“You Will See My Family Became So American”
Indian Immigration, Racial Visibility, and Specular Citizenship
Sherally Munshi*
Abstract. This paper explores the vexed relationship between legal form and personhood
that arises in the context of Indian immigration and naturalization in the early twentieth
century. In 1932, Dinshah P. Ghadiali received notice that the government was seeking to
cancel his citizenship on grounds of “racial ineligibility.” In his self-published writing
about the trial, Ghadiali wondered whether he been singled out for persecution by professional rivals. In fact, he had been caught in a larger campaign to denaturalize citizens of
Indian origin after the Supreme Court, in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), determined that “Hindus” were racially ineligible for citizenship. I offer a reading of Ghadiali’s
trial to explore the tension between rhetorical colorblindness, as an emergent idiom for
equality, and the perceptible “common sense” of racial difference. I focus my reading on
the photographs Ghadiali submitted to the Court to explore the imbrications of bodies
and discipline, essence and performance in the context of immigrant naturalization.
*
Sherally Munshi, JD, PhD Candidate, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia
University. skm2117@columbia.edu I wish to thank Marianne Hirsch, Saidiya Hartman, Patricia Williams,
Julie Peters, Bruce Robbins, Sonali Thakkar, Jennifer James, Autumn Womack, Hawa Allen, Feroze Munshi and Patricia Arnillas for their generous insights and contributions.
DRAFT—PLEASE DO NOT CITE
5/11/2013
2
Munshi
[5/11/2013
INTRODUCTION
On the morning of October 13, 1932, Dinshah P. Ghadiali was at home in New
Jersey eating breakfast with his wife and five sons when a “dignified gentleman” entered the room and, announcing himself as an officer of the Bergen County Court,
presented Ghadiali with a notice of complaint.1 The federal government was seeking
to cancel his citizenship on grounds that it had been “illegally procured.”2 As the
complaint alleged, “Dinshah P. 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.” The complaint further alleged that, unless Ghadiali surrendered his Naturalization Certificate, which he had obtained fourteen years earlier, he would be perpetrating a “fraud” against the United States.3 Upon reading the complaint, Ghadiali reflected,
So I was not a White man and not a Black man either. What then
was I? ... I looked ruefully at my skin, that unfortunate covering
which had brought me into Court once more. I rubbed it to see
what was underneath, but do what I could, no color wave that I
could recognize other than White shone forth.4
In this early passage in his self-published Naturalization Case (1944), Ghadiali offers us
a familiar, if idiosyncratic, expression of the problem of racial identification confronted by the new immigrant to the United States in the early twentieth-century.
How does the new immigrant represent himself in language and within realms of visibility constructed along color lines? Ghadiali continued,
I had presumed all along that I was White, of White father, White mother,
White family, White ancestry, White nationality, White race, White through
and though—in fact, I was always a Mr. White and here comes [this Naturalization Officer] and swears that I was not White, although he never saw me or
shook hands with me.5
The repetition of the claim, of course reveals its urgency. It also calls attention to the
ways in which racial identity is constituted through language and performance,
through iterative speech acts and embodied behavior. Ghadiali’s self-reflexive representation, also raises for us, as readers, a series of questions about what Joan Scott has
described as the problem of reading and writing “the history of difference, the history,
1
DINSHAH P. GHADIALI, NATURALIZATION CASE CLEARING CONTESTED CITIZENSHIP 1 (1943).
Id. at 12.
3
Id. at 3.
4
Id. at 5.
5
GHADIALI, supra, at 6.
2
DRAFT— PLEASE DO NOT CITE
5/11/2013]
Junior Scholar Workshop
3
that is, of the designation of the ‘other,’ of the attribution of characteristics that distinguish categories of people from some presumed norm.”6 How can we read an account like Ghadiali’s without reproducing the terms of difference, without succumbing to the persuasions of sameness, without reproducing the self-evidence or “facticity”
of racial identity? I want to suggest that Ghadiali’s histrionic insistence on being
White, his rueful rubbing of the skin seem to call forth all of the ironies attending his
awful predicament—one of identifying himself within an absurdist racial discourse
masquerading under authority of science, law, and common sense—turning his predicament into a kind of parody, one that requires his readers and judges to produce an
alternative scheme for addressing the question, “what then was I?”
Ghadiali immigrated to the United States in 1911 with the hope of establishing
himself as an important inventor. Instead, he earned notoriety as an irrepressible
quack. He became a naturalized citizen in 1917, the same year that Congress passed a
law banning further immigration from all of Asia. Ghadiali was arrested on several
occasions for violating laws regulating the practice of medicine, but after marrying a
white woman, in 1923, he became the target of increasingly racialized persecution. In
1925, Ghadiali was arrested in Oregon, for violating the Mann Act, accused of “mesmerizing” women and inducing them into “white slavery.” He was sentenced to prison
for five years. In 1932, when Ghadiali received notice of the government’s intent to
cancel his citizenship, he assumed he was the victim of a conspiracy among professional rivals, or that he had been singled out for publicizing his wrongful conviction.
In fact, he had been caught in a much broader campaign to denaturalize citizens of
Indian origin, after the Supreme Court, in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923),
had designated “Hindus” “racially ineligible for citizenship.”
Ghadiali purchased a printing press early in his career to promote his inventions,
but gradually repurposed the press to archiving the injuries and affronts that he suffered at the hands of so many police, newspapers, judges, and juries. Naturalization
Case, like others of Ghadiali’s self-published volumes, re-presenting his legal trials, appears as a heterogeneous assemblage, an unresolved intercalation of official documents—trial transcripts, newspaper clippings, mug shots—and unofficial cries, quarrelsome correction, private narration. These unusual records of self-making are compelling not because they disclose some truth that lies outside of the law. Instead because
they attest to the often unacknowledged ways in which law penetrates social being.
Ghadiali’s insistence on being recognized as white and citizen attest to the imbrication
of bodies and discipline, of essence and performance.7
6
Joan W. Scott, Experience, in FEMINISTS AND THE POLITICAL 23, 23 (Judith Butler & Joan W. Scott,
eds.) (parenthetical omitted).
7
I am indebted to Anne Cheng for this series of formulations.
DRAFT—PLEASE DO NOT CITE
4
Munshi
[5/11/2013
Critical race scholarship of the last thirty years has yielded tremendous insights
into the production and reproduction of social inequality in the United States. But
the conception of “race” with which much critical race scholarship concerns itself is a
primarily a formal legal construction. In the following section, I consider the relation
between the formal legal construction of racial categories, within the context of immigration regulation in the early twentieth century, and the embodied experience of racial difference that often eludes racial representation, argumentation, and analysis, but
nonetheless animates it.
In Part 2, I trace the tension between discursive and embodied notions of racial
difference through a critical engagement with “naturalization,” a curiously underexamined legal fabulation. How does something that is not already “natural” become
natural? I consider the role that birthright citizenship, racialized restrictions to immigration and naturalization, and the regulation of sexual intimacy across racial boundaries have played not just in the formal construction of race but in the actual construction of the visual field, in producing whiteness as the natural embodiment of citizenship and American identity. Naturalization unsettles our understanding of citizenship
and national identity because it renders apparent the conventionality of political processes usually ascribed to nature. The naturalization of racialized others also renders
apparent the entho-cultural origins of American national identity which otherwise
seem to disappear into the imagined universality of American social and cultural
forms. I argue that naturalization—as the legal process through which immigrants acquire citizenship—itself might be regarded as part of a two-tiered citizenship regime
within which, for those who appear to embody American citizenship, rights and privileges flow as naturally, as if a matter of natural law; for those who appear otherwise,
the rights and privileges of citizenship assume the form of a contract—they are conditioned on what I call adequate performance.
In Part 3, I offer an elaboration of the terms and conditions of what I describe as
the naturalization by offering an extended reading of the photographs Ghadiali submitted to the court to show “how my family became so American.” In my reading of
these photographs, I explore the pressure under which the racially-marked immigrant
finds himself to reproduce social forms that become defining of American identity,
including certain forms of domesticity, racial affiliation and aversion, militarized patriotism, economic self-reliance.
PART 1: RHETORICAL BLINDNESS AND RACIAL VISIBILITY
The Naturalization Act of 1790 restricted citizenship to “free white persons” and,
after the Civil War, to “persons of African nativity or descent.”8 The law posed few
8
Naturalization Act, 1 Stat. 103 (Mar. 26 1790).
DRAFT— PLEASE DO NOT CITE
5/11/2013]
Junior Scholar Workshop
5
hurdles to naturalization until the turn of the twentieth century, when immigration
rates accelerated to their historical peak, bringing to the United States an unprecedented diversity of peoples. American courts then found themselves under new pressure, from labor organizations and anti-immigrant groups, to administer a more restrictive interpretation of “white.”
Ian Haney Lopez, in his widely influential study of immigrant racialization, White
By Law: The Legal Construction of Race (1996), observed that, in the first decades of the
twentieth century, courts applying the racial restriction to naturalization generally followed one of two lines of reasoning to determine racial identity. 9 The first appealed to
“common knowledge,” or popular conceptions of race and racial classifications. The
second, based on “scientific evidence,” relied on the expertise of ethnologists. In most
cases, both common knowledge and scientific evidence yielded the same conclusion,
but confusion arise in cases involving immigrants from India and Arabia: common
knowledge dictated that they were “brown” or “yellow”—belonging to a race of people
distinguishable from what most Americans recognized as “white”—while race scientists
maintained that they were Aryan or Caucasian, descendents of the same ancestors as
European Americans. The question eventually rose to the Supreme Court.10
In United States v. Thind (1923), the Supreme Court was asked to determine
whether Bhagat Singh Thind, “a high-caste Hindu, of full Indian blood, born at Amritsar, Punjab, India, is a white person within the meaning of [the Naturalization
Act].”11 The previous year, the Supreme Court had determined that a Japanese immigrant, though whitish in complexion, was not “Caucasian” and thus ineligible for citizenship.12 Thind argued that, because most scientist considered Indians to be Caucasian, he was eligible for citizenship. The Court disagreed. Justice George Sutherland,
writing for a unanimous Court, acknowledged that while, among scientists, the word
“Caucasian” had come to designate a the wide diversity of people linked by remote
ancestry or linguistic inheritance, “the average well-informed white American” would
be surprised to find that “the race to which he belongs is made up of such heterogeneous elements.”13 Reversing itself, then, the Court announced a new litmus for racial
identity.
What we now hold is that the worlds ‘free white persons’ are words of common
speech, to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common
man, synonymous with the word ‘Caucasian’ only as that word is popularly un9
See IAN HANEY LOPEZ, WHITE BY LAW: THE LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF RACE 37 (1996); See also,
Angela P. Harris, Equality Trouble: Sameness and Difference in Twentieth-Century Race Law 88 CAL. L. REV.
1923 (2000).
10
See LOPEZ, supra, at 47-55.
11
U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204, 206 (1923); see also Ozawa v. United States, 260 U.S. 178
(1922).
12
See Ozawa, 260 U.S. 178 (1922).
13
Id. at 211.
DRAFT—PLEASE DO NOT CITE
6
Munshi
[5/11/2013
derstood. As so understood and used, whatever may be the speculations of the
ethnologist, it does not include the body of people to whom [Thind] belongs. It is
a matter of familiar observation and knowledge that the physical group characteristics of the Hindus render them readily distinguishable from the various groups
of persons in this country commonly recognized as white.
Justice Sutherland, himself a naturalized citizen, added, “it is a matter of familiar observation and knowledge that the physical group characteristics render them readily
distinguishable from the various groups of persons in this country commonly recognized as white.” Hindus were visually inassimilable, and thus could not be naturalized.
