasure of the<br />
history and presence of racism, for instance, in the common charge that affirmative<br />
action policies are themselves forms of racial discrimination. Colorblindness flattens<br />
the many asymmetries of racialism or racial recognition. As Neil Gotanda has compellingly<br />
argued, colorblindness also limits what we recognize as racial violence to forms<br />
of intentional discrimination, innocenting deep and persisting forms of structural racialized<br />
inequality, diminished opportunity, and dehumanization. 25 But these critiques<br />
are somewhat beyond the scope of this essay. <strong>My</strong> point here is to suggest that,<br />
within contemporary U.S. discourse, the apprehension of race continues to pass as an<br />
22<br />
Id. at xv.<br />
23<br />
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).<br />
24<br />
Id. at 543-4.<br />
25<br />
<strong>See</strong> Neil Gotanda, A Critique of “Our Constitution is Colorblind,” 44 STAN. L. REV. 1 (1991).<br />
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effect of law, beyond the reach of law, because colorblindness requires of us that we<br />
pass over such apprehension with embarrassed silence—embarrassed because, within the<br />
paradigm of equality-in-sameness, to see difference is to participate in the production<br />
of inequality. 26 As I heard a student explain, we feel awkward countenancing the racial<br />
appearance of another because we feel like we are putting the other down, enforcing<br />
hierarchy. As she suggested, we are not blinded, but made dumb. Colorblindness demands<br />
a rhetorical suppression of the differences that we, not unlike judicial actors,<br />
see and feel. I want to suggest that the demand for colorblindness can make us embarrassed<br />
about recognizing the effects of racialized subordination, it also nurtures a hostility<br />
towards cultural (or not “immutable”) difference, particularly in the context of<br />
recent immigration. Colorblindness, if, as I argue, it establishes sameness as the condition<br />
for equality, then it demands not only rhetorical (in the place of visual) restraint<br />
on the part of the observer, but a visual conformity or management of difference on<br />
the part of the observed.<br />
PART 2. NATURALIZATION AND SPECULAR CITIZENSHIP<br />
What is naturalization? How can anyone or anything that is not already regarded<br />
as natural be made natural? The inevitable failures of naturalization are figured in the<br />
term naturalization itself. Here, I want to sketch a few claims in relation to what we<br />
might describe as the paradox of naturalization before returning to Ghadiali’s denaturalization<br />
trial, in the next section.<br />
First, the paradox is definitional. As many critics have observed, modern conceptions<br />
of the nation-state, national identity, and citizenship have long been informed by<br />
conceptions of “nature”—nature figured as the original condition, as the source of political<br />
legitimacy, as self-evident and transparent to reason. 34 Citizenship, in its primary<br />
form, comes dressed in the language of “nature.” Black’s <strong>Law</strong> Dictionary includes a<br />
brief entry on citizenship, distinguishing the “natural-born citizen,” who becomes a<br />
citizen at birth, and the “naturalized citizen,” who is granted citizenship by an act of<br />
law. 35 Of course, natural-born citizenship is also an effect of law, but within the modern<br />
national and legal imaginary, appears as an effect of nature. <strong>Law</strong> attaches itself to a<br />
raw process of biology—birth, in this instance—transforms and redeploys the meaning<br />
of that process as it deposits itself and its effects as “natural.” Just as conceptions of<br />
26 I am grateful for the thoughtful candor of this student who prefers to remain anonymous.<br />
34 <strong>See</strong> e.g. RAYMOND WILLIAMS, KEYWORDS: A VOCABULARY OF CULTURE AND SOCIETY 216-224<br />
(1975); BENEDICT ANDERSON, IMAGINED COMMUNITIES: REFLECTIONS ON THE ORIGIN AND SPREAD OF<br />
NATIONALISM (1983); and ALYS WEINBAUM, WAYWARD REPRODUCTIONS: GENEALOGIES OF RACE AND<br />
NATION IN TRANS-ATLANTIC MODERN THOUGHT (2004).<br />
35 Black’s <strong>Law</strong> Dictionary defines the “natural born citizen” as “a person born within the jurisdiction of<br />
the natural government,” and defines a “naturalized citizen” as “a foreign-born person who attains citizenship<br />
by law.” BLACK’S LAW DICTIONARY 237 (7 th Ed.).<br />
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“nature” inform our understanding of birthright citizenship, “nature” and its antitheses—nature<br />
as prior to law, nature as innocent of artifice, the natural distinguished<br />
from the unnatural—seem to structure our understanding of naturalization. In naturalization<br />
persists the tension between natural law, which seems to emanate from nature,<br />
and positive law, or man-made convention.<br />
The second claim is a historical elaboration of the definitional paradox. Extending<br />
the insights of Ian Haney Lopez, Devon W. Carbado, and Angela P. Harris, I want<br />
to argue that, in the United States, naturalization has long played a role in producing<br />
whiteness as the natural embodiment and normative ideal of citizenship and national<br />
identity. 36 <strong>Law</strong>s recognizing birthright citizenship, laws designating racial eligibility for<br />
immigration and naturalization, and laws restricting sexual intimacy across racial<br />
boundaries, in what one scholar has described as a “vast breeding experiment,” effectively<br />
produce, reproduce, and naturalize a particular embodiment of citizenship. 37 As<br />
whiteness is aligned with citizenship, racial and cultural identity is conflated with political<br />
character, or qualifications for assuming the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.<br />
Thus, beyond constructing social categories, citizenship laws play a role in materializing<br />
and membering the political body, in determining its composition and complexion,<br />
as well as in constructing the social environment, the field of encounter and<br />
exchange that condition what becomes settled as “common sense.”<br />
Third, it is with the arrival of the new immigrant that the old becomes native. Or,<br />
put somewhat differently, the mass migration of raced laborers to the United States<br />
(among other nation-states founded as white-settler colonies) that begins in the late<br />
nineteenth century, I want to argue, precipitates a particular form of national identity,<br />
one based on claims to the racial and economic priority of white settlers and their descendants.<br />
Federal courts administering the racial pre-requisite to naturalization, for<br />
instance, extended citizenship to white, but not non-white, individuals on the ground<br />
that citizenship belonged to the descendants of those who contributed to the founding<br />
and “building up” of the nation. 38 As administered by courts, the Naturalization Act<br />
effectively barred non-white immigrants from citizenship while establishing a racial<br />
“right of return” to European immigrants. This legal nativism not only forges a racial<br />
identity among a diversity of Anglo-European immigrants but also establishes an identity<br />
between the state, its “people,” and territory. In the Chinese Exclusion Cases, for<br />
instance, the Supreme Court declined to review legislation restricting immigration<br />
recognizing that Congress’ authority to regulate immigration arises from the natural<br />
36 <strong>See</strong> Devon W. Carbado, Racial Naturalization, 57 AM. Q, 633 2005; see also, Lopez and Harris, supra.<br />
37 I am grateful to Patricia <strong>Will</strong>iams for this formulation.<br />
38 <strong>See</strong> In re Balsara, 171 F. 294, 294 (S.D.N.Y 1909) (holding that the Congress which framed the<br />
Naturalization Act of 1790 intended to restrict admission to the privileges of citizenship to “only white<br />
persons to those races whose emigrants had contributed to the building up of this continent of the community<br />
of people which declared itself a new nation, admission to the privileges of citizenship in which was<br />
by that statute to be restricted.”)<br />
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right of any territorial sovereign to protect and perpetuate the life of its “people” from<br />
the threat posed by the influx of foreigners. 39 Within this sort of landscape, mass migration<br />
appears to threaten the nation and national identity by undermining the economic<br />
priority of “native” and the continuance of their way of life. In relation to the<br />
raced immigrant, whiteness is aligned with particular social conventions or forms—<br />
liberal secularism, ownership of property, certain familial arrangements, for instance—<br />
identified as the social pre-requisites to citizenship. 40<br />
Fourth and finally, naturalization itself belongs to a two-tiered regime, within<br />
which, for those who appear to embody citizenship, a fulfillment of the social conditions<br />
of citizenship is assumed, and the rights and privileges of citizenship flow naturally,<br />
as a matter of course. For those who appear otherwise, the rights and privileges<br />
are conditioned on performance, or, as I argue, a spectacular self-disciplining and mirroring<br />
that confirms the superiority and universality of <strong>American</strong> social forms.<br />
Jus Sanguinis and the Racial Embodiment of Citizenship<br />
Legal treatises often distinguish between two forms of natural-born citizenship—jus<br />
sanguinis, or citizenship by right of “blood” or ancestry, and jus solis, or citizenship by<br />
right of soil. Ernst Renan, a nineteenth-century French philosopher, concerned with<br />
the forms of ethnic nationalism taking hold within parts of Europe, identified the nationalism<br />
of jus soli as the more progressive of the two traditions. 41 The sense of national<br />
belonging produced by rules of jus sanguinas, he described as “racial primoridalism”<br />
among people “united by a mistaken view about their past and a shared hatred of<br />
their neighbors.” 42 The nationalism of jus soli, by contrast, cultivated solidarity in the<br />
present: “soil establishes the substratum, the field of struggle and labor” and the<br />
“shared sense of having done great things together and wishing to do more in the future.”<br />
43 Germany is our idea of a nation defined by blood. In the United States, as in<br />
France, our preferred self-image is of a nation founded in the kind of present and future<br />
solidarity that Renan describes.<br />
Black’s <strong>Law</strong> Dictionary glosses jus soli as “birthright citizenship” and notes that “this<br />
is the U.S. rule, affirmed by the Fourteenth Amendment.” 44 While its clear that that<br />
Fourteenth Amendment expressly guaranteed citizenship to persons born in the<br />
United States, its hardly obvious that the Fourteenth Amendment affirmed that birth-<br />
39 <strong>See</strong> Chae Chan Ping v. U.S., 130 U.S. 581 (1889), and Fong Yue Ting v. U.S., 149 U.S. 698 (1893).<br />
40 <strong>See</strong> Downes v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. 244, 280 (1901) (denying constitutional protections to inhabitants of<br />
acquired territory with the assurance that “there are certain principles of natural justice inherent in the<br />
Anglo-Saxon character which need no expression in constitutions or statues to give them effect or to secure<br />
dependencies against legislation manifestly hostile to their real interests.”)<br />
41 ERNST RENAN, WHAT IS A NATION? (1882), http://www.nationalismproject.org/what/renan.htm.<br />
42 Id.<br />
43 Id.<br />
44 BLACK’S LAW DICTIONARY at 237.<br />
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right citizenship was or had been the rule in the United States. On the contrary, jus<br />
soli can only be described as the rule in the United States if we ignore the history of<br />
denying citizenship even to those born in the United States on the basis of “blood.”<br />
Before and until the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868—seventy years<br />
after the ratification of the Constitution—people of African descent were denied citizenship.<br />
In Dred Scott v. Sanford (1856), the Supreme Court held that, although the<br />
Constitution guaranteed certain rights to “natural-born citizens,” those same rights<br />
were not guaranteed to African <strong>American</strong>s because they were not members of the “citizen-race.”<br />
45 Nor could they be, in Justice Roger B. Taney’s opinion, for the “line of<br />
division which the Constitution has drawn between the citizen race, who formed and<br />
held the Government, and the African race, which they held in subjugation and slavery,”<br />
was a “perpetual and impassible barrier.” 46 The Fourteenth Amendment effectively<br />
overruled the Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott, extending the rights and privileges<br />
of citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States,” but rather than<br />
“affirm” the jus soli as the rule in the United States, we might recognize Justice<br />
Harlan’s characterization of the Fourteenth Amendment—as a “collective naturalization”<br />
of the “colored race” to be more accurate. 47<br />
Nor was jus soli the rule for indigenous peoples born in the United States. Even<br />
after the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court held that Native<br />
<strong>American</strong>s, though born within United States borders, were not citizens. In Elk v.<br />
Wilkins (1884), the Supreme Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment extended<br />
citizenship only to those persons “born or naturalized in the United States and subject<br />
to the jurisdiction thereof.” 48 Indian tribes, because they were “alien nations” in a<br />
“dependent condition, a state of pupilage,” were not subject to United States jurisdiction<br />
for the purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment. 49 John Elk, having severed his<br />
tribal allegiance and “surrendered himself” to U.S. jurisdiction, registered to vote, assuming<br />
that he was a citizen by virtue of his birth within national boundaries. The<br />
Court explained that Elk, like any other “foreigner” could apply for naturalization, but<br />
citizenship was not yet a birthright for indigenous peoples. 50 Justice Horace Gray, writing<br />
for the majority observed that:<br />
The national legislation has tended … towards the education and civilization of the<br />
Indians, and fitting them to be citizens. But the question whether any Indian tribes,<br />
or any members thereof, have become so far advanced in civilization, that they should<br />
be let out of the state of pupilage, and admitted to the privileges and responsibilities<br />
45<br />
Dred Scott v. Sanford, 60 U.S. 393, 420 (1857),<br />
46<br />
Id. at 409.<br />
47<br />
<strong>See</strong> Carbado, at 648.<br />
