Islands of Sovereignty: Haitian Migration and the Borders of Empire
- ISBN-10
- 1303005239
- ISBN-13
- 9781303005237
- Pages
- 364
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2013
- Authors
- University of Chicago, Jeffrey Sterling Kahn
Description
While excavating this history, I focus on the cosmological dimensions of what I call "law space" practices and discourses in order to show how efforts to reconfigure the legal armature of nation-state spatiality can refashion the contours of the worlds in which various subjects circulate. In this particular instance, the history of Haitian migration and Haitian rights lawfare is uniquely illuminating, because it sheds light on the medicalized geographies, the sovereign anxieties, and the liberal imaginaries of substantive nation-state self-fashioning that pre-existed but also prefigured the legal shifts of the contemporary, post-9/11 moment. In order to investigate these histories, I interrogate the production of legal framing narratives and ideologies in sites ranging from federal court houses to asylum pre-screening stations at Guantanamo Bay. By tying the intricate but often haphazard processes through which such legal edifices are established to the anxieties of eroding sovereignty and imaginaries of threatening social and biological pathologies that often drive them, I show how new spatio-temporal incarnations of the nation-state arose in the border laboratories of Haitian rights lawfare.
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Other editions
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- 2019-01-03
- 352 pages
- Paperback
- Chicago Series in Law and Soci