Notwithstanding the ruling in Thind, at his own trial, held in a federal district
court in New Jersey in January of 1933, Ghadiali presented various forms of “scientific” evidence to assert that he belonged to the small religious community of Parsi
Zoroastrians and was not Hindu.14 He cited British “experts” who identified Parsis as
descendants of the original “Aryans” who, since emigrating from Persia, preserved
their racial purity. Parsis were distinguished from their “native” counterparts, not only
in terms of their skin and stature, but by their own sense of racial superiority: Parsis
kept to themselves and practiced strict endogamy. And they distinguished themselves
with their enthusiastic Anglophilia. Ghadiali supplied the Court with an entry from
the Encyclopedia Britannica, illustrating:
The Parsis have shown themselves most desirous of receiving the benefits of an
English education; and their eagerness to embrace the science and literature of
the West has been conspicuous in the wide spread of female education… [their
having] taken to the professions of law and medicine.15
That colonial administrators in India allowed Parsis into certain “white only” accommodations, Ghadiali also cited as evidence of kinship with white Americans: “We ride
in European railway cars in India. They are not put into Hindu cars. We are White
Persons.”16
But since Thind provided that “common sense” was the preferable litmus for determining racial identity, Ghadiali found himself in the peculiar position of having to
prove that he looked white. In one especially startling moment in his text, Ghadiali
interrupts the usual transcription of trial argument to narrate an incident as an aside
to the reader. “At this point,” he writes, “I laid bare my left leg and requested the
14
GHADIALI, supra at 36-44.
Id. at 45-49.
16
Id. at 47. Indeed, one of the stranger aspects of racial formation among Parsi Zoroastrians in India
stems the status Zoroastrianism assumed within the nineteenth-century European imaginary, as the direct
descendants of the mythic Aryan race.
15
DRAFT— PLEASE DO NOT CITE
5/11/2013]
Junior Scholar Workshop
7
Judge to look at it as well as to feel it and note the smooth texture of the skin.”17 The
judge did so, according to Ghadiali, and evidently to the satisfaction of both men, as
they both thanked each other decorously, and Ghadiali proceeded with his argument.
What are we to make of such an episode? Visual inspection of the body was not
entirely new to the American courtroom—Ariela Gross, in her study of race trails in the
antebellum South, on the contrary, describes it as something of a commonplace.18
The respondent in at least one other racial pre-requisite case, an Afghani immigrant of
“dark complexion” and “delicate” feature, is reported to have been asked to “pull up
[his] sleeves” to reveal not only that covered skin was “several shades lighter than his
face and hands” but that it was “sufficiently transparent for the blue color of his veins
to show very clearly.”19 But what kind of information about his racial identity did
Ghadiali expect to communicate by exposing his skin not just to visual inspection but
to touch? What, in turn, did the judge feel? And when we speak of the judge’s feeling,
do we restrict ourselves to the notion of a tactile exchange of information, or does the
scene compel us to imagine the exchange of another kind of feeling or affect?20 These
are not questions that we can even pretend to answer here, but I want to suggest that
the scene of inspection that Ghadiali describes in his aside directs our attention to the
vast and quiet realms of vision and sensation that often exceed representation of race
in legal analysis—but nonetheless animate it.
For Haney Lopez and other critical race theorists, the racial pre-requisite cases remain significant for the ways in which they reveal the role of law in the social construction of racial categories. As Haney Lopez has written, “the Court’s eventual embrace
of common knowledge confirms the falsity of natural notions of race, exposing race
instead as a social product measurable in terms of what people believe.”21 But how
does the average person come to recognize racial difference and to believe that such
differences are incommensurable with Americanness? In Haney Lopez’ reading, the
Court in Thind seemed to reject one system of racial classification, based on “scientific”
knowledge, to embrace another, based on “common knowledge,” thus revealing the
arbitrariness and contingencies of both. But where does that leave us in terms of understanding how we come to see, feel, or believe in the forms of difference that, however, arbitrary, continue to affect the lives of those touched by their designations?
In a preface to a recently revised edition of White By Law, Haney Lopez admits
that while his analysis is closely attentive to the “formal legal construction of race,” or
the way in which law as a formal matter, either through legislation or adjudication di17
GHADIALI, NATURALIZATION CASE, supra at 21.
See ARIELA GROSS, WHITE BY LAW: THE HISTORY OF RACE ON TRIAL IN AMERICA (2008).
19
In re Feroz Din, 27 F.2d 568, 568 (N.D. Cal. 1928).
20
I am indebted to Tina Campt for opening up this realm of inquiry, into the haptic, in her IMAGE
MATTERS: ARCHIVE, PHOTOGRAPHY, AND THE AFRICAN DIASPORA (2012).
21
LOPEZ, supra at 79.
18
DRAFT—PLEASE DO NOT CITE
8
Munshi
[5/11/2013
rectly engages in legal definitions,” his study leaves relatively unexamined what he describes as “racial dynamics” or the “informal mechanisms” through which law participates in the production of racial differences and hierarchy.22 The illustrations he offers are of discretionary policing and practices of informal segregation that restrict access to material goods and thus produce a system of racialized economic subordination. I want to take Haney Lopez’ analysis in a slightly different direction—to consider
the relationship between the formal legal construction of race and the appearance or
experience of racialized difference. For instance, in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court acknowledged a formal equality between “the two races” but, notoriously,
maintained that law could do nothing to erase the natural differences between them.23
The Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment established “a political equality between the two races, but in the nature of things… could not have been intended to
abolish distinctions on the basis of color or to enforce [social equality] …. Legislation is
powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based on physical difference.”24 Here, the effects of law—the appearance of difference, social inequality,
racial aversion—are mistaken for and described as “the nature of things.” Today, to
recognize that race is a social construction has become something of a commonplace.
But I want to argue that critical race scholarship that limits its critique to the social
constructedness of race risks reproducing the error in Plessy, which is assert a distinction between the formal construction of race, or what we understand to be the effect of
law, on the one hand, and the apprehension of race, or what passes as prior to law, on
the other.
Justice Harlan, in his celebrated dissent in Plessy, rejected the open racism accommodated by the majority and offered what has become the prevailing paradigm for
equality—colorblindness. The majority’s conception of equality was one that—however
disingenuous—could tolerate the recognition of differences. The prevailing paradigm
of colorblindness, on the other hand understands legal equality to be conditioned in
prior sameness. Colorblindness does not know what to make of the differences we
see. Of course, one of most irritating legacies of colorblindness is the erasure of the
history and presence of racism, for instance, in the common charge that affirmative
action policies are themselves forms of racial discrimination. Colorblindness flattens
the many asymmetries of racialism or racial recognition. As Neil Gotanda has compellingly argued, colorblindness also limits what we recognize as racial violence to forms
of intentional discrimination, innocenting deep and persisting forms of structural racialized inequality, diminished opportunity, and dehumanization.25 But these critiques are somewhat beyond the scope of this essay. My point here is to suggest that,
within contemporary U.S. discourse, the apprehension of race continues to pass as an
22
Id. at xv.
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).
24
Id. at 543-4.
25
See Neil Gotanda, A Critique of “Our Constitution is Colorblind,” 44 STAN. L. REV. 1 (1991).
23
DRAFT— PLEASE DO NOT CITE
5/11/2013]
Junior Scholar Workshop
9
effect of law, beyond the reach of law, because colorblindness requires of us that we
pass over such apprehension with embarrassed silence—embarrassed because, within the
paradigm of equality-in-sameness, to see difference is to participate in the production
of inequality.26 As I heard a student explain, we feel awkward countenancing the racial
appearance of another because we feel like we are putting the other down, enforcing
hierarchy. As she suggested, we are not blinded, but made dumb. Colorblindness demands a rhetorical suppression of the differences that we, not unlike judicial actors,
see and feel. I want to suggest that the demand for colorblindness can make us embarrassed about recognizing the effects of racialized subordination, it also nurtures a hostility towards cultural (or not “immutable”) difference, particularly in the context of
recent immigration. Colorblindness, if, as I argue, it establishes sameness as the condition for equality, then it demands not only rhetorical (in the place of visual) restraint
on the part of the observer, but a visual conformity or management of difference on
the part of the observed.
PART 2. NATURALIZATION AND SPECULAR CITIZENSHIP
What is naturalization? How can anyone or anything that is not already regarded
as natural be made natural? The inevitable failures of naturalization are figured in the
term naturalization itself. Here, I want to sketch a few claims in relation to what we
might describe as the paradox of naturalization before returning to Ghadiali’s denaturalization trial, in the next section.
First, the paradox is definitional. As many critics have observed, modern conceptions of the nation-state, national identity, and citizenship have long been informed by
conceptions of “nature”—nature figured as the original condition, as the source of political legitimacy, as self-evident and transparent to reason.34 Citizenship, in its primary
form, comes dressed in the language of “nature.” Black’s Law Dictionary includes a
brief entry on citizenship, distinguishing the “natural-born citizen,” who becomes a
citizen at birth, and the “naturalized citizen,” who is granted citizenship by an act of
law.35 Of course, natural-born citizenship is also an effect of law, but within the modern national and legal imaginary, appears as an effect of nature. Law attaches itself to a
raw process of biology—birth, in this instance—transforms and redeploys the meaning
of that process as it deposits itself and its effects as “natural.” Just as conceptions of
26
I am grateful for the thoughtful candor of this student who prefers to remain anonymous.
See e.g. RAYMOND WILLIAMS, KEYWORDS: A VOCABULARY OF CULTURE AND SOCIETY 216-224
(1975); BENEDICT ANDERSON, IMAGINED COMMUNITIES: REFLECTIONS ON THE ORIGIN AND SPREAD OF
NATIONALISM (1983); and ALYS WEINBAUM, WAYWARD REPRODUCTIONS: GENEALOGIES OF RACE AND
NATION IN TRANS-ATLANTIC MODERN THOUGHT (2004).
35
Black’s Law Dictionary defines the “natural born citizen” as “a person born within the jurisdiction of
the natural government,” and defines a “naturalized citizen” as “a foreign-born person who attains citizenship by law.” BLACK’S LAW DICTIONARY 237 (7th Ed.).
34
DRAFT—PLEASE DO NOT CITE
10
Munshi
[5/11/2013
“nature” inform our understanding of birthright citizenship, “nature” and its antitheses—nature as prior to law, nature as innocent of artifice, the natural distinguished
from the unnatural—seem to structure our understanding of naturalization. In naturalization persists the tension between natural law, which seems to emanate from nature, and positive law, or man-made convention.
The second claim is a historical elaboration of the definitional paradox. Extending the insights of Ian Haney Lopez, Devon W. Carbado, and Angela P. Harris, I want
to argue that, in the United States, naturalization has long played a role in producing
whiteness as the natural embodiment and normative ideal of citizenship and national
identity.36 Laws recognizing birthright citizenship, laws designating racial eligibility for
immigration and naturalization, and laws restricting sexual intimacy across racial
boundaries, in what one scholar has described as a “vast breeding experiment,” effectively produce, reproduce, and naturalize a particular embodiment of citizenship.37 As
whiteness is aligned with citizenship, racial and cultural identity is conflated with political character, or qualifications for assuming the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. Thus, beyond constructing social categories, citizenship laws play a role in materializing and membering the political body, in determining its composition and complexion, as well as in constructing the social environment, the field of encounter and
exchange that condition what becomes settled as “common sense.”