48<br />
Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 95 (1884).<br />
49 Id. at 109.<br />
50 Id. at 115.<br />
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of citizenship, is a question to be decided by the nation whose wards they are and<br />
whose citizens they seek to become. 51<br />
Indeed, within a few years, Congress passed a series of laws expanding opportunities<br />
for indigenous peoples. With the General Allotment Act of 1887, also called the<br />
Dawes Act, Congress extended citizenship to individual Native <strong>American</strong>s on the condition<br />
that they “voluntarily take up… residence separate and apart from any tribe of<br />
Indians” and “adopt the habits of civilized life.” 52 For Henry Dawes, the Congressman<br />
who sponsored the Act, civilized habits included “to wear civilized clothes… cultivate<br />
the ground, live in houses, ride in Studebaker wagons, send children to school, drink<br />
whiskey”—and above all—“own property.” 53 Congress converted Indian tribal lands<br />
which had, until then, been held in community, and reallocated divided plots to individuals<br />
as private property. Unclaimed “surplus” land was sold to raise funds for the<br />
establishment of Indian Schools, in which native children, often taken from their<br />
families, were <strong>American</strong>ized. 54 Native <strong>American</strong> children were renamed, given haircuts<br />
and uniforms, trained in English and introduced to Christianity. Boys received<br />
vocational training, girls learned to reproduce middle-class domesticity. 55<br />
Thus, with the Dawes Act and subsequent legislation, defining the terms upon<br />
indigenous <strong>American</strong>s would become incorporated as citizens, we recognize the outlines<br />
of what I described earlier as the contractual model of citizenship. For indigenous<br />
<strong>American</strong>s, citizenship was conditioned not merely on national allegiance.<br />
Rather, citizenship was conditioned on a total destruction of communal identity, mediated<br />
by collective subsistence on the land, and absorption into the national economy<br />
as proprietary individuals. Citizenship required a total substitution of indigenous social<br />
forms—forms of governance, cooperation, language, subsistence, comportment,<br />
etc.—with “civilized habits.” In 1888, in a departure from the general policy against<br />
miscegenation, Congress extended citizenship to indigenous women who married<br />
<strong>American</strong> men—to facilitate the opening of remaining Indian lands to privatization<br />
and white settlement. 56 In 1919, Congress extended citizenship to indigenous men<br />
who served in the world war. 57 It was not until 1924 that Congress extended citizenship<br />
to indigenous <strong>American</strong>s as a matter of birthright, but scholars of indigenous law<br />
51 Id. at 106-107.<br />
52 Cited in The Dawes Act, Archives of the West, 1887-1914, New Perspectives on the West,<br />
http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/resources/archives/eight/dawes.htm<br />
53 Id.<br />
54 Id.<br />
55 <strong>See</strong> LAURA WEXLER, TENDER VIOLENCE: DOMESTIC VISIONS IN AN AGE OF U.S. IMPERIALISM 127-<br />
176 (2000).<br />
56 <strong>See</strong> PEGGY PASCOE, WHAT COMES NATURALLY: MISCEGENATION LAW AND THE MAKING OF<br />
RACE IN AMERICA, 77-109 (2007)<br />
57 <strong>See</strong> Lucy Salyer, Baptism By Fire: Race, Military Service, and U.S. Citizenship Policy, 1918-1935, 91 J. OF<br />
AM. HIST. 847-876 (Dec. 2004),<br />
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14 Munshi [5/11/2013<br />
and history point out the terrible irony of legal recognition conferred upon the destruction<br />
of identity, sovereignty conditioned upon dispossession. 58<br />
The scope of Fourteenth Amendment birthright citizenship was tested once more<br />
in 1898, when the Supreme Court was asked to determine whether the <strong>American</strong>-born<br />
son of Chinese immigrants was a citizen. 59 Wong Kim Ark, born in California, was<br />
denied re-entry to the United States by a customs official on grounds that Wong was<br />
“a Chinese person… by reason of his race, language, color, and dress.” 60 The Court<br />
ruled that native-born children of “aliens”—even those racially barred from becoming<br />
citizens, as Chinese were at the time—were birthright citizens of the United States. But<br />
the determinations of the customs official and dissenting opinions of two Justices in<br />
U.S. v Wong Kim Ark exhibit the persisting tension between native birth and “racial”<br />
ancestry in the defining of citizenship and national identity. Under the rule of birthright<br />
citizenship, through much of the nineteenth-century, right of blood masquerades<br />
as the right of soil.<br />
Jus <strong>So</strong>li and the Nativist Habitus<br />
<strong>So</strong> far, I have been tracing the rule that blood and ancestry, or an implicit rule of<br />
jus sanguinis, has played in defining citizenship and national identity. Restrictions to<br />
immigration and naturalization that emerge in the late nineteenth century prompt us<br />
to consider the role that jus soli, or conceptions of land and territory, have played in<br />
naturalizing the white settler’s claim to political, economic, and social priority. Here, I<br />
want to consider the role that conceptions of soil, territory, and “homeland,” emergent<br />
at the turn of the twentieth century and very much with us today, have played in defining<br />
distinctly territorialized notions of state sovereignty and national identity.<br />
Through the nineteenth century, differential rules of citizenship played a role in<br />
securing the political and economic supremacy of white settlers and their descendants.<br />
Unrestricted migration from Europe during the same period secured their numerical<br />
supremacy as well. As Aziz Rana has written, during a first phase of colonialism, while<br />
the United States was still subduing natives, acquiring territory, and establishing its<br />
population, territorial and political boundaries were “remarkably open” to European<br />
immigrants. 61 European immigrants were given access to federal lands and encouraged<br />
to settle the frontier. In some cases, they were extended voting rights, even as noncitizens,<br />
so that they might quickly integrate themselves into the political community.<br />
During this first phase, as Rana explains, citizenship was based on economic inde-<br />
58<br />
<strong>See</strong> Gerald Torres and Kathryn Milun, Translating ‘Yonnondio’ by Precedent and Evidence: The Mashpee<br />
Indian Case in CRITICAL RACE THEORY: THE KEY WRITINGS THAT FORMED THE MOVEMENT (Kimberle<br />
Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, Kendall Thomas, eds.) 1995.<br />
59<br />
Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898).<br />
60<br />
Id. at 651.<br />
61<br />
<strong>See</strong> AZIZ RANA, THE TWO FACES OF AMERICAN FREEDOM (2010)<br />
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pendence, which was secured, in turn, through expropriation of land and labor from<br />
subordinated groups, excluded from citizenship. 62<br />
During a second phase of colonial settlerism, as Rana continues, “the project of<br />
republican freedom” and the guarantee of economic independence to citizens required<br />
the continued expansion of labor, capital, and consumer markets, through immigration<br />
and imperialism. 63 But what Radhika Mongia has called “raced migration,” the<br />
migration of non-European peoples to European or white-settler colonies, would precipitate<br />
a set of crises for the United States. On the one hand, the labor of the new<br />
immigrant was what secured the economic independence and security of the old immigrant,<br />
the new native. On the other hand, the arrival of the new immigrant would<br />
unsettle what had become naturalized as a racial priority. Within the nativist imaginary<br />
of the early twentieth century, the racial immigrant appears not only as an economic<br />
rival—or the sign of more brutal forms of globalization to come, as Coleen Lye<br />
has argued—but his appearance itself, I want to argue, disrupts the fantasies that sustain<br />
our national understanding, that reconcile white supremacy with racial subordination,<br />
white settlerism with immigrant exclusion. 64 Rana describes this fantasy as one of<br />
“organic citizenship”:<br />
The emphasis on ethnicity as a justification for economic and political control<br />
has meant [white-settler] democracies are intricately bound up with organic<br />
notions of citizenship. These notions depict the political community as an inseparable<br />
union based on ethnic and cultural affinities and tied to a particular<br />
plot of land. 65<br />
Raced migration gives urgency to legitimizing of the political and economic priority of<br />
white settlers and their descendants.<br />
In the racial pre-requisites, that priority is legitimated through a myth of original<br />
possession. In In Re Balsara (1909), for instance, a case involving another Parsi Zoroastrian,<br />
the New York district court asserted that the drafters of the Naturalization Act<br />
wanted to extend citizenship only to “those races whose emigrants had contributed to<br />
the building up of this continent of the community of people which declared itself a<br />
new nation.” 66 The court delineates a right of racial inheritance based on a Lockean<br />
narrative of original acquisition. By the court’s reasoning, the original settlers, who<br />
came into possession of “this continent” by mixing their labor with it, “building [it]<br />
up,” have a right, rooted in conceptions of property and territorial sovereignty, to determine,<br />
as they did through an act of Congress, to whom the rights and privileges of<br />
62 Id. at 12.<br />
63 Id. at 13.<br />
64 <strong>See</strong> Harris, supra.<br />
65 RANA, supra at 9.<br />
66 In re Balsara, 171 F. 294, 294 (S.D.N.Y 1909).<br />
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citizenship would descend. Of course, this myth of origins obscures the dispossession<br />
of prior natives and the contributions of those non-white inhabitants who labored in<br />
bondage. At the same time, the rights of citizenship are available not just to the direct<br />
descendants of the original settlers, but to anyone in the world who claims to belong<br />
to their same “races.” By contrast, mass migration from Asia brought the closing of<br />
the national border. States adopted the designation “aliens ineligible for citizenship”<br />
to prevent Asian immigrants in particular from owning land, entering certain vocations,<br />
and forming families with white <strong>American</strong>s. 67 Thus, while Europeans enjoyed<br />
something like an ancestral claim to national destiny, Asians were prevented from<br />
rooting themselves in the land, from enjoying the same economic freedoms guaranteed<br />
to others, and from participating in the cultural and biological reproduction of the<br />
nation.<br />
Raced migration and imperial expansion in the late nineteenth century precipitate<br />
new forms of identity and belonging, a native “people” and their habitat under constant<br />
threat of becoming overwhelmed by strangers. Radhika Mongia, in her writing<br />
on the modern passport system, observes that the very “idea and materiality” of the<br />
modern nation, conceived as “a territorially and demographically circumscribed entity,<br />
takes shape not prior to but within the context of ‘raced migration.’” 68 Writing specifically<br />
about migration within the British Empire, she observes that territorial expansion<br />
and mass migration—of white settlers as well as raced subjects—was a defining feature<br />
of the European empire-state in the nineteenth-century. But migration would<br />
become a “problem” only with the voluntary migration of Indian subjects to the white<br />
settler dominions of Canada, Australia, and <strong>So</strong>uth Africa.<br />
Indian migration exposed a tear at the seam of British imperial governance. It<br />
exposed the untenable distinction between the white-settler dominions and the imperial<br />
colonies of Africa and Asia. Over the course of the second half of the nineteenthcentury,<br />
the white settler dominions had been granted a degree of self-rule. But India,<br />
transferred from company to crown rule in 1858, had not been extended the same<br />
privilege. Instead, in a proclamation issued that year, Queen Victoria promised Indians<br />
that, because they were not yet entitled to self-government, they were especially<br />
entitled to “equal and impartial protection” from the British government. Thus<br />
emerged a conflict. For Canadians, self-rule included the right to exclude Indians. But<br />
Canada could not have exercised such a right without offending the Queen’s promise<br />
to her Indian subjects. Gradually, Canadian officials asserted that the right to exclude<br />
others was itself constitutive of national sovereignty. For instance, in 1916, Frank<br />
Oliver, Minister of the Interior, defended a law excluding Indian immigrants by arguing:<br />
Canada is a mistress of her own house and takes the authority and responsibil-<br />
67 <strong>See</strong> SUSAN KOSHI, SEXUAL NATURALIZATION: ASIAN AMERICANS AND MISCEGENATION 5 (2005).<br />
68 <strong>See</strong> Mongia, supra at 528.<br />
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ity of deciding who shall be admitted to citizenship and the privileges and rights<br />
of citizenship within her borders… This is not a labor question; it is not a racial<br />
question; it is a question of national dominance and national existence. 69<br />
The United States imposed few restrictions on immigration and generally honored<br />
the “inherent and inalienable rights of man to change his home” until the late<br />
nineteenth century. The arrival of Chinese and Japanese, then Indian immigrants<br />
precipitated a chance in policy. As Du Bois observed in an essay published in 1910, at<br />
the height of “Yellow Peril,” “wave on wave, with increasing virulence, is dashing this<br />
new religion of whiteness on the shores of our time.” 70 Redeploying the imagery associated<br />
with Asian immigration—waves, tides, fear of inundation—Bois gestures at the<br />
dynamic between immigration, the emergence of whiteness as a national identity, and<br />
the shoring up of the boundaries of the nation-state.<br />
Asian immigration gave rise not only to the sort of cultural nativism that Du Bois<br />
described, but a legal nativism in the form of borders, immigration bureaucracy, and<br />
constitutional jurisprudence—specifically, the realignment of the relationship between<br />
the state, its citizens, and its others in the guise of the plenary power doctrine. While<br />
cultural nativism has largely receded since the early twentieth century, legal nativism<br />
