Connecting corporate software work in the United States and Germany, this essay tracks the racialization of mostly male Indian software engineers through the casualization of their labor. In doing ...

Bored Techies Being Casually Racist: Race as Algorithm:

This article investigates the journey of the Komagata Maru in 1914, and the multiple exclusions of its primarily Sikh passengers from various colonial jurisdictions, through the lenses of global an...

Law, Identity and Imperial Logics of Exclusion: The Case of the Komagata Maru Passengers

Predominantly a European phenomenon, the study of legal iconography has expanded to the common law world and informed approaches to Anglo-American legal development. European painting, sculptures, and other artwork were used in forensic settings to channel behavior of judges, lawyers, and litigants. Such artwork often combined religious perspectives, such as depictions of the Last Judgement, but might also reflect more secular notions such as Justice. Cultural historians and theorists have supplemented these more traditional approaches by expanding the scope of the analysis of the relationship between image and law. This study illustrates the potential for legal iconography to offer deeper insights into law, legal institutions, justice, injustice, and legal change in modern society.

Legal Iconography and Painting Constitutional Law

In 2015, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters he chose a gender-balanced cabinet “because it’s 2015,” a sentiment that resonated with Leftists and feminists. Trudeau showed he was a different kind of male politician through his yoga practice. Through candid yoga photographs, Trudeau represented himself as a sensitive new age guy who challenged hegemonic masculinity through wellness, playfulness, and a commitment to multiculturalism. Using discourse analysis, we examine visual, print, and social media texts that feature Trudeau’s connection to yoga, masculinity, and nationbuilding. We argue that Trudeau’s yoga body projects a “hybrid masculinity” (Bridges 2014; Demetriou 2001) that constructs Trudeau as a benevolent patriarch, which is mapped onto a fantasy of Canada as a multicultural nation with feelings.

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"Because It’s 2015!": Justin Trudeau’s Yoga Body, Masculinity, and Canadian Nation-Building

Contemporary immigration law cannot be understood without an understanding of the imperial contexts from which they emerged. This Article explores the continuity between the imperial formations that defined the nineteenth century and the practices of immigrant exclusion that emerged in the early twentieth century, by focusing on Indian immigration to — and eventual exclusion from — the United States and other white-settler nations. Until the turn of the twentieth century, there were relatively few restrictions on international migration. European imperialism and settler colonialism were sustained by mass migration, both voluntary and involuntary. With the arrival of Asian immigrants, white-settler nations abandoned their longstanding commitment to “the rights of man to change his home and allegiance” to establish an “absolute and unqualified” right of nations to exclude and deport foreigners. As this Article demonstrates, the legislative and political maneuvers that culminated in the exclusion of Asian immigrants from white-settler nations would precipitate a powerful shift in prevailing conceptions of national identity, territorial sovereignty, and the associated right to exclude foreigners. Moreover, as the history of Indian exclusion illuminates, by the time so many peoples in the colonized world gained their freedom — in the limited form of territorial sovereignty — they had already lost the freedom of movement that had long been enjoyed by Europeans and their descendants in the New World. National boundaries would provide a durable solution to the problem that decolonization might have otherwise unleashed upon the existing world order—the free movement of poor peoples to rich nations.

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Immigration, Imperialism, and the Legacies of Indian Exclusion

This Article seeks to reanimate comparative legal scholarship by reorienting it towards decolonizing critique. In his critical assessment of the state of the field, Pierre Legrand suggests that comparative law has become mired in a solipsistic and outmoded style of positivism. Drawing upon theoretical insights from critical theory, Legrand argues that comparative law might render itself more generative and more relevant by engaging in a more contextualized analysis of law and encouraging active interpretation beyond descriptive reporting. This Article extends Legrand’s arguments to suggest that an emancipated, incorporative, and interdisciplinary comparative law might play an important role in decolonizing legal scholarship more broadly. Founded in a commitment to constrain an ethnocentric impulse in legal discourse, comparative law might be expanded to challenge the varieties of Eurocentrism that continue to define legal scholarship and study, while providing hospitable ground for critical and interdisciplinary projects aimed at exploring the colonial roots of both the contemporary nation-state system and globalized racial formations.