Third, it is with the arrival of the new immigrant that the old becomes native. Or,
put somewhat differently, the mass migration of raced laborers to the United States
(among other nation-states founded as white-settler colonies) that begins in the late
nineteenth century, I want to argue, precipitates a particular form of national identity,
one based on claims to the racial and economic priority of white settlers and their descendants. Federal courts administering the racial pre-requisite to naturalization, for
instance, extended citizenship to white, but not non-white, individuals on the ground
that citizenship belonged to the descendants of those who contributed to the founding
and “building up” of the nation.38 As administered by courts, the Naturalization Act
effectively barred non-white immigrants from citizenship while establishing a racial
“right of return” to European immigrants. This legal nativism not only forges a racial
identity among a diversity of Anglo-European immigrants but also establishes an identity between the state, its “people,” and territory. In the Chinese Exclusion Cases, for
instance, the Supreme Court declined to review legislation restricting immigration
recognizing that Congress’ authority to regulate immigration arises from the natural
36
See Devon W. Carbado, Racial Naturalization, 57 AM. Q, 633 2005; see also, Lopez and Harris, supra.
I am grateful to Patricia Williams for this formulation.
38
See In re Balsara, 171 F. 294, 294 (S.D.N.Y 1909) (holding that the Congress which framed the
Naturalization Act of 1790 intended to restrict admission to the privileges of citizenship to “only white
persons to those races whose emigrants had contributed to the building up of this continent of the community of people which declared itself a new nation, admission to the privileges of citizenship in which was
by that statute to be restricted.”)
37
DRAFT— PLEASE DO NOT CITE
5/11/2013]
Junior Scholar Workshop
11
right of any territorial sovereign to protect and perpetuate the life of its “people” from
the threat posed by the influx of foreigners.39 Within this sort of landscape, mass migration appears to threaten the nation and national identity by undermining the economic priority of “native” and the continuance of their way of life. In relation to the
raced immigrant, whiteness is aligned with particular social conventions or forms—
liberal secularism, ownership of property, certain familial arrangements, for instance—
identified as the social pre-requisites to citizenship.40
Fourth and finally, naturalization itself belongs to a two-tiered regime, within
which, for those who appear to embody citizenship, a fulfillment of the social conditions of citizenship is assumed, and the rights and privileges of citizenship flow naturally, as a matter of course. For those who appear otherwise, the rights and privileges
are conditioned on performance, or, as I argue, a spectacular self-disciplining and mirroring that confirms the superiority and universality of American social forms.
Jus Sanguinis and the Racial Embodiment of Citizenship
Legal treatises often distinguish between two forms of natural-born citizenship—jus
sanguinis, or citizenship by right of “blood” or ancestry, and jus solis, or citizenship by
right of soil. Ernst Renan, a nineteenth-century French philosopher, concerned with
the forms of ethnic nationalism taking hold within parts of Europe, identified the nationalism of jus soli as the more progressive of the two traditions.41 The sense of national belonging produced by rules of jus sanguinas, he described as “racial primoridalism” among people “united by a mistaken view about their past and a shared hatred of
their neighbors.”42 The nationalism of jus soli, by contrast, cultivated solidarity in the
present: “soil establishes the substratum, the field of struggle and labor” and the
“shared sense of having done great things together and wishing to do more in the future.”43 Germany is our idea of a nation defined by blood. In the United States, as in
France, our preferred self-image is of a nation founded in the kind of present and future solidarity that Renan describes.
Black’s Law Dictionary glosses jus soli as “birthright citizenship” and notes that “this
is the U.S. rule, affirmed by the Fourteenth Amendment.”44 While its clear that that
Fourteenth Amendment expressly guaranteed citizenship to persons born in the
United States, its hardly obvious that the Fourteenth Amendment affirmed that birth39
See Chae Chan Ping v. U.S., 130 U.S. 581 (1889), and Fong Yue Ting v. U.S., 149 U.S. 698 (1893).
See Downes v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. 244, 280 (1901) (denying constitutional protections to inhabitants of
acquired territory with the assurance that “there are certain principles of natural justice inherent in the
Anglo-Saxon character which need no expression in constitutions or statues to give them effect or to secure
dependencies against legislation manifestly hostile to their real interests.”)
41
ERNST RENAN, WHAT IS A NATION? (1882), http://www.nationalismproject.org/what/renan.htm.
42
Id.
43
Id.
44
BLACK’S LAW DICTIONARY at 237.
40
DRAFT—PLEASE DO NOT CITE
12
Munshi
[5/11/2013
right citizenship was or had been the rule in the United States. On the contrary, jus
soli can only be described as the rule in the United States if we ignore the history of
denying citizenship even to those born in the United States on the basis of “blood.”
Before and until the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868—seventy years
after the ratification of the Constitution—people of African descent were denied citizenship. In Dred Scott v. Sanford (1856), the Supreme Court held that, although the
Constitution guaranteed certain rights to “natural-born citizens,” those same rights
were not guaranteed to African Americans because they were not members of the “citizen-race.”45 Nor could they be, in Justice Roger B. Taney’s opinion, for the “line of
division which the Constitution has drawn between the citizen race, who formed and
held the Government, and the African race, which they held in subjugation and slavery,”
was a “perpetual and impassible barrier.”46 The Fourteenth Amendment effectively
overruled the Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott, extending the rights and privileges
of citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States,” but rather than
“affirm” the jus soli as the rule in the United States, we might recognize Justice
Harlan’s characterization of the Fourteenth Amendment—as a “collective naturalization” of the “colored race” to be more accurate.47
Nor was jus soli the rule for indigenous peoples born in the United States. Even
after the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court held that Native
Americans, though born within United States borders, were not citizens. In Elk v.
Wilkins (1884), the Supreme Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment extended
citizenship only to those persons “born or naturalized in the United States and subject
to the jurisdiction thereof.”48 Indian tribes, because they were “alien nations” in a
“dependent condition, a state of pupilage,” were not subject to United States jurisdiction for the purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment.49 John Elk, having severed his
tribal allegiance and “surrendered himself” to U.S. jurisdiction, registered to vote, assuming that he was a citizen by virtue of his birth within national boundaries. The
Court explained that Elk, like any other “foreigner” could apply for naturalization, but
citizenship was not yet a birthright for indigenous peoples.50 Justice Horace Gray, writing
for
the
majority
observed
that:
The national legislation has tended … towards the education and civilization of the
Indians, and fitting them to be citizens. But the question whether any Indian tribes,
or any members thereof, have become so far advanced in civilization, that they should
be let out of the state of pupilage, and admitted to the privileges and responsibilities
45
Dred Scott v. Sanford, 60 U.S. 393, 420 (1857),
Id. at 409.
47
See Carbado, at 648.
48
Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 95 (1884).
49
Id. at 109.
50
Id. at 115.
46
DRAFT— PLEASE DO NOT CITE
5/11/2013]
Junior Scholar Workshop
13
of citizenship, is a question to be decided by the nation whose wards they are and
whose citizens they seek to become.51
Indeed, within a few years, Congress passed a series of laws expanding opportunities
for indigenous peoples. With the General Allotment Act of 1887, also called the
Dawes Act, Congress extended citizenship to individual Native Americans on the condition that they “voluntarily take up… residence separate and apart from any tribe of
Indians” and “adopt the habits of civilized life.”52 For Henry Dawes, the Congressman
who sponsored the Act, civilized habits included “to wear civilized clothes… cultivate
the ground, live in houses, ride in Studebaker wagons, send children to school, drink
whiskey”—and above all—“own property.”53 Congress converted Indian tribal lands
which had, until then, been held in community, and reallocated divided plots to individuals as private property. Unclaimed “surplus” land was sold to raise funds for the
establishment of Indian Schools, in which native children, often taken from their
families, were Americanized.54 Native American children were renamed, given haircuts and uniforms, trained in English and introduced to Christianity. Boys received
vocational training, girls learned to reproduce middle-class domesticity.55
Thus, with the Dawes Act and subsequent legislation, defining the terms upon
indigenous Americans would become incorporated as citizens, we recognize the outlines of what I described earlier as the contractual model of citizenship. For indigenous Americans, citizenship was conditioned not merely on national allegiance.
Rather, citizenship was conditioned on a total destruction of communal identity, mediated by collective subsistence on the land, and absorption into the national economy
as proprietary individuals. Citizenship required a total substitution of indigenous social forms—forms of governance, cooperation, language, subsistence, comportment,
etc.—with “civilized habits.” In 1888, in a departure from the general policy against
miscegenation, Congress extended citizenship to indigenous women who married
American men—to facilitate the opening of remaining Indian lands to privatization
and white settlement.56 In 1919, Congress extended citizenship to indigenous men
who served in the world war.57 It was not until 1924 that Congress extended citizenship to indigenous Americans as a matter of birthright, but scholars of indigenous law
51
Id. at 106-107.
Cited in The Dawes Act, Archives of the West, 1887-1914, New Perspectives on the West,
http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/resources/archives/eight/dawes.htm
53
Id.
54
Id.
55
See LAURA WEXLER, TENDER VIOLENCE: DOMESTIC VISIONS IN AN AGE OF U.S. IMPERIALISM 127176 (2000).
56
See PEGGY PASCOE, WHAT COMES NATURALLY: MISCEGENATION LAW AND THE MAKING OF
RACE IN AMERICA, 77-109 (2007)
57
See Lucy Salyer, Baptism By Fire: Race, Military Service, and U.S. Citizenship Policy, 1918-1935, 91 J. OF
AM. HIST. 847-876 (Dec. 2004),
52
DRAFT—PLEASE DO NOT CITE
14
Munshi
[5/11/2013
and history point out the terrible irony of legal recognition conferred upon the destruction of identity, sovereignty conditioned upon dispossession.58
The scope of Fourteenth Amendment birthright citizenship was tested once more
in 1898, when the Supreme Court was asked to determine whether the American-born
son of Chinese immigrants was a citizen.59 Wong Kim Ark, born in California, was
denied re-entry to the United States by a customs official on grounds that Wong was
“a Chinese person… by reason of his race, language, color, and dress.” 60 The Court
ruled that native-born children of “aliens”—even those racially barred from becoming
citizens, as Chinese were at the time—were birthright citizens of the United States. But
the determinations of the customs official and dissenting opinions of two Justices in
U.S. v Wong Kim Ark exhibit the persisting tension between native birth and “racial”
ancestry in the defining of citizenship and national identity. Under the rule of birthright citizenship, through much of the nineteenth-century, right of blood masquerades
as the right of soil.
Jus Soli and the Nativist Habitus
So far, I have been tracing the rule that blood and ancestry, or an implicit rule of
jus sanguinis, has played in defining citizenship and national identity. Restrictions to
immigration and naturalization that emerge in the late nineteenth century prompt us
to consider the role that jus soli, or conceptions of land and territory, have played in
naturalizing the white settler’s claim to political, economic, and social priority. Here, I
want to consider the role that conceptions of soil, territory, and “homeland,” emergent
at the turn of the twentieth century and very much with us today, have played in defining distinctly territorialized notions of state sovereignty and national identity.
Through the nineteenth century, differential rules of citizenship played a role in
securing the political and economic supremacy of white settlers and their descendants.
Unrestricted migration from Europe during the same period secured their numerical
supremacy as well. As Aziz Rana has written, during a first phase of colonialism, while
the United States was still subduing natives, acquiring territory, and establishing its
population, territorial and political boundaries were “remarkably open” to European
immigrants.61 European immigrants were given access to federal lands and encouraged
to settle the frontier. In some cases, they were extended voting rights, even as noncitizens, so that they might quickly integrate themselves into the political community.
During this first phase, as Rana explains, citizenship was based on economic inde58
See Gerald Torres and Kathryn Milun, Translating ‘Yonnondio’ by Precedent and Evidence: The Mashpee
Indian Case in CRITICAL RACE THEORY: THE KEY WRITINGS THAT FORMED THE MOVEMENT (Kimberle
Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, Kendall Thomas, eds.) 1995.
59
Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898).
60
Id. at 651.