remains a defining, if largely unexamined, feature of national self-understanding.<br />
In Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889), the Supreme Court recognized that<br />
Congress had “absolute and exclusive” authority to regulate immigration, asserting (as<br />
the Canadian minister would a few years later) that the right to exclude others was a<br />
natural right, constitutive of territorial sovereignty. In Fong Yue Ting v. United States<br />
(1898), Justice Fuller explained “every nation” has the right and duty to defend the<br />
country against the “danger” posed by foreigners:<br />
what [a nation] owes to itself, the care of its own safety, give it this right; and in<br />
virtue of its natural liberty; it becomes to a nation to judge whether its circumstances…<br />
justify the admission of the foreigner. Every society possesses the undoubtable<br />
right to determine who shall compose its members, and it is exercised<br />
by all nations, both in peace and war. 71<br />
Congress’ absolute authority to regulate immigration was premised on a natural right<br />
to territorial sovereignty. That right is, in some instances, articulated was right to preserve<br />
the nation’s resources for its native population:<br />
the people of the coast saw, or believed they saw, in the facility of immigration,<br />
and in the crowded millions of China, where population presses upon the means<br />
69<br />
Cited in Mongia, 550.<br />
70<br />
W.E.B. Du Bois, “The <strong>So</strong>uls of White Folk,” reprinted in Darkwater (1922).<br />
d<br />
71<br />
Fong Yue Ting v. U.S. 149 U.S. 698, at 607.<br />
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18 Munshi [5/11/2013<br />
of subsistence, great danger that at no distant day that portion of our country<br />
would be overrun by them, unless prompt action was taken to restrict their immigration.<br />
72<br />
In other instances, as cited above, the right is described as one of preserving and protecting<br />
a certain racial “composition” and way of life. For instance, in Chae Chan Ping,<br />
the Court acknowledged the concerns of west coast representatives who asserted “the<br />
presence of Chinese laborers had a baneful effect upon the material interests of the<br />
state, and upon public morals; that their immigration was in numbers approaching the<br />
character of an Oriental invasion, and was a menace to our civilization.” 73 That the<br />
Chinese government itself has no hostility against the United States is irrelevant: Congress<br />
has authority to determine for itself that “the presence of a different race in this<br />
country, who will not assimilate with us, [is] dangerous to its peace and security.” 74 It<br />
is against this shared threat, posed by the foreigner, that <strong>American</strong>s are united—and<br />
through their government:<br />
For national purposes, embracing our relations with foreign nations, we are but<br />
one people, one nation, one power. To preserve its independence, and give security<br />
against foreign aggression and encroachment, it is the highest duty of every<br />
nation, and to attain these ends nearly all other considerations are to be subordinated.<br />
It matters not in what form such aggression and encroachment come,<br />
whether from the foreign nation acting in its national character, or from vast<br />
hordes of its people crowding in on us. 75<br />
Beginning in 1910, anti-immigrant groups proposed various schemes for Hindu<br />
exclusion, modeled after the passport regime established by the Gentleman’s Agreement<br />
with Japan or the Chinese Exclusion laws. <strong>So</strong>me recommended penalizing shipping<br />
companies. But these proposals gained little traction in Congress, which we reluctant<br />
to pass another expressly racial law of exclusion. 76 The Bureau of Immigration,<br />
in the meantime, enforced existing laws to exclude many Indian immigrants on medical<br />
grounds. 77 In 1917, Congress finally passed the Immigration Act of 1917, banning<br />
immigration from a designated “Barred Zone” covering most of Asia and the contemporary<br />
Middle East, thus restricting immigration not on the basis of race but geography.<br />
78 In this elaboration of the notion of territorial belonging, articulated in the<br />
Chinese Exclusion cases, we recognize one version of what recent critics describe as<br />
72<br />
Chae Chan Ping, 130 U.S. at 626.<br />
73<br />
Id. at 595.<br />
74<br />
Id. at 606.<br />
75<br />
Id. at 606.<br />
76<br />
<strong>See</strong> JOAN JENSEN, PASSAGE FROM INDIA (1988)<br />
77<br />
<strong>See</strong> NAYAN SHAH, CONTAGIOUS DIVIDES: EPIDEMICS AND RACE IN SAN FRANCISCO’S CHINA-<br />
TOWN 179-203, 180 (2001).<br />
78 Immigration Act, 39 Stat. 874 (Feb. 5 1917).<br />
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“racism without races” or “racists.” In this instance, a racism that disappears into the<br />
naturalized horizon of national boundaries.<br />
Mae Ngai has shown that the Immigration Act of 1917 and 1924, establishing a<br />
national origins quota, generated “a constellation of reconstructed racial categories, in<br />
which race and nationality—concepts that had been loosely conflated since the nineteenth<br />
century—were disaggregated and realigned in new and uneven ways.” 79 On the<br />
one hand, the Immigration Acts of 1917 and 1924 codified the “Asian,” which Ngai<br />
and others recognize to be a “peculiarly <strong>American</strong> racial category,” lumping a swath of<br />
peoples into commonality in terms of their supposed unassimilability. 80 While the law<br />
drew distinctions among more and less desirable European, those distinctions disappeared<br />
within the emergence of a whiteness bound with <strong>American</strong> consanguinity. But<br />
perhaps of greater significance is the way in which the national origins quota, again,<br />
enshrine a particular imbrication of nation, identity, and government. The words of<br />
one Congressman, describing the urgency of immigration restriction, are illustrative.<br />
As he explained,<br />
the sooner this Congress lays down the proposition of not admitting people who<br />
cannot assimilate, who cannot become a part of our blood, our tongue, our life,<br />
and our ways, the sooner will begin to mirror the sentiments and the wishes of<br />
the great body of <strong>American</strong>s who want America for <strong>American</strong>s. 81<br />
Thus, it is with the arrival of the raced migrant that white settler becomes <strong>American</strong>.<br />
It is with the new immigrant that the old immigrant becomes “native.”<br />
Curiously, the Immigration Act of 1924, putting an end to free migration and<br />
establishing the national origin quota, is passed in the same year as the Citizenship Act<br />
of 1924, finally incorporating indigenous peoples into the body politic. Of course, the<br />
incorporation into <strong>American</strong> citizenship also marks a certain end to indigenous sovereignty<br />
and identity. It is with the vanquishing of the old native that the new native<br />
himself becomes endangered. The nativist concern behind the immigration restrictions<br />
was that the white race would become overwhelmed by the flood of diverse<br />
strangers and eventually go the way of the vanishing Indian. Lothrop Stoddard, an<br />
especially authoritative nativist, had warned that, as a result of unrestricted immigration<br />
in the decades the turn of the century, “the native Nordic <strong>American</strong>” had “in<br />
many of our urban areas become almost extinct.” 94 This imperiled native is the rhetorical<br />
and legal subject of immigration regulation at the turn of the century; it is the<br />
79<br />
Mae Ngai, The Architecture of Race in <strong>American</strong> Immigration <strong>Law</strong>: A Reexamination of the Immigration<br />
Act of 1924, in 86 J. OF AM. HIST. 67, 70.<br />
80<br />
Id. at 71.<br />
81<br />
<strong>See</strong> WALTER BENN MICHAELS, OUR AMERICA: NATIVISM, MODERNISM, AND PLURALISM 147<br />
(1995) (citing Congressman Watkins).<br />
94<br />
LOTHROP STODDARD, THE RISING TIDE OF COLOR AGAINST WHITE WORLD SUPREMACY 165<br />
(1920), cited in Benn Michaels, id., at 29.<br />
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native and his claim to his habitat the national government grows to preserve. Raced<br />
migration threatens national sovereignty because it appears to destroy the native habitat—or,<br />
put somewhat differently, the nativist habitus, the racial landscape and structures<br />
of experience that sustain the fantasy of racial priority. Similarly, the change in<br />
social composition that follows unrestricted migration threatens national integrity by<br />
shattering resemblance, the myth of identity between “a people” and its government.<br />
Naturalization and Specular Citizenship<br />
Naturalization, like immigration, unsettles our understanding of citizenship and<br />
national identity because it renders apparent the conventionality of political processes<br />
usually ascribed to nature. In other words, naturalization exposes the artificiality of<br />
birthright citizenship, or the relative arbitrariness with which a fundamental human<br />
right—the “right to have rights,” Hannah Arendt’s formulation of citizenship which<br />
gained urgency in the wake of mass displacements caused by world wars—is determined<br />
by place of birth rather than of belonging. 95 The naturalization of racialized others<br />
also renders apparent the ethno-cultural origins of <strong>American</strong> national identity which<br />
otherwise seem to disappear into the imagined universality of <strong>American</strong> cultural and<br />
social forms. Birthright citizenship, racialized restrictions to immigration and citizenship,<br />
I want to argue, have played a role not just in the formal construction of race but<br />
in the actual construction of the visual field, in producing whiteness as the natural<br />
embodiment of citizenship and <strong>American</strong> identity. Naturalization—as the legal process<br />
through which immigrants acquire citizenship—itself might be regarded as part of a<br />
two-tiered citizenship regime within which, for those who appear to embody <strong>American</strong><br />
citizenship, rights and privileges flow as naturally, as if a matter of natural law. For<br />
immigrants marked as different, there emerges a contractual model of citizenship, conditioned<br />
on performance.<br />
Performance here has two meanings. In the more colloquial sense, performance<br />
describes embodied representation, or what Richard Schechner has described as<br />
“twice-behaved behavior.” 96 The doubling and slippage between reality and artifice,<br />
embodiment and signification suggested by performance—and figured in the term<br />
“naturalization” itself (how can anything be made natural?)—have made “performance”<br />
a critical term for theorists like J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, and Homi Bhabha, for<br />
thinking about the ways in which bodies are recruited into the production and reproduction<br />
of identities and ideologies. Performance also describes, within common law,<br />
the fulfillment of a contractual obligation. At his denaturalization trial, Ghadiali<br />
would reformulate the question of citizenship from one of racial identity to one of<br />
95<br />
HANNAH ARENDT, THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM 177 (1968); see also SEYLA BENHABIB, THE<br />
RIGHTS OF OTHERS: ALIENS, RESIDENTS, AND CITIZENS (1994).<br />
96<br />
RICHARD SCHECHNER, BETWEEN THEATER AND ANTHROPOLOGY 52 (2002).<br />
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fulfilment of an implied contract. As he argued,<br />
“[W]hat is Naturalization, may it please the Court? It is a contract between the<br />
people of the United States and the Respondent, on the strength of which the man<br />
renounces his former Government, takes off his mantle as a British subject of India,<br />
bows at the foot of that <strong>American</strong> Flag… On the strength of the government’s<br />
decision in an exalted Court of <strong>Law</strong> in Bergen County, the respondent, under contract<br />
with the people of the United States, gets a divorce from his former wife, who<br />
refuses to become an <strong>American</strong>… on that ground, marries a German descended<br />
<strong>American</strong> girl, raised a family of six sons as loyal citizens; on the strength of that he<br />
builds a quarter of a million dollar plant in Malaga, New Jersey… He served the<br />
country. This man gave 2 years of his life and time and money and service to the<br />
City of New York and was trusted for his Patriotism, Valor, Fidelity, and Abilities”<br />
with the Air Service of the Police Department… 97<br />
Performance of citizenship here is fulfillment of the demand of ideological mirroring.<br />
Ghadiali’s case is revealing of the ways in which the nation is produced not only<br />
through exclusions but through the conscription of certain bodies into reflecting back<br />
to the nation an image of itself.<br />
PART 3. “YOU WILL SEE MY FAMILY BECAME SO AMERICAN”<br />
At his denaturalization trial, Ghadiali presented the court with several photographs<br />
of himself, his family, and his properties. As he submitted these into evidence,<br />
Ghadiali promised the Judge:<br />
<strong>You</strong> will see my family became so <strong>American</strong>. We live just like <strong>American</strong> people.<br />
Here is one of my babies’ rooms, to show how we live inside. The Honorable<br />
Justice Sutherland said in the Thind case, “The Hindus are not assimilable.”<br />
I am NOT Hindu. I am European and I shall give you the proofs<br />
presently. 98<br />
But how do these photographs show that Ghadiali and his family are “European” and<br />
“NOT Hindu”? How do the photographs purport to evidence racial eligibility? In this<br />
section, I want to explore the tension between the visualization of race—a practice inextricably<br />
bound with the medium of photography in the early twentieth century—and<br />
the appearance of “<strong>American</strong>ness,” through a close reading of the photographs<br />
Ghadiali submitted to prove national belonging.<br />
97 GHADIALI, supra at 70-71.<br />
98 GHADIALI, NATURALIZATION CASE, supra at 38.<br />
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By promising the judge that his identity would reveal itself through photographs,<br />
Ghadiali invoked the contemporary understanding of way in which photography offered<br />
an unmediated and transparent rendering of the world, or what scholars of visual<br />
culture describe as the “indexical” properties of the photograph—that term adopted<br />
from Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of signs. 99 Peirce distinguished among three<br />
types of signs: symbols, icons, and indexes. Symbols, he describes as signs that have an<br />
arbitrary relationship to their referents, as most word have. Icons bear some relationship<br />