Comparative Law and Decolonizing Critique

In 1932, the United States government sought to cancel the citizenship of Dinshah Ghadiali, an immigrant from India, alleging that Ghadiali “by reason of his not being a free white person or a person of African nativity or descent is, and was, ineligible racially for naturalization.” Ghadiali was one of dozens of Indian immigrants targeted for denaturalization in the wake of United States v. Thind (1923), in which the Supreme Court declared that “Hindus,” though capable of cultural assimilation, would remain visually unassimilable. At his denaturalization trial, Ghadiali submitted into evidence a series of photographs, assuring the judge, “You will see my family became so American.” How do these photographs purport to show that Ghadiali and his family had become “so American”? In this essay, through a through a close reading of Ghadiali’s photography, I explore a tension between the visualization of race—a practice at once institutionalized by law and inextricably bound with the medium of photography—and the performance of national belonging.

'You Will See My Family Became so American': Race, Citizenship, and the Visual Archive

Racism in the United States has proven to be a remarkably recombinant ideology, ever shifting in its dominant practices and expressions, but invariably reproducing distinctions among people as justifications for preserving social distance. This article, through a recovery of the history of “Hindu” exclusion from the United States in the early twentieth century, traces the emergence of what some scholars have identified as the “neo-racism” of our contemporary global order, a “racism without races” that disappears into the naturalized horizon of national boundaries. Almost as soon as Indians began immigrating to the United States, exclusionists hoped to pass a Hindu Exclusion Act modeled after the Chinese Exclusion Acts. Though their efforts failed, in 1917, another law, barring immigration from an invented “Asiatic Barred Zone,” was passed by Congress with an overwhelming majority. The ingenuity of that law was that it restricted immigration not on the basis of identity — racial or national — but on the basis of geographic origin. That law powerfully shifted the ground of exclusion from racialized bodies to the apparently neutral and natural relation between peoples and places.

Race, Geography, and Mobility

From the moment President Donald Trump signed it into effect, the Muslim ban would become the focus of outrage. Thousands gathered at airports across the country to protest the executive order. Lawyers filed challenges. Universities and CEOs issued public condemnations. Earlier that same week, the President signed another executive order, calling for the creation of a massive deportation force which, within a few months, rounded up hundreds of thousand of undocumented immigrants, terrorizing millions more. Another executive order halved the number of refugees annually admitted to the country and cancelled the protected status previously extended to displaced Haitians and Central Americans. Those orders generated far less outrage, few protests, no corporate press releases. Why does the Muslim ban seem to betray “everything we stand for,” as Dick Cheney announced, while the other orders are received with relative complacence? 

This essay attempts to answer that question by tracing a set of shifts in the rhetorical norms and legal architecture governing immigration law and policy over the past century. The controversial enactment of the Muslim ban is particularly resonant with failed attempts to pass a “Hindu” ban, almost exactly one hundred years before. Constrained by a shift in global norms governing racial discourse, Congress hoping to exclude Indian immigrants from the United States eventually succeeded in passing a law to exclude “Hindus” not “by name” but through the invention of a geographic designation, the “Asiatic Barred Zone.” In the post-colonial era, the exclusion of immigrants on the basis of racial identity is no longer tolerable, but the exclusion of immigrants on the basis of nationality or place of origin has become entirely normative—as the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the Muslim ban demonstrates.

Sherally Munshi

Papers

Immigration, Imperialism, and the Legacies of Indian Exclusion

Comparative Law and Decolonizing Critique

'You Will See My Family Became so American': Race, Citizenship, and the Visual Archive

Race, Geography, and Mobility

Manners of Exclusion: From the Asiatic Barred Zone to the Muslim Ban