61
See AZIZ RANA, THE TWO FACES OF AMERICAN FREEDOM (2010)
DRAFT— PLEASE DO NOT CITE
5/11/2013]
Junior Scholar Workshop
15
pendence, which was secured, in turn, through expropriation of land and labor from
subordinated groups, excluded from citizenship.62
During a second phase of colonial settlerism, as Rana continues, “the project of
republican freedom” and the guarantee of economic independence to citizens required
the continued expansion of labor, capital, and consumer markets, through immigration and imperialism.63 But what Radhika Mongia has called “raced migration,” the
migration of non-European peoples to European or white-settler colonies, would precipitate a set of crises for the United States. On the one hand, the labor of the new
immigrant was what secured the economic independence and security of the old immigrant, the new native. On the other hand, the arrival of the new immigrant would
unsettle what had become naturalized as a racial priority. Within the nativist imaginary of the early twentieth century, the racial immigrant appears not only as an economic rival—or the sign of more brutal forms of globalization to come, as Coleen Lye
has argued—but his appearance itself, I want to argue, disrupts the fantasies that sustain our national understanding, that reconcile white supremacy with racial subordination, white settlerism with immigrant exclusion.64 Rana describes this fantasy as one of
“organic citizenship”:
The emphasis on ethnicity as a justification for economic and political control
has meant [white-settler] democracies are intricately bound up with organic
notions of citizenship. These notions depict the political community as an inseparable union based on ethnic and cultural affinities and tied to a particular
plot of land.65
Raced migration gives urgency to legitimizing of the political and economic priority of
white settlers and their descendants.
In the racial pre-requisites, that priority is legitimated through a myth of original
possession. In In Re Balsara (1909), for instance, a case involving another Parsi Zoroastrian, the New York district court asserted that the drafters of the Naturalization Act
wanted to extend citizenship only to “those races whose emigrants had contributed to
the building up of this continent of the community of people which declared itself a
new nation.”66 The court delineates a right of racial inheritance based on a Lockean
narrative of original acquisition. By the court’s reasoning, the original settlers, who
came into possession of “this continent” by mixing their labor with it, “building [it]
up,” have a right, rooted in conceptions of property and territorial sovereignty, to determine, as they did through an act of Congress, to whom the rights and privileges of
62
Id. at 12.
Id. at 13.
64
See Harris, supra.
65
RANA, supra at 9.
66
In re Balsara, 171 F. 294, 294 (S.D.N.Y 1909).
63
DRAFT—PLEASE DO NOT CITE
16
Munshi
[5/11/2013
citizenship would descend. Of course, this myth of origins obscures the dispossession
of prior natives and the contributions of those non-white inhabitants who labored in
bondage. At the same time, the rights of citizenship are available not just to the direct
descendants of the original settlers, but to anyone in the world who claims to belong
to their same “races.” By contrast, mass migration from Asia brought the closing of
the national border. States adopted the designation “aliens ineligible for citizenship”
to prevent Asian immigrants in particular from owning land, entering certain vocations, and forming families with white Americans.67 Thus, while Europeans enjoyed
something like an ancestral claim to national destiny, Asians were prevented from
rooting themselves in the land, from enjoying the same economic freedoms guaranteed
to others, and from participating in the cultural and biological reproduction of the
nation.
Raced migration and imperial expansion in the late nineteenth century precipitate
new forms of identity and belonging, a native “people” and their habitat under constant threat of becoming overwhelmed by strangers. Radhika Mongia, in her writing
on the modern passport system, observes that the very “idea and materiality” of the
modern nation, conceived as “a territorially and demographically circumscribed entity,
takes shape not prior to but within the context of ‘raced migration.’”68 Writing specifically about migration within the British Empire, she observes that territorial expansion and mass migration—of white settlers as well as raced subjects—was a defining feature of the European empire-state in the nineteenth-century. But migration would
become a “problem” only with the voluntary migration of Indian subjects to the white
settler dominions of Canada, Australia, and South Africa.
Indian migration exposed a tear at the seam of British imperial governance. It
exposed the untenable distinction between the white-settler dominions and the imperial colonies of Africa and Asia. Over the course of the second half of the nineteenthcentury, the white settler dominions had been granted a degree of self-rule. But India,
transferred from company to crown rule in 1858, had not been extended the same
privilege. Instead, in a proclamation issued that year, Queen Victoria promised Indians that, because they were not yet entitled to self-government, they were especially
entitled to “equal and impartial protection” from the British government. Thus
emerged a conflict. For Canadians, self-rule included the right to exclude Indians. But
Canada could not have exercised such a right without offending the Queen’s promise
to her Indian subjects. Gradually, Canadian officials asserted that the right to exclude
others was itself constitutive of national sovereignty. For instance, in 1916, Frank
Oliver, Minister of the Interior, defended a law excluding Indian immigrants by arguing:
Canada is a mistress of her own house and takes the authority and responsibil67
68
See SUSAN KOSHI, SEXUAL NATURALIZATION: ASIAN AMERICANS AND MISCEGENATION 5 (2005).
See Mongia, supra at 528.
DRAFT— PLEASE DO NOT CITE
5/11/2013]
Junior Scholar Workshop
17
ity of deciding who shall be admitted to citizenship and the privileges and rights
of citizenship within her borders… This is not a labor question; it is not a racial
question; it is a question of national dominance and national existence.69
The United States imposed few restrictions on immigration and generally honored the “inherent and inalienable rights of man to change his home” until the late
nineteenth century. The arrival of Chinese and Japanese, then Indian immigrants
precipitated a chance in policy. As Du Bois observed in an essay published in 1910, at
the height of “Yellow Peril,” “wave on wave, with increasing virulence, is dashing this
new religion of whiteness on the shores of our time.”70 Redeploying the imagery associated with Asian immigration—waves, tides, fear of inundation—Bois gestures at the
dynamic between immigration, the emergence of whiteness as a national identity, and
the shoring up of the boundaries of the nation-state.
Asian immigration gave rise not only to the sort of cultural nativism that Du Bois
described, but a legal nativism in the form of borders, immigration bureaucracy, and
constitutional jurisprudence—specifically, the realignment of the relationship between
the state, its citizens, and its others in the guise of the plenary power doctrine. While
cultural nativism has largely receded since the early twentieth century, legal nativism
remains a defining, if largely unexamined, feature of national self-understanding.
In Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889), the Supreme Court recognized that
Congress had “absolute and exclusive” authority to regulate immigration, asserting (as
the Canadian minister would a few years later) that the right to exclude others was a
natural right, constitutive of territorial sovereignty. In Fong Yue Ting v. United States
(1898), Justice Fuller explained “every nation” has the right and duty to defend the
country against the “danger” posed by foreigners:
what [a nation] owes to itself, the care of its own safety, give it this right; and in
virtue of its natural liberty; it becomes to a nation to judge whether its circumstances… justify the admission of the foreigner. Every society possesses the undoubtable right to determine who shall compose its members, and it is exercised
by all nations, both in peace and war.71
Congress’ absolute authority to regulate immigration was premised on a natural right
to territorial sovereignty. That right is, in some instances, articulated was right to preserve the nation’s resources for its native population:
the people of the coast saw, or believed they saw, in the facility of immigration,
and in the crowded millions of China, where population presses upon the means
69
Cited in Mongia, 550.
70
W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk,” reprinted in Darkwater (1922).
d
71
Fong Yue Ting v. U.S. 149 U.S. 698, at 607.
DRAFT—PLEASE DO NOT CITE
18
Munshi
[5/11/2013
of subsistence, great danger that at no distant day that portion of our country
would be overrun by them, unless prompt action was taken to restrict their immigration.72
In other instances, as cited above, the right is described as one of preserving and protecting a certain racial “composition” and way of life. For instance, in Chae Chan Ping,
the Court acknowledged the concerns of west coast representatives who asserted “the
presence of Chinese laborers had a baneful effect upon the material interests of the
state, and upon public morals; that their immigration was in numbers approaching the
character of an Oriental invasion, and was a menace to our civilization.”73 That the
Chinese government itself has no hostility against the United States is irrelevant: Congress has authority to determine for itself that “the presence of a different race in this
country, who will not assimilate with us, [is] dangerous to its peace and security.”74 It
is against this shared threat, posed by the foreigner, that Americans are united—and
through their government:
For national purposes, embracing our relations with foreign nations, we are but
one people, one nation, one power. To preserve its independence, and give security against foreign aggression and encroachment, it is the highest duty of every
nation, and to attain these ends nearly all other considerations are to be subordinated. It matters not in what form such aggression and encroachment come,
whether from the foreign nation acting in its national character, or from vast
hordes of its people crowding in on us.75
Beginning in 1910, anti-immigrant groups proposed various schemes for Hindu
exclusion, modeled after the passport regime established by the Gentleman’s Agreement with Japan or the Chinese Exclusion laws. Some recommended penalizing shipping companies. But these proposals gained little traction in Congress, which we reluctant to pass another expressly racial law of exclusion.76 The Bureau of Immigration,
in the meantime, enforced existing laws to exclude many Indian immigrants on medical grounds.77 In 1917, Congress finally passed the Immigration Act of 1917, banning
immigration from a designated “Barred Zone” covering most of Asia and the contemporary Middle East, thus restricting immigration not on the basis of race but geography.78 In this elaboration of the notion of territorial belonging, articulated in the
Chinese Exclusion cases, we recognize one version of what recent critics describe as
72
Chae Chan Ping, 130 U.S. at 626.
Id. at 595.
74
Id. at 606.
75
Id. at 606.
76
See JOAN JENSEN, PASSAGE FROM INDIA (1988)
77
See NAYAN SHAH, CONTAGIOUS DIVIDES: EPIDEMICS AND RACE IN SAN FRANCISCO’S CHINATOWN 179-203, 180 (2001).
78
Immigration Act, 39 Stat. 874 (Feb. 5 1917).
73
DRAFT— PLEASE DO NOT CITE
5/11/2013]
Junior Scholar Workshop
19
“racism without races” or “racists.” In this instance, a racism that disappears into the
naturalized horizon of national boundaries.
Mae Ngai has shown that the Immigration Act of 1917 and 1924, establishing a
national origins quota, generated “a constellation of reconstructed racial categories, in
which race and nationality—concepts that had been loosely conflated since the nineteenth century—were disaggregated and realigned in new and uneven ways.”79 On the
one hand, the Immigration Acts of 1917 and 1924 codified the “Asian,” which Ngai
and others recognize to be a “peculiarly American racial category,” lumping a swath of
peoples into commonality in terms of their supposed unassimilability.80 While the law
drew distinctions among more and less desirable European, those distinctions disappeared within the emergence of a whiteness bound with American consanguinity. But
perhaps of greater significance is the way in which the national origins quota, again,
enshrine a particular imbrication of nation, identity, and government. The words of
one Congressman, describing the urgency of immigration restriction, are illustrative.
As he explained,
the sooner this Congress lays down the proposition of not admitting people who
cannot assimilate, who cannot become a part of our blood, our tongue, our life,
and our ways, the sooner will begin to mirror the sentiments and the wishes of
the great body of Americans who want America for Americans.81
Thus, it is with the arrival of the raced migrant that white settler becomes American.
It is with the new immigrant that the old immigrant becomes “native.”
Curiously, the Immigration Act of 1924, putting an end to free migration and
establishing the national origin quota, is passed in the same year as the Citizenship Act
of 1924, finally incorporating indigenous peoples into the body politic. Of course, the
incorporation into American citizenship also marks a certain end to indigenous sovereignty and identity. It is with the vanquishing of the old native that the new native
himself becomes endangered. The nativist concern behind the immigration restrictions was that the white race would become overwhelmed by the flood of diverse
strangers and eventually go the way of the vanishing Indian. Lothrop Stoddard, an
especially authoritative nativist, had warned that, as a result of unrestricted immigration in the decades the turn of the century, “the native Nordic American” had “in
many of our urban areas become almost extinct.”94 This imperiled native is the rhetorical and legal subject of immigration regulation at the turn of the century; it is the
79
Mae Ngai, The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the Immigration
Act of 1924, in 86 J. OF AM. HIST. 67, 70.