to their referents—Peirce’s example was of a painted portrait. Indexes are signs<br />
that have a “direct physical connection” or natural relationship of continuity with their<br />
referents. 100 Smoke, for example, is an index of fire. Photographs are both iconic and<br />
indexical—indexical in that photographs are the result of a direct impression of light<br />
on celluloid and paper. 101<br />
It was the photograph’s indexical quality that rendered it so immediately attractive<br />
to natural scientists, including race scientists, whose method it was to observe, compare,<br />
and catalogue human variation and difference. Francis Galton, an English eugenicist<br />
and cousin of Charles Darwin, is well known, for instance, for developing<br />
techniques of composite photography—superimposing portraits of multiple individuals—to<br />
produce representations of, for instance, Jewish types, sick types, pedigreed<br />
types. 102 Through such practices, photography was made to play a critical role in the<br />
visualization of race. Coco Fusco, for instance, has argued that early photography did<br />
not just “record the existence of race” but instead “produc[ed] race as a visualizable<br />
fact.” 103 But just as photography lent race its apparent facticity, so did racial discourse<br />
come to saturate photographic practices—of staging and seeing—with racial meaning.<br />
Christopher Pinney, writing about scientific and government photography in colonial<br />
India, goes further to argue that photographic practices of the nineteenth century<br />
played a role in producing the body itself—rendering the skin, or the surface of the<br />
body, as a sign of hidden interiority and essence. 104<br />
Scholars of visual studies recognize a convergence in the methods of race scientists<br />
also criminological uses of photography in the nineteenth-century. Alphonse Bertillion,<br />
a director of police in Paris, introduced the “mug shot” to his already intricate<br />
system of criminal identification, designed to measure and record distinguishing features<br />
of the criminal body. Within the Bertillion system, as illustrated in Figure 1,<br />
below, photographs appeared together with anthropometric measurements and descriptions,<br />
thus inscribing appearance with the vocabularies of race science. But unlike<br />
99 Charles Sanders Peirce, One, Two, Three: Fundamental Categories of Thought and Nature, in PIERCE ON<br />
SIGNS: WRITING ON SEMIOTICS 180, 181 (James Hoopes, ed., 1991).<br />
100 Id. at 183.<br />
101 Id.<br />
102<br />
103 COCO FUSCO, ONLY SKIN DEEP: CHANGING VISIONS OF THE AMERICAN SELF (2003).<br />
104 CHRISTOPHER PINNEY, CAMERA INDICA: THE SOCIAL LIFE OF INDIAN PHOTOGRAPHS 20 (1989).<br />
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Galton, whose purpose was to aggregate individuals into visuablizable “types,” Bertillion’s<br />
purpose was to wield the authority of visual record to undermine the duplicitous<br />
speech of the criminal. In Alan Sekula’s words, the Bertillion system was designed “to<br />
break the professional criminal’s mastery of disguises, false identities, multiple biographies,<br />
and alibis.” 105 Photography, Bertillion discovered, was especially adept at muting<br />
the testimony and “literally arresting” its subject. 106<br />
Figure 1. An Arrest Record Identifying Ghadiali as “White (Persian)”<br />
Thus, it was the photograph’s presumed superiority over other, more equivocal<br />
signs—the utterance of unreliable subjects—that rendered the medium critical to immigration<br />
administration in the late nineteenth century. Anna Pegler-Gordon has observed<br />
that photographic identification was introduced to immigrant processing with<br />
the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1892, also known as the Geary Act. That law required<br />
all Chinese residents in the United States to carry identification. The law was<br />
105 Sekula, id. at27.<br />
106 Id.<br />
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amended the following year to require that photographs appear on the identification,<br />
not only because, as the Congressman sponsoring the law suggested, “all Chinamen<br />
look alike,” but because immigration officials believed that the use of photographic<br />
documentation would assist them in catching immigration fraud. 109 Thus, the photograph<br />
is incorporated into forms of identification created by the state, as John Tagg<br />
has suggested, to “have knowledge over, and control of, diverse and mobile [groups],<br />
and the power relations constructed through this process came to invest photography<br />
with an authority”—but, he is careful to point out, authority that “could not be reduced<br />
to its technical and semiotic properties.” In other words, the supposed capacity<br />
of photography to authoritatively render identity is function not only of the medium’s<br />
indexical quality but the needs of the administrative state.<br />
It is within the context of Chinese migration that movement across borders becomes<br />
a “problem” for state regulation. Similarly, it is within the context of Chinese<br />
Exclusion that forms of documentary identification, not limited to photographs, come<br />
to define the relationship between the subject and the state. A brief discussion of the<br />
Chinese Exclusion Acts, I think, should illustrate.<br />
The Chinese Exclusion Acts, the series of acts passed between 1882 and 1892,<br />
were not only the first immigration laws to restrict voluntary migration on the basis of<br />
race or national origin, 110 but as John Torpey has observed, also the first to regulate the<br />
movement of individuals on the basis “relevant characteristics [that were] knowable<br />
only [through] documents.” 111 The Exclusion Acts did not establish an absolute racial<br />
bar to immigration—that would come later. Instead, they established a general rule<br />
against Chinese immigration and two major exceptions—for re-entering residents and<br />
entering “non-laborers.” But as historians have written, those exceptions proved especially<br />
difficult to administer. 112<br />
The first exception allowed Chinese residents of the United States to re-enter the<br />
country, in accordance with existing treaty obligations. But this exception, included in<br />
the first Chinese Exclusion Act, passed in 1882, also created certification and recordkeeping<br />
requirements. Customs officials at U.S. ports were required to issue certificates<br />
of re-entry to departing Chinese residents and to maintain registries against<br />
which certificates could be cross-referenced. Almost immediately, customs officials<br />
began reporting that the certification requirements were attended with “great embarrassment.”<br />
This embarrassment was caused not by administration of a discriminatory<br />
government policy but by “the suspicious nature… of testimony offered to establish<br />
109<br />
<strong>See</strong> id. at 57.<br />
110<br />
Earlier, I noted that the Page Act of 1875 was the first law to introduce racial distinction to the<br />
administration of immigration, but that law was aimed at what it characterized, however disingenuously, as<br />
involuntary migration.<br />
111<br />
JOHN TORPEY, THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT: SURVEILLANCE, CITIZENSHIP, AND THE STATE<br />
(1999).<br />
112<br />
<strong>See</strong> Kitty Calavita, The Paradoxes of Race, Class, Identity, and “Passing”: Enforcing the Chinese Exclusion<br />
Acts, 25 LAW AND SOC. INQ. 1 (2000).<br />
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residence” and “the loose notions entertained by the witness of the obligations of the<br />
oath,” as one official reported. 113 To prevent evasion of the law through fraudulent<br />
testimony, in the Exclusion Act of 1884, Congress ruled that a U.S-issued certificate<br />
“shall be the only evidence permissible to establish a right of re-entry.” 114 Thus, the<br />
certificate represents not only the exceptional right of re-entry but the essential unreliability<br />
of the Chinese. Still embarrassed by the “manifold Still embarrassed by the<br />
“manifold evasions [and] attempted evasions” of the law, in 1888 Congress passed a<br />
law eliminating Chinese laborers’ right of re-entry altogether—certificate or no certificate.<br />
The Exclusion Act of 1892 was still even more stringent in that it demanded that<br />
even those who had entered the country and were residing in it properly were required<br />
to carry proof of identification—now including photographic documentation—or risk<br />
deportation. 115 Thus, photography is introduced to administration of Chinese Exclusion<br />
as mechanism for identification. Identifying papers, in this context, depose their<br />
bearers of the authority to identify themselves, as the government shifts the locus of<br />
authenticity from the mouths of people to the papers they are issued.<br />
The second exception allowed a limited class of “non-laborers” the right of entry.<br />
The terms of an existing treaty between the United States and China allowed the<br />
United States to impose “reasonable” limits to Chinese immigration for purpose of<br />
protecting <strong>American</strong> interests. <strong>So</strong> as not to offend standards of reason, or principles<br />
of non-discrimination, the first Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned migration of<br />
only “laborers.” “Every Chinese person other than a laborer”—including diplomats,<br />
missionaries, merchants, professionals, students, artists, curious travelers—were allowed<br />
to immigrate. But, under the terms of the relevant provision, known as “Section Six,”<br />
Congress required that “such identity [be] evidence by a certificate,” stating the individual’s<br />
“name, occupation, title, rank, age, height, and physical peculiarities.” 116 Out<br />
of the structure of this rule and exception—a racial bar and class exception—emerges a<br />
construction of identity, imbricating race and class. As one critic has written, under<br />
the law, one was either “Mongolian or a merchant”—raced labor or a deracinated elite.<br />
Almost immediately after the passage of the first Exclusion Act, the Chinese government<br />
issued over a thousand Section Six certificates to individuals identifying themselves<br />
as “merchants.” To correct for the liberal certification practices of the Chinese<br />
government, the Exclusion Act of 1884 required that Section Six certificate bearers<br />
113<br />
<strong>See</strong> Adam McKeown, Ritualization of Regulation: The Enforcement of Chinese Exclusion in the United<br />
States and China, 108 AM HIST. REV. 377 (1999) (citations omitted).<br />
114<br />
<strong>See</strong> Fong Yue Ting, 149 U.S. at 719 (upholding provisions requiring Chinese immigrants to carry<br />
identification upon penalty of deportation).<br />
115<br />
<strong>See</strong> id. at 726. The Exclusion Act of that year created a system of identifying and registering current<br />
Chinese residents. It required every Chinese laborer to obtain a certificate of residence; any one who filed<br />
to do so within a year was subject to deportation. But to obtain a certificate, a Chinese person needed “at<br />
least once credible white witness” to testify on his behalf—further attestation of the Chinaman’s essential<br />
untrustworthiness—and further depriving him of the authority to credibly narrate his own story.<br />
116<br />
<strong>See</strong> McKeown, supra, at 389-403.<br />
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also obtain a visa from a U.S. consul before leaving China. But in many instances, the<br />
consul applied a no more restrictive definition of “merchant” than the Chinese government—reflecting,<br />
as Adam McKeown has suggested, a divergence between local experience<br />
and understanding of what it meant to be a merchant, on the one hand, and<br />
the desires of the Bureau of Immigration to isolate a small class of admissible immigrants.<br />
117 Subsequent Acts called for clearer and narrower definitions of Section Six<br />
classes, especially “merchants,” eligible to obtain certificates.<br />
But, as McKeown has shown, by investing certificates and certification procedures<br />
with exclusive authority—that is, over the voice of immigrants and the discretion of<br />
informed officials—the rigid formalism that came to characterized immigration administration<br />
created new opportunities for fraud and evasion. As he notes, in the early<br />
years of Chinese Exclusions, fraud and evasion took the form of forged or counterfeit<br />
documents. The immigration bureaucracy responded by developing methods for<br />
authenticating documents—systems of cross-referencing names, photographs, fingerprints,<br />
the testimony of third parties. But as these mechanism stabilized—or at least<br />
heightened the investment in—the authority of identifying documents, Chinese immigrants<br />
found that it was easier to evade restrictions by becoming a fake person than<br />
producing a faked document. Tenacious immigrants found ways to become the individuals<br />
to whom certificates had been issued. Through questionnaires and interviews,<br />
identities were recreated to conform to prescribed categories. As McKeown found,<br />
some rented store fronts and set up illusory companies, often with hundreds of associates,<br />
also fake, to bring themselves within the definition of “merchant.” Brokers<br />
bought and sold good certificates (and narratives), attesting to their material value, and<br />
prepared immigrants for their encounters with immigration officials in the U.S. One<br />
immigration officer complained, “any new turn of phraseology of the [interview] questions<br />
is reported by aliens to [coaching] schools, incorporated in their drilling, and is<br />
brought to light within an astonishingly short time in the testimony of subsequent<br />
applicants.” 118 Thus, immigrants intent to evade discriminatory restrictions, rather<br />
117 <strong>See</strong> Id. For instance, McKeown a report written by a U.S. consul in China criticizing immigration<br />
officers in the U.S. for their mistaken belief that a person could be identified as a merchant only if he wore<br />
“silken robes.” In the consul’s experience, all of Hong Kong was a “vast warehouse,” in which the overwhelming<br />
majority of residents were involved in some form of merchandizing. The legislated distinction<br />
between undesirable laborer and admissible merchant was impossible to administer, in his view, because, in<br />
fact, almost everyone in Hong Kong was simultaneously a business-owner, merchant, and laborer.<br />
118 Still another example of this is what has become known as the “paper sons” affair. In 1906, earthquake<br />
and fire in San Francisco destroyed local public records, including many birth certificates. Thousands<br />
of Chinese men then present in California claimed that they were born in San Francisco before the<br />