80
Id. at 71.
81
See WALTER BENN MICHAELS, OUR AMERICA: NATIVISM, MODERNISM, AND PLURALISM 147
(1995) (citing Congressman Watkins).
94
LOTHROP STODDARD, THE RISING TIDE OF COLOR AGAINST WHITE WORLD SUPREMACY 165
(1920), cited in Benn Michaels, id., at 29.
DRAFT—PLEASE DO NOT CITE
20
Munshi
[5/11/2013
native and his claim to his habitat the national government grows to preserve. Raced
migration threatens national sovereignty because it appears to destroy the native habitat—or, put somewhat differently, the nativist habitus, the racial landscape and structures of experience that sustain the fantasy of racial priority. Similarly, the change in
social composition that follows unrestricted migration threatens national integrity by
shattering resemblance, the myth of identity between “a people” and its government.
Naturalization and Specular Citizenship
Naturalization, like immigration, unsettles our understanding of citizenship and
national identity because it renders apparent the conventionality of political processes
usually ascribed to nature. In other words, naturalization exposes the artificiality of
birthright citizenship, or the relative arbitrariness with which a fundamental human
right—the “right to have rights,” Hannah Arendt’s formulation of citizenship which
gained urgency in the wake of mass displacements caused by world wars—is determined
by place of birth rather than of belonging.95 The naturalization of racialized others
also renders apparent the ethno-cultural origins of American national identity which
otherwise seem to disappear into the imagined universality of American cultural and
social forms. Birthright citizenship, racialized restrictions to immigration and citizenship, I want to argue, have played a role not just in the formal construction of race but
in the actual construction of the visual field, in producing whiteness as the natural
embodiment of citizenship and American identity. Naturalization—as the legal process
through which immigrants acquire citizenship—itself might be regarded as part of a
two-tiered citizenship regime within which, for those who appear to embody American
citizenship, rights and privileges flow as naturally, as if a matter of natural law. For
immigrants marked as different, there emerges a contractual model of citizenship, conditioned on performance.
Performance here has two meanings. In the more colloquial sense, performance
describes embodied representation, or what Richard Schechner has described as
“twice-behaved behavior.”96 The doubling and slippage between reality and artifice,
embodiment and signification suggested by performance—and figured in the term
“naturalization” itself (how can anything be made natural?)—have made “performance”
a critical term for theorists like J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, and Homi Bhabha, for
thinking about the ways in which bodies are recruited into the production and reproduction of identities and ideologies. Performance also describes, within common law,
the fulfillment of a contractual obligation. At his denaturalization trial, Ghadiali
would reformulate the question of citizenship from one of racial identity to one of
95
HANNAH ARENDT, THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM 177 (1968); see also SEYLA BENHABIB, THE
RIGHTS OF OTHERS: ALIENS, RESIDENTS, AND CITIZENS (1994).
96
RICHARD SCHECHNER, BETWEEN THEATER AND ANTHROPOLOGY 52 (2002).
DRAFT— PLEASE DO NOT CITE
5/11/2013]
Junior Scholar Workshop
21
fulfilment of an implied contract. As he argued,
“[W]hat is Naturalization, may it please the Court? It is a contract between the
people of the United States and the Respondent, on the strength of which the man
renounces his former Government, takes off his mantle as a British subject of India, bows at the foot of that American Flag… On the strength of the government’s
decision in an exalted Court of Law in Bergen County, the respondent, under contract with the people of the United States, gets a divorce from his former wife, who
refuses to become an American… on that ground, marries a German descended
American girl, raised a family of six sons as loyal citizens; on the strength of that he
builds a quarter of a million dollar plant in Malaga, New Jersey… He served the
country. This man gave 2 years of his life and time and money and service to the
City of New York and was trusted for his Patriotism, Valor, Fidelity, and Abilities”
with
the
Air
Service
of
the
Police
Department…97
Performance of citizenship here is fulfillment of the demand of ideological mirroring.
Ghadiali’s case is revealing of the ways in which the nation is produced not only
through exclusions but through the conscription of certain bodies into reflecting back
to the nation an image of itself.
PART 3. “YOU WILL SEE MY FAMILY BECAME SO AMERICAN”
At his denaturalization trial, Ghadiali presented the court with several photographs of himself, his family, and his properties. As he submitted these into evidence,
Ghadiali promised the Judge:
You will see my family became so American. We live just like American people. Here is one of my babies’ rooms, to show how we live inside. The Honorable Justice Sutherland said in the Thind case, “The Hindus are not assimilable.” I am NOT Hindu. I am European and I shall give you the proofs
presently.98
But how do these photographs show that Ghadiali and his family are “European” and
“NOT Hindu”? How do the photographs purport to evidence racial eligibility? In this
section, I want to explore the tension between the visualization of race—a practice inextricably bound with the medium of photography in the early twentieth century—and
the appearance of “Americanness,” through a close reading of the photographs
Ghadiali submitted to prove national belonging.
97
98
GHADIALI, supra at 70-71.
GHADIALI, NATURALIZATION CASE, supra at 38.
DRAFT—PLEASE DO NOT CITE
22
Munshi
[5/11/2013
By promising the judge that his identity would reveal itself through photographs,
Ghadiali invoked the contemporary understanding of way in which photography offered an unmediated and transparent rendering of the world, or what scholars of visual
culture describe as the “indexical” properties of the photograph—that term adopted
from Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of signs.99 Peirce distinguished among three
types of signs: symbols, icons, and indexes. Symbols, he describes as signs that have an
arbitrary relationship to their referents, as most word have. Icons bear some relationship to their referents—Peirce’s example was of a painted portrait. Indexes are signs
that have a “direct physical connection” or natural relationship of continuity with their
referents.100 Smoke, for example, is an index of fire. Photographs are both iconic and
indexical—indexical in that photographs are the result of a direct impression of light
on celluloid and paper.101
It was the photograph’s indexical quality that rendered it so immediately attractive
to natural scientists, including race scientists, whose method it was to observe, compare, and catalogue human variation and difference. Francis Galton, an English eugenicist and cousin of Charles Darwin, is well known, for instance, for developing
techniques of composite photography—superimposing portraits of multiple individuals—to produce representations of, for instance, Jewish types, sick types, pedigreed
types.102 Through such practices, photography was made to play a critical role in the
visualization of race. Coco Fusco, for instance, has argued that early photography did
not just “record the existence of race” but instead “produc[ed] race as a visualizable
fact.”103 But just as photography lent race its apparent facticity, so did racial discourse
come to saturate photographic practices—of staging and seeing—with racial meaning.
Christopher Pinney, writing about scientific and government photography in colonial
India, goes further to argue that photographic practices of the nineteenth century
played a role in producing the body itself—rendering the skin, or the surface of the
body, as a sign of hidden interiority and essence.104
Scholars of visual studies recognize a convergence in the methods of race scientists
also criminological uses of photography in the nineteenth-century. Alphonse Bertillion, a director of police in Paris, introduced the “mug shot” to his already intricate
system of criminal identification, designed to measure and record distinguishing features of the criminal body. Within the Bertillion system, as illustrated in Figure 1,
below, photographs appeared together with anthropometric measurements and descriptions, thus inscribing appearance with the vocabularies of race science. But unlike
99
Charles Sanders Peirce, One, Two, Three: Fundamental Categories of Thought and Nature, in PIERCE ON
SIGNS: WRITING ON SEMIOTICS 180, 181 (James Hoopes, ed., 1991).
100
Id. at 183.
101
Id.
102
103
104
COCO FUSCO, ONLY SKIN DEEP: CHANGING VISIONS OF THE AMERICAN SELF (2003).
CHRISTOPHER PINNEY, CAMERA INDICA: THE SOCIAL LIFE OF INDIAN PHOTOGRAPHS 20 (1989).
DRAFT— PLEASE DO NOT CITE
5/11/2013]
Junior Scholar Workshop
23
Galton, whose purpose was to aggregate individuals into visuablizable “types,” Bertillion’s purpose was to wield the authority of visual record to undermine the duplicitous
speech of the criminal. In Alan Sekula’s words, the Bertillion system was designed “to
break the professional criminal’s mastery of disguises, false identities, multiple biographies, and alibis.”105 Photography, Bertillion discovered, was especially adept at muting the testimony and “literally arresting” its subject.106
Figure 1. An Arrest Record Identifying Ghadiali as “White (Persian)”
Thus, it was the photograph’s presumed superiority over other, more equivocal
signs—the utterance of unreliable subjects—that rendered the medium critical to immigration administration in the late nineteenth century. Anna Pegler-Gordon has observed that photographic identification was introduced to immigrant processing with
the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1892, also known as the Geary Act. That law required
all Chinese residents in the United States to carry identification. The law was
105
106
Sekula, id. at27.
Id.
DRAFT—PLEASE DO NOT CITE
24
Munshi
[5/11/2013
amended the following year to require that photographs appear on the identification,
not only because, as the Congressman sponsoring the law suggested, “all Chinamen
look alike,” but because immigration officials believed that the use of photographic
documentation would assist them in catching immigration fraud.109 Thus, the photograph is incorporated into forms of identification created by the state, as John Tagg
has suggested, to “have knowledge over, and control of, diverse and mobile [groups],
and the power relations constructed through this process came to invest photography
with an authority”—but, he is careful to point out, authority that “could not be reduced to its technical and semiotic properties.” In other words, the supposed capacity
of photography to authoritatively render identity is function not only of the medium’s
indexical quality but the needs of the administrative state.
It is within the context of Chinese migration that movement across borders becomes a “problem” for state regulation. Similarly, it is within the context of Chinese
Exclusion that forms of documentary identification, not limited to photographs, come
to define the relationship between the subject and the state. A brief discussion of the
Chinese Exclusion Acts, I think, should illustrate.
The Chinese Exclusion Acts, the series of acts passed between 1882 and 1892,
were not only the first immigration laws to restrict voluntary migration on the basis of
race or national origin,110 but as John Torpey has observed, also the first to regulate the
movement of individuals on the basis “relevant characteristics [that were] knowable
only [through] documents.”111 The Exclusion Acts did not establish an absolute racial
bar to immigration—that would come later. Instead, they established a general rule
against Chinese immigration and two major exceptions—for re-entering residents and
entering “non-laborers.” But as historians have written, those exceptions proved especially difficult to administer.112
The first exception allowed Chinese residents of the United States to re-enter the
country, in accordance with existing treaty obligations. But this exception, included in
the first Chinese Exclusion Act, passed in 1882, also created certification and recordkeeping requirements. Customs officials at U.S. ports were required to issue certificates of re-entry to departing Chinese residents and to maintain registries against
which certificates could be cross-referenced. Almost immediately, customs officials
began reporting that the certification requirements were attended with “great embarrassment.” This embarrassment was caused not by administration of a discriminatory
government policy but by “the suspicious nature… of testimony offered to establish
109
See id. at 57.
Earlier, I noted that the Page Act of 1875 was the first law to introduce racial distinction to the
administration of immigration, but that law was aimed at what it characterized, however disingenuously, as
involuntary migration.
111
JOHN TORPEY, THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT: SURVEILLANCE, CITIZENSHIP, AND THE STATE
(1999).
112
See Kitty Calavita, The Paradoxes of Race, Class, Identity, and “Passing”: Enforcing the Chinese Exclusion
Acts, 25 LAW AND SOC. INQ. 1 (2000).
110
DRAFT— PLEASE DO NOT CITE
5/11/2013]
Junior Scholar Workshop
25
residence” and “the loose notions entertained by the witness of the obligations of the
oath,” as one official reported.113 To prevent evasion of the law through fraudulent
testimony, in the Exclusion Act of 1884, Congress ruled that a U.S-issued certificate
“shall be the only evidence permissible to establish a right of re-entry.”114 Thus, the
certificate represents not only the exceptional right of re-entry but the essential unreliability of the Chinese. Still embarrassed by the “manifold Still embarrassed by the
“manifold evasions [and] attempted evasions” of the law, in 1888 Congress passed a
law eliminating Chinese laborers’ right of re-entry altogether—certificate or no certificate. The Exclusion Act of 1892 was still even more stringent in that it demanded that
even those who had entered the country and were residing in it properly were required
to carry proof of identification—now including photographic documentation—or risk
deportation.115 Thus, photography is introduced to administration of Chinese Exclusion as mechanism for identification. Identifying papers, in this context, depose their
bearers of the authority to identify themselves, as the government shifts the locus of
authenticity from the mouths of people to the papers they are issued.
The second exception allowed a limited class of “non-laborers” the right of entry.
The terms of an existing treaty between the United States and China allowed the
United States to impose “reasonable” limits to Chinese immigration for purpose of
protecting American interests. So as not to offend standards of reason, or principles
of non-discrimination, the first Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned migration of
only “laborers.” “Every Chinese person other than a laborer”—including diplomats,
missionaries, merchants, professionals, students, artists, curious travelers—were allowed
to immigrate. But, under the terms of the relevant provision, known as “Section Six,”
Congress required that “such identity [be] evidence by a certificate,” stating the individual’s “name, occupation, title, rank, age, height, and physical peculiarities.”116 Out
of the structure of this rule and exception—a racial bar and class exception—emerges a
construction of identity, imbricating race and class. As one critic has written, under
the law, one was either “Mongolian or a merchant”—raced labor or a deracinated elite.
Almost immediately after the passage of the first Exclusion Act, the Chinese government issued over a thousand Section Six certificates to individuals identifying themselves as “merchants.” To correct for the liberal certification practices of the Chinese
government, the Exclusion Act of 1884 required that Section Six certificate bearers
113
See Adam McKeown, Ritualization of Regulation: The Enforcement of Chinese Exclusion in the United
States and China, 108 AM HIST. REV. 377 (1999) (citations omitted).
114
See Fong Yue Ting, 149 U.S. at 719 (upholding provisions requiring Chinese immigrants to carry
identification upon penalty of deportation).
115
See id. at 726. The Exclusion Act of that year created a system of identifying and registering current
Chinese residents. It required every Chinese laborer to obtain a certificate of residence; any one who filed
to do so within a year was subject to deportation. But to obtain a certificate, a Chinese person needed “at
least once credible white witness” to testify on his behalf—further attestation of the Chinaman’s essential
untrustworthiness—and further depriving him of the authority to credibly narrate his own story.
116
See McKeown, supra, at 389-403.
DRAFT—PLEASE DO NOT CITE
26
Munshi
[5/11/2013
also obtain a visa from a U.S. consul before leaving China. But in many instances, the
consul applied a no more restrictive definition of “merchant” than the Chinese government—reflecting, as Adam McKeown has suggested, a divergence between local experience and understanding of what it meant to be a merchant, on the one hand, and
the desires of the Bureau of Immigration to isolate a small class of admissible immigrants.117 Subsequent Acts called for clearer and narrower definitions of Section Six
classes, especially “merchants,” eligible to obtain certificates.
But, as McKeown has shown, by investing certificates and certification procedures
with exclusive authority—that is, over the voice of immigrants and the discretion of
informed officials—the rigid formalism that came to characterized immigration administration created new opportunities for fraud and evasion. As he notes, in the early
years of Chinese Exclusions, fraud and evasion took the form of forged or counterfeit
documents. The immigration bureaucracy responded by developing methods for
authenticating documents—systems of cross-referencing names, photographs, fingerprints, the testimony of third parties. But as these mechanism stabilized—or at least
heightened the investment in—the authority of identifying documents, Chinese immigrants found that it was easier to evade restrictions by becoming a fake person than
producing a faked document. Tenacious immigrants found ways to become the individuals to whom certificates had been issued. Through questionnaires and interviews,
identities were recreated to conform to prescribed categories. As McKeown found,
some rented store fronts and set up illusory companies, often with hundreds of associates, also fake, to bring themselves within the definition of “merchant.” Brokers
bought and sold good certificates (and narratives), attesting to their material value, and
prepared immigrants for their encounters with immigration officials in the U.S. One
immigration officer complained, “any new turn of phraseology of the [interview] questions is reported by aliens to [coaching] schools, incorporated in their drilling, and is
brought to light within an astonishingly short time in the testimony of subsequent
applicants.”118 Thus, immigrants intent to evade discriminatory restrictions, rather
117
See Id. For instance, McKeown a report written by a U.S. consul in China criticizing immigration
officers in the U.S. for their mistaken belief that a person could be identified as a merchant only if he wore
“silken robes.” In the consul’s experience, all of Hong Kong was a “vast warehouse,” in which the overwhelming majority of residents were involved in some form of merchandizing. The legislated distinction
between undesirable laborer and admissible merchant was impossible to administer, in his view, because, in
fact, almost everyone in Hong Kong was simultaneously a business-owner, merchant, and laborer.
118
Still another example of this is what has become known as the “paper sons” affair. In 1906, earthquake and fire in San Francisco destroyed local public records, including many birth certificates. Thousands of Chinese men then present in California claimed that they were born in San Francisco before the
earthquake. Because no documents could disprove their claims, they were suddenly reborn as natural citizens, at a time when the Exclusion Acts largely prevented them from naturalization. On subsequent trips
to China, these citizens would claim to have fathered a child—usually a son—who would then be eligible to
claim his American citizenship before reaching majority. In most instances, no child had been born, but
the citizen-father would have created a “paper son” or administrative opportunity for a future immigrant to
claim citizenship. Between 1925 and 1931, nearly six thousand returned citizens claimed more than
16,000 sons and 1,000 daughters. Slots had been quickly commoditized in China—each slot accompanied
(continued next page)
DRAFT— PLEASE DO NOT CITE
5/11/2013]
Junior Scholar Workshop
27
than resign them to the dispossession of authority through processes of authentication,
learned to exploit the effects of bureaucratic truth-production to their own ends.
Thus, in the encounter between the immigrant and the nation state, both are remade: the immigrant as veritable fraud, and the nation-state, through its immigration
bureaucracy, as legitimate sovereign. In the context of Chinese Exclusion, the immigration bureaucracy effectively produced the fraud that it enlarges itself to protect. To
be clear, bureaucratic dissembling begins not with the Chinese immigrant evading
immigration laws, but with the laws themselves. With each revision, the original Chinese Exclusion Act, a rule of racial exclusion, one of dubious legitimacy in the first
instance, gradually accrues to itself a legitimacy through its administration, its guarantee of procedural fairness, and adherence to “rule of law.” The legitimacy of the expanding immigration bureaucracy would come to rest not on its success at excluding
the intended class of Chinese laborers, but in its standardized, predictable, and thus
non-discriminatory application of law, however discriminatory. It is in this zone of
mirrored dissimulation, in the variance between the certifiable and real, between the
sign and its referent, that I locate Ghadiali’s strategic use of form, particularly documentary and photographic evidence. Returning to Figure 1, we can recognize that
Ghadiali introduced his arrest record—not an especially flattering document—into evidence because, beside a visual representation of himself, he is describes as “white (Persian).” His volubility notwithstanding, if paper spoke louder than words, then he
would speak through paper. More specifically, he would use paper to make claims
about racial identity that, after Thind, his own body seemed to betray.
The Hopeful Immigrants
Reading the development of scientific and criminological photography together
with the emerging tradition of commercial portraiture in the United States, Shawn
Michelle Smith argues that photography played a role in producing a racialized middleclass identity in the United States.119 The relatively low cost of photography in the
late-nineteenth century afforded middle-class subjects new opportunities for ceremonial presentations of the self, which had previously been available only to a small elite.
Commercial studios drew upon and developed conventions to distinguish the honorific self-presentation of portraiture from the repressive form of repressive identification
with extensive coaching papers that would allows fictive families to reconstruct before incredulous immigration officers common memories of imaginary landscapes. The Bureau of Immigration responded with
more intense interviews, questioning several family members about the number of windows in a room or
events that took place on a nearby street. Of course, any detail that could be confirmed and crossreferenced by an immigration officer was also one that a broker, a coach, an immigrant could rehearse
beforehand and—given the stunning predictability of the interview process—often was.
119
SHAWN MICHELLE SMITH, AMERICAN ARCHIVES: GENDER, RACE, AND CLASS IN VISUAL CULTURE 3 (1999).
DRAFT—PLEASE DO NOT CITE
28
Munshi
[5/11/2013
and documentation.120 Distinctions of class were not dissolved in the common medium of photography, but were heightened through representational convention.
Commercial portraiture drew the middle-class into conformity, standardizing the
“look” of middle-class respectability. At the same time, photographic documentation
produced the non-standard deviant type—the criminal, the immigrant, the urban
poor—as objects of scrutiny, knowledge, and control.121 Again, underwriting both traditions—of honorific self-presentation and regulatory documentation—was a set of characterological assumptions, a hermeneutic confidence that external appearance reflected
internal character, how people live “inside.”122
In Figure 2, a portrait of the “Hopeful Immigrants in America as They Looked in
January 1912,” we recognize a blurring of conventions, of the honorific and regulatory,
in the representation of self. The photograph is a studio portrait of Ghadiali with his
first wife, Manek, and their two young children, Kashmira and Khushcheher, positioned in front of a painted backdrop of the inside of a home—clearly not theirs. The
draped curtains and gilded table, topped with an arrangement of flowers, are all markers of an American middle-class respectability and comfort that is not yet their but
perhaps awaits them. The caption helps us to situate the image at the beginning of a
familiar narrative of immigrant uplift and assimilation. But, insofar as captions often
appear when images fail to speak for themselves, the caption also indexes uncertainty,
the possibility of failure—a failure in the unfolding of the plot, a failure to look the
part, a failure to project their own futurity.
We might situate our own reading of the portrait among other reading practices—
spectatorship, inspection, and surveillance—that begin but do not end at the border,
practices that conflate the regulation of national boundaries with the monitoring of
bodies.123 Chinese immigrants were subject to particularly invasive inspection.”124
European immigrants, while spared more invasive and regulatory inspection, were still
subject to what Pegler-Gordon describes as “observation.”125 On Ellis Island, galleries
were constructed from which physicians could scan the mass of entering bodies for
signs of irregularity, as other officials surveyed the scene for signs of disorder. The
galleries themselves attracted ordinary Americans who came to behold the stunning
120
See Sekula, supra at 7.
See id.
122
See SMITH, supra at 4.
123
See ANNA PEGLER-GORDON, IN SIGHT OF AMERICA: PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF
U.S. IMMIGRATION POLICY 104-173 (2009). Though the practices I describe here are specific to the latenineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, it is not hard to recognize the persistence of immigrant surveillance in contemporary laws such as those modeled after Arizona’s SB-1070.
124
NAYAN SHAH, CONTAGIOUS DIVIDES: EPIDEMICS AND RACE IN SAN FRANCISCO’S CHINATOWN
179-203, 180 (2001). They were stripped, their eyelids flipped, wastes collected and examined; as one historian has written, “each new layer to visual scrutiny revealed hidden threats. The Chinese body, imagined as
especially susceptible to parasites, would become a figure of hidden danger, compelling ever more scrutiny
and surveillance.
125
PEGLER-GORDON, IN SIGHT OF AMERICA, supra at 104-173.
121
DRAFT— PLEASE DO NOT CITE
5/11/2013]
Junior Scholar Workshop
29
mass of people streaming through the gates and the spectacle of difference on parade.