earthquake. Because no documents could disprove their claims, they were suddenly reborn as natural citizens,<br />
at a time when the Exclusion Acts largely prevented them from naturalization. On subsequent trips<br />
to China, these citizens would claim to have fathered a child—usually a son—who would then be eligible to<br />
claim his <strong>American</strong> citizenship before reaching majority. In most instances, no child had been born, but<br />
the citizen-father would have created a “paper son” or administrative opportunity for a future immigrant to<br />
claim citizenship. Between 1925 and 1931, nearly six thousand returned citizens claimed more than<br />
16,000 sons and 1,000 daughters. Slots had been quickly commoditized in China—each slot accompanied<br />
(continued next page)<br />
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than resign them to the dispossession of authority through processes of authentication,<br />
learned to exploit the effects of bureaucratic truth-production to their own ends.<br />
Thus, in the encounter between the immigrant and the nation state, both are remade:<br />
the immigrant as veritable fraud, and the nation-state, through its immigration<br />
bureaucracy, as legitimate sovereign. In the context of Chinese Exclusion, the immigration<br />
bureaucracy effectively produced the fraud that it enlarges itself to protect. To<br />
be clear, bureaucratic dissembling begins not with the Chinese immigrant evading<br />
immigration laws, but with the laws themselves. With each revision, the original Chinese<br />
Exclusion Act, a rule of racial exclusion, one of dubious legitimacy in the first<br />
instance, gradually accrues to itself a legitimacy through its administration, its guarantee<br />
of procedural fairness, and adherence to “rule of law.” The legitimacy of the expanding<br />
immigration bureaucracy would come to rest not on its success at excluding<br />
the intended class of Chinese laborers, but in its standardized, predictable, and thus<br />
non-discriminatory application of law, however discriminatory. It is in this zone of<br />
mirrored dissimulation, in the variance between the certifiable and real, between the<br />
sign and its referent, that I locate Ghadiali’s strategic use of form, particularly documentary<br />
and photographic evidence. Returning to Figure 1, we can recognize that<br />
Ghadiali introduced his arrest record—not an especially flattering document—into evidence<br />
because, beside a visual representation of himself, he is describes as “white (Persian).”<br />
His volubility notwithstanding, if paper spoke louder than words, then he<br />
would speak through paper. More specifically, he would use paper to make claims<br />
about racial identity that, after Thind, his own body seemed to betray.<br />
The Hopeful Immigrants<br />
Reading the development of scientific and criminological photography together<br />
with the emerging tradition of commercial portraiture in the United States, Shawn<br />
Michelle Smith argues that photography played a role in producing a racialized middleclass<br />
identity in the United States. 119 The relatively low cost of photography in the<br />
late-nineteenth century afforded middle-class subjects new opportunities for ceremonial<br />
presentations of the self, which had previously been available only to a small elite.<br />
Commercial studios drew upon and developed conventions to distinguish the honorific<br />
self-presentation of portraiture from the repressive form of repressive identification<br />
with extensive coaching papers that would allows fictive families to reconstruct before incredulous immigration<br />
officers common memories of imaginary landscapes. The Bureau of Immigration responded with<br />
more intense interviews, questioning several family members about the number of windows in a room or<br />
events that took place on a nearby street. Of course, any detail that could be confirmed and crossreferenced<br />
by an immigration officer was also one that a broker, a coach, an immigrant could rehearse<br />
beforehand and—given the stunning predictability of the interview process—often was.<br />
119 SHAWN MICHELLE SMITH, AMERICAN ARCHIVES: GENDER, RACE, AND CLASS IN VISUAL CUL-<br />
TURE 3 (1999).<br />
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and documentation. 120 Distinctions of class were not dissolved in the common medium<br />
of photography, but were heightened through representational convention.<br />
Commercial portraiture drew the middle-class into conformity, standardizing the<br />
“look” of middle-class respectability. At the same time, photographic documentation<br />
produced the non-standard deviant type—the criminal, the immigrant, the urban<br />
poor—as objects of scrutiny, knowledge, and control. 121 Again, underwriting both traditions—of<br />
honorific self-presentation and regulatory documentation—was a set of characterological<br />
assumptions, a hermeneutic confidence that external appearance reflected<br />
internal character, how people live “inside.” 122<br />
In Figure 2, a portrait of the “Hopeful Immigrants in America as They Looked in<br />
January 1912,” we recognize a blurring of conventions, of the honorific and regulatory,<br />
in the representation of self. The photograph is a studio portrait of Ghadiali with his<br />
first wife, Manek, and their two young children, Kashmira and Khushcheher, positioned<br />
in front of a painted backdrop of the inside of a home—clearly not theirs. The<br />
draped curtains and gilded table, topped with an arrangement of flowers, are all markers<br />
of an <strong>American</strong> middle-class respectability and comfort that is not yet their but<br />
perhaps awaits them. The caption helps us to situate the image at the beginning of a<br />
familiar narrative of immigrant uplift and assimilation. But, insofar as captions often<br />
appear when images fail to speak for themselves, the caption also indexes uncertainty,<br />
the possibility of failure—a failure in the unfolding of the plot, a failure to look the<br />
part, a failure to project their own futurity.<br />
We might situate our own reading of the portrait among other reading practices—<br />
spectatorship, inspection, and surveillance—that begin but do not end at the border,<br />
practices that conflate the regulation of national boundaries with the monitoring of<br />
bodies. 123 Chinese immigrants were subject to particularly invasive inspection.” 124<br />
European immigrants, while spared more invasive and regulatory inspection, were still<br />
subject to what Pegler-Gordon describes as “observation.” 125 On Ellis Island, galleries<br />
were constructed from which physicians could scan the mass of entering bodies for<br />
signs of irregularity, as other officials surveyed the scene for signs of disorder. The<br />
galleries themselves attracted ordinary <strong>American</strong>s who came to behold the stunning<br />
120<br />
<strong>See</strong> Sekula, supra at 7.<br />
121<br />
<strong>See</strong> id.<br />
122<br />
<strong>See</strong> SMITH, supra at 4.<br />
123<br />
<strong>See</strong> ANNA PEGLER-GORDON, IN SIGHT OF AMERICA: PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF<br />
U.S. IMMIGRATION POLICY 104-173 (2009). Though the practices I describe here are specific to the latenineteenth<br />
and early-twentieth centuries, it is not hard to recognize the persistence of immigrant surveillance<br />
in contemporary laws such as those modeled after Arizona’s SB-1070.<br />
124<br />
NAYAN SHAH, CONTAGIOUS DIVIDES: EPIDEMICS AND RACE IN SAN FRANCISCO’S CHINATOWN<br />
179-203, 180 (2001). They were stripped, their eyelids flipped, wastes collected and examined; as one historian<br />
has written, “each new layer to visual scrutiny revealed hidden threats. The Chinese body, imagined as<br />
especially susceptible to parasites, would become a figure of hidden danger, compelling ever more scrutiny<br />
and surveillance.<br />
125<br />
PEGLER-GORDON, IN SIGHT OF AMERICA, supra at 104-173.<br />
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mass of people streaming through the gates and the spectacle of difference on parade.<br />
Pegler-Gordon aligns this form of spectatorship with visiting ethnographic exhibitions<br />
at the world’s fair or slumming—practices of observing structured by social distance<br />
and affirming the superiority of observer over the observed. 126<br />
Figure 2. A family portrait (1912)<br />
The portrait of the Ghadialis resembles the images of other hopeful immigrants<br />
upon their arrival in the early twentieth century, but with some notable difference.<br />
Pegler-Gordon writes that the several photographers who regularly took photographs at<br />
Ellis Island often pulled their subjects from processing lines and isolated them against<br />
backdrops. Their purpose in doing so was to distance the ugly scene of government<br />
processing and to isolate the distinctive features of their subjects, heightening the appearance<br />
of ethnographic difference. As Pegler-Gordon demonstrates, many of these<br />
photographs reflect a desire to not only catalogue but memorialize types, to capture the<br />
old-world differences (winged hats, heavy jewelry, long beards) before they disappeared<br />
126 <strong>See</strong> id. at 112<br />
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entirely in the process of <strong>American</strong>ization. This nostalgic mode of immigrant portraiture,<br />
Pegler-Gordon describes as “ethnographic honorific.” 127 The respectful presentation<br />
of these passing types confers a dignity to their subjects, mainly European, but it<br />
also bespeaks a confidence that the same subjects will eventually disappear into a homogenous<br />
<strong>American</strong> population. Does the Ghadialis’ portrait lay the same claim to<br />
assimilability as that of their European counterparts, for whom the signs of difference<br />
are erased with a change of costume? Or does the appearance of racial difference impede<br />
assimilation?<br />
Curiously, the hopeful Ghadialis arrive wearing none of the old-country clothing<br />
that featured so prominently in Ellis Island photography. Instead, they are shown<br />
wearing dark overcoats, worn boots, plain head-coverings. The Ghadialis’ clothing is<br />
unremarkable but for the striking incongruity between the appearance of defensive<br />
outerwear and warm intimacy suggested by the painted backdrop. How do we account<br />
for this incongruity, which seems only to exaggerate their status as outsiders?<br />
Perhaps the coats themselves were worth putting on display. Before arriving in the<br />
United States, Ghadiali had applied for residency in Canada. 128 Though he was a subject<br />
of the British Empire, he was denied entry under new regulations restricting the<br />
migration of Indian subjects to Canada. 129 Among the reasons Canadian officials citied<br />
for the regulation was the “humanitarian concern” that “the transfer of any people<br />
from a tropical climate to a northern one [must] result in much physical suffering and<br />
danger to health.” 130 If, as Canadian officials seemed to argue, the possibility of cultural<br />
assimilation was precluded by the supposed “climactic incompatibility” of Indians,<br />
perhaps we can recognize the Ghadiali’s coats to assert cultural assimilation as<br />
environmental adaptation.<br />
I want to venture here another, related, hypothesis. Perhaps Ghadiali and his<br />
family appear in coats and boots to disguise the fact that they were also covering their<br />
heads—not from the cold but in religious observance. At his denaturalization trial,<br />
Ghadiali recounted to the Judge that, in 1917, he had been thrown out of his naturalization<br />
oath ceremony for refusing to remove his topi. 131 As he testified, “the authorities<br />
lifted me and threw me out bodily.” 132 The incident was also reported in the New<br />
York Times:<br />
127 Id. at 126.<br />
128 DINSHAH P. GHADIALI, RAILROADING, supra 13.<br />
129 <strong>See</strong> Radhika Mongia, Race, Nation, and Mobility: A History of the Passport, 11 PUB. CULT. (1999), at<br />
533 (reviewing telegrams, confidential memoranda and reports exchanged between government officials in<br />
Britain, Canada, and India in 1906, after “some 2,000 people from North India” arrived in Vancouver,<br />
devising “race-neutral” policies to restrict further migration).<br />
130 <strong>See</strong> id. (citing “Memorandum: Re: Immigration of Hindoos [sic] to Canada,” Department of Commerce<br />
and Industry, Emigration Proceedings A, May 1907, no. 7, ser. no. 1.).<br />
131 GHADIALI, NATURALIZATION CASE, supra at 38.<br />
132 Id.<br />
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One hundred and five aliens, representing seven nations of Europe, renounced<br />
their allegiance to their former Governments and were made <strong>American</strong><br />
citizens… A little excitement was created when Dr. Dinshah P. Ghadiali of<br />
Hillsdale, N.J. … appeared in the court room wearing a turban hat, which he<br />
refused to remove when ordered by the court, and was ousted. 133<br />
Ghadiali was allowed to return to the oath ceremony, but his application was put aside<br />
until March of that year, after additional witnesses had testified in support of his application.<br />
Ghadiali explained to Judge Boyd, “It is a religious principle and a respect<br />
to the Honorable Court… We never make an Affirmation without a cap.” 134 But at<br />
other times and in other settings, when asked about his cap, Ghadiali would direct<br />
attention away from religious belief and offer a more secularized explanation for the<br />
religious practice. On his first visit to the United States in 1898, for instance, he explained<br />
to a reporter that the Zoroastrian cap prevents “loss of vital magnetism,” aligning<br />
his rhetoric with that of eugenicists preoccupied with racial “hygiene.” 135<br />
What Ghadiali wore on top of his head was not a turban but a topi, the headcovering<br />
traditionally worn by Parsi Zoroastrians in India, more closely resembling a<br />
skull-cap than a hair-wrap, but the newspaper’s mislabeling is telling of the way in<br />
which the turban had become a particularly noisy signifier by 1917. Earlier in the century,<br />
the turban was still an object of benign fascination, a picturesque ornament, so<br />
inert a signifier that was appropriated, as late as 1909, a women’s fashion craze. 136 But<br />
as Indian immigration to the United States increased, inciting animus from unions<br />
and anti-immigrant groups, particularly in the west, then the turban became an object<br />
of suspicion, associated with excessive religiosity, deviant masculinity, lack of cleanliness.<br />
137 The turban—especially the refusal to remove it—came to signify unruly differ-<br />
133<br />
105 Aliens Made Citizens: Flag Decks Hackensack Courtroom—Oriental Wears Green Skull Cap, N.Y.<br />
TIMES, Jan. 20, 1917, at 16.<br />
134<br />
GHADIALI, NATURALIZATOIN CASE, supra at 31.<br />
135<br />
Says X-Rays Are Not New, Views of Dinshar Pestonjee Ghadially, the Indian Scientist, N.Y. TIMES, Marc.<br />
11, 1896, at 16; see Warwick Anderson, “States of Hygiene: Racial ‘Improvement’ and Biomedical Citizenship<br />
in Australia and Colonial Philippines,” in Haunted By Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North <strong>American</strong><br />
Histories 94 (ed. Laura Ann Stoler) (2006).<br />
136<br />
<strong>See</strong> e.g., “Fez and Turban: Origin and Differences Between Headgear,” in Mineappolis Journal (Jan.<br />
13, 1900), p. 5 supplement; “Origin of the Turban,” in National Labor Tribune (Jan. 11, 1904), p. 7; “Humor<br />
of the Turban: Hat of the Moment is Simplicity Dressed for a Spree,” in Kansas City Times (Nov. 26,<br />
1909), p. 12B.<br />
137<br />
In the immediate wake of a mass shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin this past summer, sympathetic<br />
reporters and Sikh community leaders were quick to suggest that the terrible irony was that Wade<br />
Michael Page, a white supremacist, had targeted the Sikh temple because he had wrongly assumed that its<br />
occupants were Muslim. Since the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, many Sikhs have<br />
found themselves the target of “misdirected hatred.” Sikh community leaders, in turn, have organized<br />
educational campaigns to clarify the distinctions between Sikhs and Muslims, as if to redirect the hatred to<br />
its rightful target. A second wave of commentary then emerged to make better sense of the problem of<br />
misdirected hatred to assert that Muslims are no more deserving of violence than Sikhs. But, in an especially<br />
thoughtful editorial opinion, Simran Jeet Singh and Prabhjot Singh explained that the more concern-<br />
(continued next page)<br />
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ence, a refusal to assimilate, a resistance to discipline, a defiance. Thus, while the distinctive<br />
dress of Europeans features in Ellis Island photography as an object of mourning,<br />
the quaint difference lost to the process of <strong>American</strong>ization, the turban appears as<br />
a sign of stubborn defiance, flickering between the cultural and the immutably corporeal<br />
and, as such, as Puar suggests, between “that which can be disciplined and that<br />
which must be outlawed.” 138 Here, Ghadiali issues a form of sly insubordination,<br />
smuggling into the frame of a sign of religious attachment that exceeds what the middle-class<br />
portrait can accommodate.<br />
The Only Parsi Zoroastrian <strong>American</strong> Citizen<br />
At his denaturalization hearing, Ghadiali produced a second family portrait, one<br />
that he had printed on a publicity card announcing his citizenship in 1917. As he said<br />
to the Judge, “I was so proud of my citizenship, I put this before the public with the<br />
remarks, ‘The only Parsee Zoroastrian Citizen of the United States of America—<br />
America Always.’” 139<br />
In his Naturalization Case, the two family portraits, showing the Ghadialis first as<br />
new arrivals then as full-fledged citizens, appear on opposite pages, loosely conforming<br />
to the conventions of the familiar “before-and-after sequence.” The before-and-after<br />
sequence, Laura Wexler argues, had become something of a staple in reformist propaganda<br />
by the late nineteenth century. 140 Reformists used the convention to demonstrate<br />
to their capacity to turn others—emancipated slaves, pacified natives, raced immigrants—into<br />
citizens. The albums created for the Hampton Institute, for instance,<br />
depict young freedmen using modern wells, mixing fertilizer, receiving instruction for<br />
mechanical drawing. The photographs are supposed to evidence the Institute’s capacity<br />
to prepare freedmen for citizenship, but this is citizenship conceived narrowly as<br />
preparation for agriculture and industry, discipline and self-sufficiency.<br />
In the photograph, Ghadiali and his two children are positioned beside a projector.<br />
Here is a father preparing his children for citizenship—but a citizenship narrowly<br />
imagined as preparation for work, as self-reliance, and self-discipline. Ghadiali’s one<br />
hand rests on his son’s shoulder while the other handles the projector. The children’s<br />
eyes and hands are riveted to the machine. The machine, projecting a modernity that<br />
ing problem with the “misdirected hatred” analysis is that it “overlooks the long history of discrimination<br />
and hatred directed at Sikhs in America.” Simran Jeet Singh, How Hate Gets Counted, N.Y. TIMES, Aug. 24,<br />
2012. The authors note that Sikhs were the targets of vicious race riots in Bellingham, Washington, long<br />
before the attacks in 2001. They argue that “their distinct religious identity (uncut hair, turban, beard) has<br />
historically marked Sikhs, particularly men, as targets of discrimination.” As the authors suggest, it is the<br />
turban itself that seems to arouse or attract animus.<br />
138 JASBIR PUAR, TERRORIST ASSEMBLAGES: HOMONATIONALISM IN QUEER TIMES 171 (2007).<br />
139 GHADIALI, NATURALIZATION CASE, supra at 35.<br />
140 <strong>See</strong> WEXLER, supra at 127-176 (2000).<br />
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the bodies themselves cannot. While in his writing, Ghadiali represents himself as a<br />
genius, a zealously aspiring individual, here, the desire for aggressive upward mobility<br />
is carefully contained.<br />
Figure 3. A Publicity Card Announcing Citizenship (1917)<br />
One cannot help but notice the artifice of the image, the contrived choreography<br />
of the bodies depicted. There is the curious triangulation of looks: the children direct<br />
our gaze towards the projector, which seems to confront us with its look more directly,<br />
but our eyes return to bodies of the children, torqued as if to display not only their<br />
compliance with the photographer’s instructions but to inspection generally—the kind<br />
of inspection made a routine part of immigrant processing and selecting, the kind of<br />
inspection into which we, like the Judge, are drawn.<br />
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The tension between the appearance of racial difference and the project of assimilation,<br />
I want to suggest, can be further traced in the temporal framing of the photograph,<br />
the strangeness with which the image purports to capture development by arresting<br />
activity. But in the photographer’s stilling of the image, we recognize the violence<br />
of the imposed order. If the first portrait allows us to project “hope” into the<br />
Ghadiali’s future, the same bodies depicted here, in their uncomfortable state of suspended<br />
animation, disclose their precarious liminality, the threat of deportation and<br />
statelessness that loom in the event of poor performance.<br />
Ghadiali often identified himself proudly as “The Only Parsi Zoroastrian Citizen<br />
of the United States.” He delighted in representing the “smallest nationality” in the<br />
annual Fourth of July parade in 1919 (also billed the <strong>American</strong>ization Day parade that<br />
year). How does this announcement of compound identity complicate the claim to<br />
<strong>American</strong> citizenship? It may be tempting to read this expression of identity, or more<br />
open display of cultural particularity (see the religious caps) as an invitation to his contemporaries<br />
to envision an enlarged, pluralist vision of “<strong>American</strong>ness,” one that could<br />
accommodate hybridity and difference. But even if Ghadiali had been so optimistic in<br />
1917, when he published the image, we cannot but admit that, by 1934, at the time of<br />
his denaturalization trial, the practice of looking generalized and institutionalized by<br />
Thind had trained his contemporaries to see, as we still see, difference before anything<br />
else. The label “Parsi Zoroastrian” seems an attempt acknowledge the difference we<br />
detect, and steer our identification—“NOT Hindu.” Like the Bertillion mug shot, he<br />
frames his image with the vocabulary of racial looking.<br />
But Ghadiali was not the first or only Parsi Zoroastrian to become a citizen. Nor<br />
was he the first to face a challenge to his citizenship. In 1909, a New York district<br />
court cancelled the citizenship of another Parsi Zoroastrian, Bhikaji Balsara, admitting<br />
that, although Balsara himself may have made for a desirable citizen, he belonged to a<br />
group racially disqualified. 142 After Thind, at least one other Parsi Zoroastrian defended<br />
his citizenship by distinguishing his kind from Hindus, but the Second Circuit<br />
admitted no distinction: “A Parsee… can hardly be differentiated in the mind of the<br />
common man from that of the Hindus beside whom the Parsees have lived for 1,200<br />
years.” 143<br />
The Second Circuit’s racial reasoning follows that of Thind, shifting from ethnohistorical<br />
classification to “common sense” perception, but my point here is not to<br />
emphasize the elision of cultural and historical particularity implicated in the legal<br />
construction of “Hindu” identity. It is to call our attention not to the “fact” of difference—between<br />
“Hindu” and “Parsi Zoroastrian,” in this instance—but the processes of<br />
differentiation into which Ghadiali, like others who find themselves negotiating their<br />
142 <strong>See</strong> In Re Balsara, 171 F. 294 (S.D.N.Y 1909), rev’d, 180 F. 694 (2nd Cir. 1910).<br />
143 Id. at 9.<br />
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membership in despised communities, are sometimes compelled, sometimes complicit.<br />
The “only” registers the continuous and strenuous disavowal of Hindu community.<br />
Ghadiali’s family portraits are so unlike the photographs that have been collected in<br />
archives recording the experience of Indian immigrants in the early twentieth century.<br />
The most familiar photographs show groups of Sikh men disembarking at Angel Island,<br />
posing outside the factories and mills at which they worked, congregating in<br />
temples. These are mainly group photos. There are no wedding albums, no family<br />
portraits. But several images of communities gathered at funerals. Ghadiali, on the<br />
other hand, intent to hold himself apart from the working men, holds himself apart.<br />
He only ever appears with his family, alone.<br />
Figure 4. S.S. Minnesota, Seattle, WA, 1913 Figure 5. North Pacific Lumber<br />
Company Sawmill Workers<br />
Figure 6. Funeral of Utam Singh Figure 7. A Gurudwara in Stockton, CA, 1915<br />
Yuba City, CA, 1945<br />
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<strong>My</strong> Portrait in Uniform<br />
In addition to family portraits, Ghadiali submitted to the court a series of photographs<br />
of himself in police uniform, taken during the first world war. Ghadiali was<br />
Colonel and Commander of the New York Police Air Reserve, which he evidently established<br />
at his own expense, in 1918. 147 Ghadiali submitted to the court a letter of<br />
appointment, “reposing special trust and confidence in the Patriotism, Valor, Fidelity,<br />
and Abilities of Dinshah P. Ghadiali.” Ghadiali argued, “I should not have had that<br />
unless I were a citizen.” 149<br />
Ghadiali submitted another photograph in which he appears wearing flight<br />
glggles, standing before an airplane and a few dozen others in uniform. The caption at<br />
the bottom of the image, “Ready for New-York Philadelphia Flight, April 26, 1919,” is<br />
written by hand. 150 The image, we can assume, was drawn fro his personal collection.<br />
He took pride in it.<br />
Another photograph, taken the next year, shows several dozen members of the<br />
New York Police Reserve Service standing in rigid formation, uniformly erect. Though<br />
difficult to distinguish, Ghadiali appears front and center. His positioning designates<br />
rank. All other differences are made to disappear into the projected unity of the<br />
group. The repetition of the uniform impresses us with common purpose to which all<br />
other distinctions—of race, culture, class—are supposedly subordinated. 151<br />
Photographs of the raced officer in national uniform have become something of a fixture<br />
within the contemporary national imaginary. <strong>So</strong> ubiquitious that Roland Barthesoffered<br />
the example of a “young Negro in French uniform” appearing on the cover of<br />
Match, to illustrate his classical study of the myth. 152 Barthes wrote,<br />
I see very well what it signifies to me: that France is a great Empire, that all<br />
her sons, without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag,<br />
and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism<br />
than the zeal shown by this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors. 153<br />
Similarly, within the <strong>American</strong> context, images of the raced soldier appear to reconcile<br />
principles of formal equality with histories of racial subordination—both at home and<br />
147<br />
<strong>See</strong> GHADIALI, NATURALIZATION CASE, supra at 34.<br />
149<br />
Id.<br />
150<br />
Id.<br />
151<br />
I am indebted to Tina Campt’s reading of military group photographs. <strong>See</strong> TINA CAMPT, IMAGE<br />
MATTERS: RACE, PHOTOGRAPHY AND DIASPORA (2012).<br />
152<br />
<strong>See</strong> ROLAND BARTHES, MYTHOLOGIES 1-4 (trans. Anette Lavers) (1984).<br />
153 Id. at 4.<br />
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abroad. The grand narrative into which images of the raced soldier are often conscripted<br />
is one of racial progress at home, admiration for the United States and what it<br />
stands for abroad. It was precisely to this flattering self-image of the nation to which<br />
Ghadiali appealed. 154<br />
Figure 8. Ghadiali as Commander of New York Police Air Reserve (1919).<br />
Figure 9. New York Police Air Reserve at Memorial Day Parade (1919)<br />
154 Ghadiali also submitted evidence of his participation in the New York City Fourth of July Parade.<br />
Fourth of July that year, for the second time since the United States entered the world war, marked <strong>American</strong>ization<br />
rather than Independence. The parade was coordinated by government and business interests to<br />
provide foreign-born immigrants with the occasion to display national allegiance. This occasion, of course,<br />
was double-edged,: the parade provided immigrants a clear opportunity to improve their claim to citizenship<br />
and belonging, but failure to adequately display patriotic excitement rendered immigrants subject to<br />
suspicion. <strong>See</strong> Remembering World War I, NEW YORK STATE ARCHIVES,<br />
http://iarchives.nysed.gov/Gallery/gallery.jsp?id=149&ss=WWI. One historian notes that after the Fourth<br />
of July was turned over to celebrating Independence, <strong>American</strong>izationist turned to reclaim Labor Day by<br />