Pegler-Gordon aligns this form of spectatorship with visiting ethnographic exhibitions
at the world’s fair or slumming—practices of observing structured by social distance
and affirming the superiority of observer over the observed.126
Figure 2. A family portrait (1912)
The portrait of the Ghadialis resembles the images of other hopeful immigrants
upon their arrival in the early twentieth century, but with some notable difference.
Pegler-Gordon writes that the several photographers who regularly took photographs at
Ellis Island often pulled their subjects from processing lines and isolated them against
backdrops. Their purpose in doing so was to distance the ugly scene of government
processing and to isolate the distinctive features of their subjects, heightening the appearance of ethnographic difference. As Pegler-Gordon demonstrates, many of these
photographs reflect a desire to not only catalogue but memorialize types, to capture the
old-world differences (winged hats, heavy jewelry, long beards) before they disappeared
126
See id. at 112
DRAFT—PLEASE DO NOT CITE
30
Munshi
[5/11/2013
entirely in the process of Americanization. This nostalgic mode of immigrant portraiture, Pegler-Gordon describes as “ethnographic honorific.”127 The respectful presentation of these passing types confers a dignity to their subjects, mainly European, but it
also bespeaks a confidence that the same subjects will eventually disappear into a homogenous American population. Does the Ghadialis’ portrait lay the same claim to
assimilability as that of their European counterparts, for whom the signs of difference
are erased with a change of costume? Or does the appearance of racial difference impede assimilation?
Curiously, the hopeful Ghadialis arrive wearing none of the old-country clothing
that featured so prominently in Ellis Island photography. Instead, they are shown
wearing dark overcoats, worn boots, plain head-coverings. The Ghadialis’ clothing is
unremarkable but for the striking incongruity between the appearance of defensive
outerwear and warm intimacy suggested by the painted backdrop. How do we account
for this incongruity, which seems only to exaggerate their status as outsiders?
Perhaps the coats themselves were worth putting on display. Before arriving in the
United States, Ghadiali had applied for residency in Canada.128 Though he was a subject of the British Empire, he was denied entry under new regulations restricting the
migration of Indian subjects to Canada.129 Among the reasons Canadian officials citied for the regulation was the “humanitarian concern” that “the transfer of any people
from a tropical climate to a northern one [must] result in much physical suffering and
danger to health.”130 If, as Canadian officials seemed to argue, the possibility of cultural assimilation was precluded by the supposed “climactic incompatibility” of Indians, perhaps we can recognize the Ghadiali’s coats to assert cultural assimilation as
environmental adaptation.
I want to venture here another, related, hypothesis. Perhaps Ghadiali and his
family appear in coats and boots to disguise the fact that they were also covering their
heads—not from the cold but in religious observance. At his denaturalization trial,
Ghadiali recounted to the Judge that, in 1917, he had been thrown out of his naturalization oath ceremony for refusing to remove his topi.131 As he testified, “the authorities lifted me and threw me out bodily.”132 The incident was also reported in the New
York Times:
127
Id. at 126.
DINSHAH P. GHADIALI, RAILROADING, supra 13.
129
See Radhika Mongia, Race, Nation, and Mobility: A History of the Passport, 11 PUB. CULT. (1999), at
533 (reviewing telegrams, confidential memoranda and reports exchanged between government officials in
Britain, Canada, and India in 1906, after “some 2,000 people from North India” arrived in Vancouver,
devising “race-neutral” policies to restrict further migration).
130
See id. (citing “Memorandum: Re: Immigration of Hindoos [sic] to Canada,” Department of Commerce and Industry, Emigration Proceedings A, May 1907, no. 7, ser. no. 1.).
131
GHADIALI, NATURALIZATION CASE, supra at 38.
132
Id.
128
DRAFT— PLEASE DO NOT CITE
5/11/2013]
Junior Scholar Workshop
31
One hundred and five aliens, representing seven nations of Europe, renounced their allegiance to their former Governments and were made American citizens… A little excitement was created when Dr. Dinshah P. Ghadiali of
Hillsdale, N.J. … appeared in the court room wearing a turban hat, which he
refused to remove when ordered by the court, and was ousted.133
Ghadiali was allowed to return to the oath ceremony, but his application was put aside
until March of that year, after additional witnesses had testified in support of his application. Ghadiali explained to Judge Boyd, “It is a religious principle and a respect
to the Honorable Court… We never make an Affirmation without a cap.”134 But at
other times and in other settings, when asked about his cap, Ghadiali would direct
attention away from religious belief and offer a more secularized explanation for the
religious practice. On his first visit to the United States in 1898, for instance, he explained to a reporter that the Zoroastrian cap prevents “loss of vital magnetism,” aligning his rhetoric with that of eugenicists preoccupied with racial “hygiene.”135
What Ghadiali wore on top of his head was not a turban but a topi, the headcovering traditionally worn by Parsi Zoroastrians in India, more closely resembling a
skull-cap than a hair-wrap, but the newspaper’s mislabeling is telling of the way in
which the turban had become a particularly noisy signifier by 1917. Earlier in the century, the turban was still an object of benign fascination, a picturesque ornament, so
inert a signifier that was appropriated, as late as 1909, a women’s fashion craze.136 But
as Indian immigration to the United States increased, inciting animus from unions
and anti-immigrant groups, particularly in the west, then the turban became an object
of suspicion, associated with excessive religiosity, deviant masculinity, lack of cleanliness.137 The turban—especially the refusal to remove it—came to signify unruly differ133
105 Aliens Made Citizens: Flag Decks Hackensack Courtroom—Oriental Wears Green Skull Cap, N.Y.
TIMES, Jan. 20, 1917, at 16.
134
GHADIALI, NATURALIZATOIN CASE, supra at 31.
135
Says X-Rays Are Not New, Views of Dinshar Pestonjee Ghadially, the Indian Scientist, N.Y. TIMES, Marc.
11, 1896, at 16; see Warwick Anderson, “States of Hygiene: Racial ‘Improvement’ and Biomedical Citizenship in Australia and Colonial Philippines,” in Haunted By Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American
Histories 94 (ed. Laura Ann Stoler) (2006).
136
See e.g., “Fez and Turban: Origin and Differences Between Headgear,” in Mineappolis Journal (Jan.
13, 1900), p. 5 supplement; “Origin of the Turban,” in National Labor Tribune (Jan. 11, 1904), p. 7; “Humor of the Turban: Hat of the Moment is Simplicity Dressed for a Spree,” in Kansas City Times (Nov. 26,
1909), p. 12B.
137
In the immediate wake of a mass shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin this past summer, sympathetic reporters and Sikh community leaders were quick to suggest that the terrible irony was that Wade
Michael Page, a white supremacist, had targeted the Sikh temple because he had wrongly assumed that its
occupants were Muslim. Since the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, many Sikhs have
found themselves the target of “misdirected hatred.” Sikh community leaders, in turn, have organized
educational campaigns to clarify the distinctions between Sikhs and Muslims, as if to redirect the hatred to
its rightful target. A second wave of commentary then emerged to make better sense of the problem of
misdirected hatred to assert that Muslims are no more deserving of violence than Sikhs. But, in an especially thoughtful editorial opinion, Simran Jeet Singh and Prabhjot Singh explained that the more concern(continued next page)
DRAFT—PLEASE DO NOT CITE
32
Munshi
[5/11/2013
ence, a refusal to assimilate, a resistance to discipline, a defiance. Thus, while the distinctive dress of Europeans features in Ellis Island photography as an object of mourning, the quaint difference lost to the process of Americanization, the turban appears as
a sign of stubborn defiance, flickering between the cultural and the immutably corporeal and, as such, as Puar suggests, between “that which can be disciplined and that
which must be outlawed.”138 Here, Ghadiali issues a form of sly insubordination,
smuggling into the frame of a sign of religious attachment that exceeds what the middle-class portrait can accommodate.
The Only Parsi Zoroastrian American Citizen
At his denaturalization hearing, Ghadiali produced a second family portrait, one
that he had printed on a publicity card announcing his citizenship in 1917. As he said
to the Judge, “I was so proud of my citizenship, I put this before the public with the
remarks, ‘The only Parsee Zoroastrian Citizen of the United States of America—
America Always.’”139
In his Naturalization Case, the two family portraits, showing the Ghadialis first as
new arrivals then as full-fledged citizens, appear on opposite pages, loosely conforming
to the conventions of the familiar “before-and-after sequence.” The before-and-after
sequence, Laura Wexler argues, had become something of a staple in reformist propaganda by the late nineteenth century.140 Reformists used the convention to demonstrate to their capacity to turn others—emancipated slaves, pacified natives, raced immigrants—into citizens. The albums created for the Hampton Institute, for instance,
depict young freedmen using modern wells, mixing fertilizer, receiving instruction for
mechanical drawing. The photographs are supposed to evidence the Institute’s capacity to prepare freedmen for citizenship, but this is citizenship conceived narrowly as
preparation for agriculture and industry, discipline and self-sufficiency.
In the photograph, Ghadiali and his two children are positioned beside a projector. Here is a father preparing his children for citizenship—but a citizenship narrowly
imagined as preparation for work, as self-reliance, and self-discipline. Ghadiali’s one
hand rests on his son’s shoulder while the other handles the projector. The children’s
eyes and hands are riveted to the machine. The machine, projecting a modernity that
ing problem with the “misdirected hatred” analysis is that it “overlooks the long history of discrimination
and hatred directed at Sikhs in America.” Simran Jeet Singh, How Hate Gets Counted, N.Y. TIMES, Aug. 24,
2012. The authors note that Sikhs were the targets of vicious race riots in Bellingham, Washington, long
before the attacks in 2001. They argue that “their distinct religious identity (uncut hair, turban, beard) has
historically marked Sikhs, particularly men, as targets of discrimination.” As the authors suggest, it is the
turban itself that seems to arouse or attract animus.
138
JASBIR PUAR, TERRORIST ASSEMBLAGES: HOMONATIONALISM IN QUEER TIMES 171 (2007).
139
GHADIALI, NATURALIZATION CASE, supra at 35.
140
See WEXLER, supra at 127-176 (2000).
DRAFT— PLEASE DO NOT CITE
5/11/2013]
Junior Scholar Workshop
33
the bodies themselves cannot. While in his writing, Ghadiali represents himself as a
genius, a zealously aspiring individual, here, the desire for aggressive upward mobility
is carefully contained.
Figure 3. A Publicity Card Announcing Citizenship (1917)
One cannot help but notice the artifice of the image, the contrived choreography
of the bodies depicted. There is the curious triangulation of looks: the children direct
our gaze towards the projector, which seems to confront us with its look more directly,
but our eyes return to bodies of the children, torqued as if to display not only their
compliance with the photographer’s instructions but to inspection generally—the kind
of inspection made a routine part of immigrant processing and selecting, the kind of
inspection into which we, like the Judge, are drawn.
DRAFT—PLEASE DO NOT CITE
34
Munshi
[5/11/2013
The tension between the appearance of racial difference and the project of assimilation, I want to suggest, can be further traced in the temporal framing of the photograph, the strangeness with which the image purports to capture development by arresting activity. But in the photographer’s stilling of the image, we recognize the violence of the imposed order. If the first portrait allows us to project “hope” into the
Ghadiali’s future, the same bodies depicted here, in their uncomfortable state of suspended animation, disclose their precarious liminality, the threat of deportation and
statelessness that loom in the event of poor performance.
Ghadiali often identified himself proudly as “The Only Parsi Zoroastrian Citizen
of the United States.” He delighted in representing the “smallest nationality” in the
annual Fourth of July parade in 1919 (also billed the Americanization Day parade that
year). How does this announcement of compound identity complicate the claim to
American citizenship? It may be tempting to read this expression of identity, or more
open display of cultural particularity (see the religious caps) as an invitation to his contemporaries to envision an enlarged, pluralist vision of “Americanness,” one that could
accommodate hybridity and difference. But even if Ghadiali had been so optimistic in
1917, when he published the image, we cannot but admit that, by 1934, at the time of
his denaturalization trial, the practice of looking generalized and institutionalized by
Thind had trained his contemporaries to see, as we still see, difference before anything
else. The label “Parsi Zoroastrian” seems an attempt acknowledge the difference we
detect, and steer our identification—“NOT Hindu.” Like the Bertillion mug shot, he
frames his image with the vocabulary of racial looking.