calling it Loyalty Day. Thus, particularly for the foreign-born, <strong>American</strong>ization is aligned not only with<br />
unqualified support of foreign policy but complete abandonment of shared interest with the working<br />
classes. <strong>See</strong> Noam Chomsky, A Few Words on Independence Day, COVERT ACTION Q. (Sum. 1995).<br />
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Of course, these imaged conceal as much as they reveal. Consider, for instance,<br />
the photograph of Bhagat Singh Thind, the named party in the Supreme Court case<br />
designating the racial status of “Hindus.” Thind’s photograph is often reproduced in<br />
contemporary accounts of Indian immigration and military service, but as often, without<br />
much commentary. As if the image speaks for itself. But obscured by the imagined<br />
transparency of the image is Thind’s anti-imperial politics, a politics which continues<br />
to challenge the limits of national form can accommodate.<br />
Thind came to the United States to study philosophy at the University of California<br />
at Berkeley. He spent his summers working in lumber mills in Oregon and then<br />
Washington, where became better acquainted with the hardships endured by laboring<br />
co-nationalists. <strong>So</strong>on afterwards he joined the Ghadar Party, an organization founded<br />
by an unlikely coalition of Indians students—many of them political exiles identified<br />
with the decolonization movement—and workers in California. Their purpose was to<br />
bring and end to British imperialism.<br />
Thind quickly became a local leader of the organization, serving as General Secretary<br />
of the Oregon chapter. 160 His public speeches, calling for an end to British rule in<br />
India, quickly brought him within the surveillance of the British Intelligence Agency,<br />
which described the Ghadar Party as a “terrorist” organization and labeled Thind himself<br />
as an “extremist.” 161<br />
With the start of the world war, and with the support of the German government,<br />
Ghadarites began leaving the United States to return to India to plot a rebellion. The<br />
German government supported the movement not because it had any deep opposition<br />
to imperialism, but because it recognized the opportunity to weaken its English enemy<br />
by supporting incipient rebellions in its colonies around the world. The British government<br />
had called on the United States to suppress Ghadar activities within its borders.<br />
The United States resisted until it officially entered war in 1917. 162 In the spring<br />
of that year, the government arrested more than one hundred individuals on suspicion<br />
of conspiring with the German government in violation of neutrality laws. In what<br />
was one of the most expensive trials in the United States at the time, thirty-five individuals—nine<br />
Germans, nine <strong>American</strong>s, and seventeen Indians—were tried for conspiracy.<br />
163<br />
Bhagat Singh Thind himself was not tried for conspiracy. Instead, he enlisted in<br />
the United States Army. He served for six months until he was honorably discharged<br />
in 1918. 164 Two years later, the Bureau of Immigration sought to cancel his citizenship,<br />
arguing before an Oregon district court that his affiliation with the Ghadar Party<br />
160<br />
<strong>See</strong> Bhagat Singh Thind, http://www.bhagatsinghthind.com/gadar_movement.php.<br />
161<br />
Id.<br />
162<br />
<strong>See</strong> RAMNATH, supra supra, note 120, at 1-27.<br />
163<br />
Id.<br />
164<br />
In re Bhagat Singh Thind, 268 F. 683, at 684 (Or. 1920).<br />
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rendered him “undesirable” as a citizen. The court disagreed, acknowledging that<br />
while Thind advocated national independence, he did not advocate violence. 165 The<br />
Court seemed convinced that his tenure in the United States had tempered his politics,<br />
as he had come to possess “a genuine affection for the Constitution, laws, customs,<br />
and privileges of this country.” The court was otherwise impressed that his “deportment”<br />
was that of a “good citizen.” The Supreme Court decision in 1923, cancelling<br />
Thind’s citizenship, made no mention of either Thind’s anti-imperialism or his<br />
military service, and instead framed the question in narrow terms of racial identity.<br />
Figure 11. Bhagat Singh Thind<br />
Ghadiali himself was not associated with the Ghadar or any other revolutionary<br />
party, and so, when, in 1914, his laboratory in New Jersey was visited by federal officers,<br />
as the New York Times reported, he was “surprised that his experiment in electricity<br />
had attracted the attention of the government.” 170 <strong>So</strong>mething about his identity<br />
brought him under suspicion. The offer asked Ghadiali if he had been communicat-<br />
165 Id. at 684.<br />
170 Says X-Rays Are Not New, Views of Dinshar Pestonjee Ghadially, the Indian Scientist, N.Y. TIMES 16<br />
(Mar. 11, 1896).<br />
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ing wirelessly with the German government. 171 Then he joined the war effort.<br />
The portrait in uniform represents national loyalty and sacrifice, but Ghadiali’s<br />
somewhat irritated testimony discloses a more mercenary motivation. He returns us to<br />
the idiom of contract.<br />
Here is my portrait in uniform… and this is one-sixth of the Staff Officers, whom<br />
I collected at my own expense to serve the country; during the time when they<br />
needed fliers, I created them your Honor… As a white man, I served the City of<br />
New York [for two] years… I was the man in charge of the Police Boat to receive<br />
the Commander in Chief John J. Pershing returning from the war. I was appointed<br />
by the Police Department to receive the first Transatlantic Flyers… I did<br />
all that to serve the country. Now, the Government does not need me… 172<br />
Ghadiali found himself in the same position as many other Asian immigrants who<br />
enlisted with the expectation that their service would be rewarded with citizenship.<br />
When the United States entered the war in 1917, immigrants, comprising nearly one<br />
sixth of the <strong>American</strong> population—were included among the targets of military recruitment.<br />
173 Most <strong>American</strong>s disfavored the war, but recruiters promoted military<br />
service to the foreign-born as the highest expression of <strong>American</strong> loyalty. Many immigrants<br />
seized the opportunity to display their patriotism. But others were simply<br />
drafted, as draft laws made little distinction between the native and foreign-born, or<br />
between citizen and alien. 174<br />
As other countries began objecting to conscription of their nationals, in May<br />
1918, Congress passed a law providing for the immediate naturalization of alien soldiers.<br />
175 <strong>So</strong>ldier naturalization averted diplomatic crisis and otherwise served the interests<br />
of military recruiters, assimilationists, and reformers alike. 176 But as hundreds<br />
of Asian servicemen began applying for citizenship, in July of 1919, the law precipitated<br />
a new crisis, as Lucy Salyer has shown. Although the Supreme Court had not yet<br />
ruled on the issue, most courts had reached the consensus that Asians were not eligible<br />
for citizenship under the Naturalization Act. And yet, the solider naturalization expressly<br />
provided for the naturalization of “any alien.” 177 The question forced by the<br />
Asian soldiers, as Salyer puts it, was whether “martial patriotism” or racial identity was<br />
the “quintessential criterion of citizenship.” 178<br />
Most judges denied the citizenship applications of Asian soldiers. In the few cases<br />
in which judges did naturalize Asian soldiers, federal officials were quick to issue bills<br />
171<br />
Seal Up Wireless on Foreign Ships, Radio Plants Warned, N.Y. TIMES 17 (Aug. 11, 1914).<br />
172<br />
GHADIALI, NATURALIZATION CASE, supra at 76.<br />
173<br />
<strong>See</strong> Salyer, at 851-853.<br />
174<br />
<strong>See</strong> id.<br />
175<br />
<strong>See</strong> id. (citing Act of June 29, 1906, as amended May 9, 1918, 34 Stat. 601, 40 Stat. 542.)<br />
176<br />
Id. at 852.<br />
177<br />
<strong>See</strong> id (citing Subdivision 7 of the 1918 statute).<br />
178 Id., at 848.<br />
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of cancellation, on grounds of “racial ineligibility.” 179 In United States v. Thind (1923),<br />
the Supreme Court definitively established a racial bar to naturalization and decisively<br />
closed down all other paths to citizenship for Asian immigrants. Emboldened by the<br />
Court’s decision, exclusionists sought more explicit determination on the question of<br />
naturalization of Asian soldiers. The Department of Justice made a test case of Hidemitsu<br />
Toyota, a Japanese immigrant who, after serving in the U.S. Coast Guard for ten<br />
years, was naturalized under the provisions of the 1918 soldier naturalization law. 180<br />
His citizenship was later rescinded on grounds of racial ineligibility. In Toyota v. U.S.<br />
(1925), the Supreme Court ruled that the 1918 solider naturalization act, though it<br />
provided for the naturalization of “any alien,” could not unsettle the long-standing<br />
“national policy to maintain the distinction of color and race.” 181<br />
Do the forms of identity connoted by the uniform naturalize Ghadiali’s apparent<br />
difference? Or do the stubborn denotations of race impede our recognition of identity?<br />
Does the judge, do we, trace even in these black and white images the imprint of<br />
color? This tension—between the connotation of national identity and denotations of<br />
racial difference—I would argue, also structure Barthes’ reading of the image of the<br />
“young Negro in French uniform.” The Negro solder, in Barthes’ reading, can only<br />
signify French universalism by first appearing to us as Negro.<br />
Disappearing Women<br />
While the photographs described above reference an explicitly masculine path of<br />
assimilation for Asian immigrants—through military participation, economic integration,<br />
performance of civic patriarchy—they imagine no place for Asian women. And,<br />
indeed, conspicuously absent from Ghadiali’s later family portraits is the appearance of<br />
his first wife, Manek.<br />
In 1917, the same year Ghadaili became a citizen, his wife, Manek, abandoned<br />
him and their children to return to India, alone. 182 Citizenship laws at the time provided<br />
that the citizenship status of married women was, as a general rule, derivative of<br />
her husbands. Alien women who married <strong>American</strong> citizens were naturalized by the<br />
marriage, but as long as she herself “might be lawfully naturalized.” 183 Leti Volpp has<br />
shown that while marital naturalization generally extended citizenship to foreign-born<br />
women who married <strong>American</strong> citizens—including some who never set foot in the<br />
United States—the same law generally prevented Asian women, married to citizens or<br />
179<br />
<strong>See</strong> Salyer, 854-862.<br />
180<br />
<strong>See</strong> Toyota v. U.S., 268 U.S. 402, 406 (1925).<br />
181<br />
Id.<br />
182<br />
GHADIALI, NATURALIZATION CASE, supra at 45.<br />
183<br />
Leti Volpp, Divesting Citizenship: On Asian <strong>American</strong> History and the Loss of Citizenship Through Mar-<br />
riage, 53 UCLA L. REV. 405, 457 (2005).<br />
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42 Munshi [5/11/2013<br />
otherwise, from becoming citizens. 184 The effect of the law was to ease the naturalization<br />
of white women, while impeding the formation of families among Asian immigrants—again,<br />
reproducing not only an ideal embodiment of citizenship but construction<br />
of the <strong>American</strong> family.<br />
Whether Manek was denied citizenship on grounds of racial ineligibility or otherwise<br />
we cannot know. Ghadiali’s testimony about his wife is brief and opaque. Leaving<br />
only the faintest impression of her arrival in the United States, Manek recedes<br />
from the record, and like so many women who shared her circumstances, returns to<br />
historical obscurity. But even a casual survey of the laws regulating the immigration of<br />
women in the beginning of the twentieth century allows us to imagine the particularly<br />
inhospitable circumstances in which women like Manek would have found themselves.<br />
Feminist historians note that the first racially restrictive immigration law, the Page<br />
Act of 1875, predating the first Chinese Exclusion Act by seven years, was enforced<br />
primarily to prevent Asian women from entering the country. 185 The express purpose<br />
of the law was to prevent the “involuntary migration” of contract workers and forced<br />
prostitutes, but at Congressional hearings, representatives voiced a more general concern<br />
about the presence of “cheap Chinese labor and immoral Chinese women.” 186<br />
One Representative described Chinese women as the “most undesirable class” of immigrants<br />
because they “spread disease and moral death among our population.” 187<br />
Rendered presumptive prostitutes by the law and its administration, Chinese women<br />
were figured as the foreign source of domestic degeneracy and a general threat to the<br />
boundaries of the white home. As legitimate wives, Asian women embodied the more<br />
menacing danger of reproducing an alien race within national borders.<br />
Historians note that the Page Act had almost no effect in restricting the migration<br />
of Chinese laborers. 188 The ban on prostitution, on the other hand, was aggressively<br />
enforced, discouraging even wives from joining their husbands. 189 Even before immigrating<br />
to the United States, Chinese women were subject to prolonged investigation<br />
by consular officials in China. Those who made as far as the United States border<br />
were often separated from other family members, their bodies examined for signs of<br />
184<br />
<strong>See</strong> id. (citing Low Wah Suey v. Bakus , 225 U.S. 460 (1912)).<br />
185<br />
<strong>See</strong> Kerry Abrams, Polygamy, Prostitution, and the Federalization of Immigration <strong>Law</strong>, 105 COLUM. L.<br />
REV. 641, 677 (2005).<br />
186<br />
<strong>See</strong> George Anthony Peffer, “Forbidden Families: Emigration Experiences of Chinese Women<br />
Under the Page <strong>Law</strong>, 1875-1882,” in 6 J. OF AM. ETHNIC HIST. (Fall 1986), 28 (citing Representative<br />
Horace F. Page, sponsor of the Page Act.)<br />
187<br />
Id.<br />
188<br />
The number of Chinese men entering the United States during the period of Page Act enforcement<br />
exceeded that of any over seven year period before the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882.<br />
<strong>See</strong> EITHNE LUIBHEID, ENTRY DENIED: CONTROLLING SEXUALITY AT THE BORDER, 31-54 (2002). <strong>See</strong><br />
GEORGE PEFFER, IF THEY DON’T BRING THEIR WOMEN HERE: CHINESE FEMALE IMMIGRATION BEFORE<br />
EXCLUSION (1999)<br />
189<br />
<strong>See</strong> TATAKI, at 40.<br />
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“immorality.” 190 A law passed in 1907 made prostitutes among the first classes of deportable<br />
aliens, extending the reach of the earlier immigration law by allowing for the<br />
surveillance of any resident alien suspected of prostitution for an indefinite period of<br />
time.<br />
Again, while we cannot know whether it was the effect of these laws that prevented<br />
or discouraged Manek from pursuing a life in the United States, it is not difficult<br />
to recognize that her disappearance would ease the unfolding of Ghadiali’s own<br />
narrative of <strong>American</strong>ization. The “Hindu” wife, denied entry to the labor market or<br />
public sphere—her movement out of the home always shadowed by the suggestion of<br />
sexual illicitness—was at best, the keeper of the home. But the immigrant home,<br />
grossly disparaged as the object of reform, was itself the repository of sexual pathology,<br />
illiberality, and unwelcome cultural difference. As such, the claim to becoming<br />
<strong>American</strong> asserted in Figure 3 is advanced as much by the disciplining of the bodies<br />
depicted as by the disappearance of the Asian wife and mother.<br />
With Manek out of the picture, Ghadiali would improve his claim to <strong>American</strong>ness<br />
by introducing evidence of his new wife, Irene Grace, native-born and of<br />
“German descent.” As he said to the court, “<strong>My</strong> wife is a White woman; if I were a<br />
Hindu, she would never have married me.” 191 But Ghadiali’s second marriage would<br />
produce its own set of tensions. Marriage to a white woman evidenced acceptance by<br />
white <strong>American</strong>s, entry to respectability and the <strong>American</strong> family. But marriage to a<br />
white woman inevitably raised the specter of miscegenation. In his voluminous selfwriting,<br />
Ghadiali says relatively little about his marriage to Irene. In his brief and<br />
muted descriptions of her, he is only careful to distance her from the image of the<br />
“New Woman” who flouted social conventions. As he wrote in Railroading a Citizen, a<br />
testimonial of the events leading up to his Mann Act conviction, Ghadiali says only in<br />
passing that it was her Protestant industriousness, her “simplicity in dress, nonfollowing<br />
of the foolish fashions, so dear to the average flapper [that] were so to my<br />
liking that I began to consider her qualifications as a wife.” 192<br />
Figure 12 depicts Ghadiali’s five sons from his second marriage. The youngest<br />
are perched on tricycles, the oldest is on his bicycle, the sentimental properties of middle-class<br />
<strong>American</strong> childhood well-displayed. Though all of Ghadiali’s children were<br />
schooled at home—at a time when Asian <strong>American</strong> children in some parts of the country<br />
were prevented from attending white public schools—their matching uniforms seem<br />
to place them within a metonymic sequence that extends from brotherhood to mem-<br />
190 <strong>See</strong> MARTHA GARDNER, THE QUALITIES OF A CITIZEN: WOMEN, IMMIGRATION, AND CITIZEN-<br />
SHIP, 50-72 (1870-1965).<br />
191 GHADIALI, supra, note 1, at 35.<br />
192 GHADIALI, RAILROADING A CITIZEN 75 (1925).<br />
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bership within the national community. 193<br />
Figure 12. A photograph of Ghadiali’s sons from his second marriage (1929)<br />
In Thind, the Court determined that no amount of education or discipline could<br />
prepare the children of Ghadiali’s first marriage to incorporate themselves into the<br />
national body. As Justice Sutherland explained, “the children… of Hindu parents<br />
would retain indefinitely clear evidence of their ancestry… of such extent and character<br />
that the great body of our people instinctively recognize it and reject the thought of<br />
assimilation.” 194 Compare the representation of the children from Ghadiali’s first<br />
marriage to those of his second. In the earlier image, the children are pictured in<br />
training. Here, we are invited to imagine the children at play. Here, the children fix<br />
their gaze narrowly upon the projector, the symbol of <strong>American</strong>ness in the photograph;<br />
they hold their bodies open to display. Here, Ghadiali’s mixed-race children<br />
look directly into the camera, their look eliciting what Marianne Hirsch has described<br />
as “familiality,” a recognition of the continuity in the domestic arrangements that extend<br />
from subject to spectator—in this case, the Judge, who seemed far more captivated<br />
193 <strong>See</strong> Lum v. Rice, 275 U.S. 78 (1927) (state laws providing separate educational facilities for white<br />
children and colored children—“black, yellow, and brown”—did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment<br />
rights of an <strong>American</strong>-born child of Chinese descent).<br />
194 Thind, 261 U.S. at 215.<br />
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by Ghadiali’s family album than he was by any other evidence of racial identity. 195 In<br />
Figure 3, <strong>American</strong>ness is represented by the children themselves, their lighter skin,<br />
the relative comfort with which they seem to inhabit their environment—here, a natural<br />
setting—and their own bodies.<br />
But while Figure 12 gestures at a continuity between Ghadiali’s family and the<br />
nation, what is noticeably absented from Ghadiali’s family album is any impression of<br />
racial discontinuity within the family. The photographs assemble as family either the<br />
Parsi Ghadialis (Dinshah, Manek, and their two children), or the mixed-race Ghadialis<br />
(the sons from his second marriage), but in none of these photographs are Ghadiali<br />
and Irene Grace pictured together. The suppression of the mixed-race couple of<br />
course signals the limits of the family portrait, what its conventions can familialize or<br />
naturalize. I have come across only one published photograph in which Ghadiali and<br />
his second wife, Irene, are pictured together. Though they are shown together, presumably<br />
working an invention, alongside Ghadiali’s daughter, Kashmira, it was framed<br />
as a scandal. The photograph was published in the Dearborn Independent, a newspaper<br />
known to reflect the anti-Semitic and xenophobic leanings of its owner, Henry Ford.<br />
The caption to the photograph reads, “Dinshah P. Ghadiali… who has come out of the<br />
Orient to heal the ills of mortal man… and his wife, Irene Grace Ghadiali, who claims<br />
to be an <strong>American</strong>.” 196 Behind the rhetorical withholding of recognition of national<br />
identity lay a real threat of expatriation. While the citizenship of wives generally followed<br />
that of their husbands, the Expatriation Act of 1907 provided that “any <strong>American</strong><br />
woman who marries a foreigner shall take the nationality of her husband.” 197 In<br />
1922, in response to outcry by newly enfranchised women voters, Congress passed the<br />
Cable Act generally repealing the martial expatriation provisions, but with important<br />
exception: <strong>American</strong> women who married “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” a category<br />
reserved for Asian immigrants, might herself lose her citizenship. At his denaturalization<br />
hearing, as the Judge scanned the images of Manek and Irene Grace, Ghadiali<br />
pointed out the awful irony of his situation. He explained that he was deserted by his<br />
first wife, “because I would become a Citizen. Now America throws me out and my<br />
second wife will desert me because I did not become a Citizen. The government puts<br />
me in a funny position.” 198<br />
CONCLUSION<br />
195<br />
MARIANNE HIRSCH, FAMILY FRAMES: PHOTOGRAPHY, NARRATIVE, AND POSTMEMORY 48 (1997).<br />
196<br />
Morgan Robert, Colored Glass Now Cures All Our Ills, THE DEARBORN INDEPENDENT 4 (MAR. 15,<br />
1924).<br />
197<br />
Expatriation Act, ch. 254 §4, 34 Stat. 1228, 1229 (1907).<br />
198<br />
Act Relative to the Naturalization and Citizenship of Married Women (Cable Act), ch. 411, 42<br />
Stat. 1021 (1922).<br />
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After both parties made their final arguments, as Ghadiali narrated, “there was a<br />
tense silence pervading the Court… The Honorable Judge was seated on his bench,<br />
with his hands folded behind his neck, for a few short moments, gazing steadily into<br />
space.” 199 The Judge finally spoke, somewhat uneasily:<br />
The real issue, I suppose, laying aside all the technicalities, is as to whether or<br />
not the Respondent was and is a White Person, as contemplated in the Statute.<br />
The decision of this question is rather difficult, in view of the fact that<br />
the Races of the Earth are considerably mixed at the present time, have been,<br />
of course, for years, by reason of transfer from one locality to another and that<br />
there is no tracing of the descent of this Respondent, excepting in his own<br />
recollection or tradition, I suppose, coming down through his family and the<br />
works that have been produced of different persons, with relation to the separation<br />
of the Races. 200<br />
Throughout the trial, Judge Boyd had expressed some reluctance to apply the ruling in<br />
Thind to make a determination about Ghadiali’s racial identity. In the end, rather<br />
than apply the rule, Judge Boyd decided the case on procedural grounds. In his view,<br />
the question of Ghadiali’s eligibility for citizenship had been litigated once before,<br />
more than fifteen years before, and that res judicata precluded its reopening. As he<br />
said,<br />
I am inclined to think… that the Respondent is a White Person, in the contemplation<br />
of the Statute. But regardless of that, here is a man who was naturalized<br />
after a hearing… authorized to be admitted as a Citizen, and that the<br />
[Common Pleas Court in Bergen County,] either on its own motion or with<br />
the assent, consent, and approval of the Government, authorized, found, concluded<br />
and decided that the Respondent was a White Person, entitled to be<br />
naturalized under the Statute which is now in question… I think that in the<br />
instant case, the case we are now trying, that it is res adjudicata… that the<br />
Court has not the power at present to grant the Prayer of the Bill of Complaint<br />
and cancel the Naturalization Certificate, now held by the Respondent,<br />
and as a result, I feel it my duty to dismiss the Bill of Complaint. 201<br />
Thus, Ghadiali prevailed in his case. But his win did little to unsettle prevailing white<br />
supremacy. For instance, the New York Times, in an editorial about Ghadiali’s case,<br />
199 GHADIALI, NATURALIZATION CASE, supra at 85.<br />
200 Id.<br />
201 Id. at 85-86.<br />
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supported Ghadiali’s claim to citizenship—but on grounds of the “scientific evidence”<br />
he presented to the court. From the opinion:<br />
The defendant contends that he is not a Hindu but a Parsee of the Indo-<br />
Iranic or Indo-European family to which all the leading racial white strains belong.<br />
But even if he were a Hindu, the argument from ethnology and philology<br />
would carry force. If anybody was entitled to an Indo-European club it<br />
ought to be a native of India. 202<br />
The Times opinion, rather than challenge white supremacy calls for the slightest enlargement<br />
of “club” membership. But it would be a mistake to collapse Ghadiali’s<br />
narrative into the grand narrative of national progress, of gradual but eventual inclusion<br />
and incorporation.<br />
What do these images disclose to us? What can they represent about Ghadiali<br />
beyond the strangling circumstances in which he found himself? Ultimately, the images<br />
reveal far less about Ghadiali than about those who scrutinized him. What the<br />
photographs images reflect is something about the character of nation itself, the particular<br />
narrowness with which it would regard others. They convey, I think, the failure<br />
to establish a vision of equality that extends beyond recognition or familiarity.<br />
Rabindranath Tagore, visiting the United States in the beginning of 1917, speaking<br />
before massive audiences, addressed himself a that perennial question, “What is a<br />
Nation?” 203 He spoke just before the United States entered the war and closed its borders<br />
to new immigrants. He warned his audience that the nation was a paranoid form<br />
of self-idolatry, an organized selfishness that reproduced itself around the world by<br />
goading its neighbors with greed and fear. Tagore suggested to his <strong>American</strong> audience,<br />
“a parallelism exists between India and the United States—the parallelism of welding<br />
together into one body various races.” Refusing the nativist construction of the<br />
United States, Tagore recognized about the United States its constitutive diversity.<br />
“What India has always been,” he further observed, “the whole world is now.” By<br />
that he meant that just as India had come to receive a diversity of foreigners,<br />
innovations of travel and communication had made it possible to flood geographical<br />
limits as never before. But while “India tolerated differences from the first,” in the<br />
new world colonies, “Europe had simplified her problem” or difference through extermination<br />
and exclusion. He continued,<br />
During the evolution of the Nation the moral culture of brotherhood was limited<br />
by geographical boundaries, because at that time, those boundaries were true.<br />
Now they have become imaginary lines of tradition divested of real obstacles. <strong>So</strong><br />
the time has come when man’s moral nature must deal with this great fact… Man<br />
202<br />
203 RABINDRANATH TAGORE, NATIONALISM (1917).<br />
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48 Munshi [5/11/2013<br />
will have to exert all his power of love and clarity of vision to make another great<br />
moral adjustment which will comprehend the whole world of men and not<br />
merely fractional groups of nationality…. If it is given at all to the West to struggle<br />
out of these tangles of the lower slopes to the spiritual summit of humanity, then<br />
I cannot but think that it is the special mission of America to fulfill this hope of<br />
God and man. <strong>You</strong> are the country of expectation, desiring of something else<br />
than what is.<br />
These images, I think, compel us to re-envision, to recognize the stranger, not in terms<br />
of recognition, but in terms of the occasion for “moral adjustment” his difference<br />
brings.<br />
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