But Ghadiali was not the first or only Parsi Zoroastrian to become a citizen. Nor
was he the first to face a challenge to his citizenship. In 1909, a New York district
court cancelled the citizenship of another Parsi Zoroastrian, Bhikaji Balsara, admitting
that, although Balsara himself may have made for a desirable citizen, he belonged to a
group racially disqualified.142 After Thind, at least one other Parsi Zoroastrian defended his citizenship by distinguishing his kind from Hindus, but the Second Circuit
admitted no distinction: “A Parsee… can hardly be differentiated in the mind of the
common man from that of the Hindus beside whom the Parsees have lived for 1,200
years.”143
The Second Circuit’s racial reasoning follows that of Thind, shifting from ethnohistorical classification to “common sense” perception, but my point here is not to
emphasize the elision of cultural and historical particularity implicated in the legal
construction of “Hindu” identity. It is to call our attention not to the “fact” of difference—between “Hindu” and “Parsi Zoroastrian,” in this instance—but the processes of
differentiation into which Ghadiali, like others who find themselves negotiating their
142
143
See In Re Balsara, 171 F. 294 (S.D.N.Y 1909), rev’d, 180 F. 694 (2nd Cir. 1910).
Id. at 9.
DRAFT— PLEASE DO NOT CITE
5/11/2013]
Junior Scholar Workshop
35
membership in despised communities, are sometimes compelled, sometimes complicit.
The “only” registers the continuous and strenuous disavowal of Hindu community.
Ghadiali’s family portraits are so unlike the photographs that have been collected in
archives recording the experience of Indian immigrants in the early twentieth century.
The most familiar photographs show groups of Sikh men disembarking at Angel Island, posing outside the factories and mills at which they worked, congregating in
temples. These are mainly group photos. There are no wedding albums, no family
portraits. But several images of communities gathered at funerals. Ghadiali, on the
other hand, intent to hold himself apart from the working men, holds himself apart.
He only ever appears with his family, alone.
Figure 4. S.S. Minnesota, Seattle, WA, 1913
Figure 5. North Pacific Lumber
Company Sawmill Workers
Figure 6. Funeral of Utam Singh
Yuba City, CA, 1945
Figure 7. A Gurudwara in Stockton, CA, 1915
DRAFT—PLEASE DO NOT CITE
36
Munshi
[5/11/2013
My Portrait in Uniform
In addition to family portraits, Ghadiali submitted to the court a series of photographs of himself in police uniform, taken during the first world war. Ghadiali was
Colonel and Commander of the New York Police Air Reserve, which he evidently established at his own expense, in 1918.147 Ghadiali submitted to the court a letter of
appointment, “reposing special trust and confidence in the Patriotism, Valor, Fidelity,
and Abilities of Dinshah P. Ghadiali.” Ghadiali argued, “I should not have had that
unless I were a citizen.”149
Ghadiali submitted another photograph in which he appears wearing flight
glggles, standing before an airplane and a few dozen others in uniform. The caption at
the bottom of the image, “Ready for New-York Philadelphia Flight, April 26, 1919,” is
written by hand.150 The image, we can assume, was drawn fro his personal collection.
He took pride in it.
Another photograph, taken the next year, shows several dozen members of the
New York Police Reserve Service standing in rigid formation, uniformly erect. Though
difficult to distinguish, Ghadiali appears front and center. His positioning designates
rank. All other differences are made to disappear into the projected unity of the
group. The repetition of the uniform impresses us with common purpose to which all
other distinctions—of race, culture, class—are supposedly subordinated.151
Photographs of the raced officer in national uniform have become something of a fixture within the contemporary national imaginary. So ubiquitious that Roland Barthesoffered the example of a “young Negro in French uniform” appearing on the cover of
Match, to illustrate his classical study of the myth.152 Barthes wrote,
I see very well what it signifies to me: that France is a great Empire, that all
her sons, without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag,
and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism
than the zeal shown by this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors.153
Similarly, within the American context, images of the raced soldier appear to reconcile
principles of formal equality with histories of racial subordination—both at home and
147
See GHADIALI, NATURALIZATION CASE, supra at 34.
Id.
150
Id.
151
I am indebted to Tina Campt’s reading of military group photographs. See TINA CAMPT, IMAGE
MATTERS: RACE, PHOTOGRAPHY AND DIASPORA (2012).
152
See ROLAND BARTHES, MYTHOLOGIES 1-4 (trans. Anette Lavers) (1984).
153
Id. at 4.
149
DRAFT— PLEASE DO NOT CITE
5/11/2013]
Junior Scholar Workshop
37
abroad. The grand narrative into which images of the raced soldier are often conscripted is one of racial progress at home, admiration for the United States and what it
stands for abroad. It was precisely to this flattering self-image of the nation to which
Ghadiali appealed.154
Figure 8. Ghadiali as Commander of New York Police Air Reserve (1919).
Figure 9. New York Police Air Reserve at Memorial Day Parade (1919)
154
Ghadiali also submitted evidence of his participation in the New York City Fourth of July Parade.
Fourth of July that year, for the second time since the United States entered the world war, marked Americanization rather than Independence. The parade was coordinated by government and business interests to
provide foreign-born immigrants with the occasion to display national allegiance. This occasion, of course,
was double-edged,: the parade provided immigrants a clear opportunity to improve their claim to citizenship and belonging, but failure to adequately display patriotic excitement rendered immigrants subject to
suspicion.
See
Remembering
World
War
I,
NEW
YORK
STATE
ARCHIVES,
http://iarchives.nysed.gov/Gallery/gallery.jsp?id=149&ss=WWI. One historian notes that after the Fourth
of July was turned over to celebrating Independence, Americanizationist turned to reclaim Labor Day by
calling it Loyalty Day. Thus, particularly for the foreign-born, Americanization is aligned not only with
unqualified support of foreign policy but complete abandonment of shared interest with the working
classes. See Noam Chomsky, A Few Words on Independence Day, COVERT ACTION Q. (Sum. 1995).
DRAFT—PLEASE DO NOT CITE
38
Munshi
[5/11/2013
Of course, these imaged conceal as much as they reveal. Consider, for instance,
the photograph of Bhagat Singh Thind, the named party in the Supreme Court case
designating the racial status of “Hindus.” Thind’s photograph is often reproduced in
contemporary accounts of Indian immigration and military service, but as often, without much commentary. As if the image speaks for itself. But obscured by the imagined transparency of the image is Thind’s anti-imperial politics, a politics which continues to challenge the limits of national form can accommodate.
Thind came to the United States to study philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. He spent his summers working in lumber mills in Oregon and then
Washington, where became better acquainted with the hardships endured by laboring
co-nationalists. Soon afterwards he joined the Ghadar Party, an organization founded
by an unlikely coalition of Indians students—many of them political exiles identified
with the decolonization movement—and workers in California. Their purpose was to
bring and end to British imperialism.
Thind quickly became a local leader of the organization, serving as General Secretary of the Oregon chapter. 160 His public speeches, calling for an end to British rule in
India, quickly brought him within the surveillance of the British Intelligence Agency,
which described the Ghadar Party as a “terrorist” organization and labeled Thind himself as an “extremist.”161
With the start of the world war, and with the support of the German government,
Ghadarites began leaving the United States to return to India to plot a rebellion. The
German government supported the movement not because it had any deep opposition
to imperialism, but because it recognized the opportunity to weaken its English enemy
by supporting incipient rebellions in its colonies around the world. The British government had called on the United States to suppress Ghadar activities within its borders. The United States resisted until it officially entered war in 1917.162 In the spring
of that year, the government arrested more than one hundred individuals on suspicion
of conspiring with the German government in violation of neutrality laws. In what
was one of the most expensive trials in the United States at the time, thirty-five individuals—nine Germans, nine Americans, and seventeen Indians—were tried for conspiracy.163
Bhagat Singh Thind himself was not tried for conspiracy. Instead, he enlisted in
the United States Army. He served for six months until he was honorably discharged
in 1918.164 Two years later, the Bureau of Immigration sought to cancel his citizenship, arguing before an Oregon district court that his affiliation with the Ghadar Party
160
See Bhagat Singh Thind, http://www.bhagatsinghthind.com/gadar_movement.php.
Id.
162
See RAMNATH, supra supra, note 120, at 1-27.
163
Id.
164
In re Bhagat Singh Thind, 268 F. 683, at 684 (Or. 1920).
161
DRAFT— PLEASE DO NOT CITE
5/11/2013]
Junior Scholar Workshop
39
rendered him “undesirable” as a citizen. The court disagreed, acknowledging that
while Thind advocated national independence, he did not advocate violence.165 The
Court seemed convinced that his tenure in the United States had tempered his politics, as he had come to possess “a genuine affection for the Constitution, laws, customs, and privileges of this country.” The court was otherwise impressed that his “deportment” was that of a “good citizen.” The Supreme Court decision in 1923, cancelling Thind’s citizenship, made no mention of either Thind’s anti-imperialism or his
military service, and instead framed the question in narrow terms of racial identity.
Figure 11. Bhagat Singh Thind
Ghadiali himself was not associated with the Ghadar or any other revolutionary
party, and so, when, in 1914, his laboratory in New Jersey was visited by federal officers, as the New York Times reported, he was “surprised that his experiment in electricity had attracted the attention of the government.”170 Something about his identity
brought him under suspicion. The offer asked Ghadiali if he had been communicat-
165
Id. at 684.
Says X-Rays Are Not New, Views of Dinshar Pestonjee Ghadially, the Indian Scientist, N.Y. TIMES 16
(Mar. 11, 1896).
170
DRAFT—PLEASE DO NOT CITE
40
Munshi
[5/11/2013
ing wirelessly with the German government.171 Then he joined the war effort.
The portrait in uniform represents national loyalty and sacrifice, but Ghadiali’s
somewhat irritated testimony discloses a more mercenary motivation. He returns us to
the idiom of contract.
Here is my portrait in uniform… and this is one-sixth of the Staff Officers, whom
I collected at my own expense to serve the country; during the time when they
needed fliers, I created them your Honor… As a white man, I served the City of
New York [for two] years… I was the man in charge of the Police Boat to receive
the Commander in Chief John J. Pershing returning from the war. I was appointed by the Police Department to receive the first Transatlantic Flyers… I did
all that to serve the country. Now, the Government does not need me… 172
Ghadiali found himself in the same position as many other Asian immigrants who
enlisted with the expectation that their service would be rewarded with citizenship.
When the United States entered the war in 1917, immigrants, comprising nearly one
sixth of the American population—were included among the targets of military recruitment.173 Most Americans disfavored the war, but recruiters promoted military
service to the foreign-born as the highest expression of American loyalty. Many immigrants seized the opportunity to display their patriotism. But others were simply
drafted, as draft laws made little distinction between the native and foreign-born, or
between citizen and alien.174
As other countries began objecting to conscription of their nationals, in May
1918, Congress passed a law providing for the immediate naturalization of alien soldiers.175 Soldier naturalization averted diplomatic crisis and otherwise served the interests of military recruiters, assimilationists, and reformers alike.176 But as hundreds
of Asian servicemen began applying for citizenship, in July of 1919, the law precipitated a new crisis, as Lucy Salyer has shown. Although the Supreme Court had not yet
ruled on the issue, most courts had reached the consensus that Asians were not eligible
for citizenship under the Naturalization Act. And yet, the solider naturalization expressly provided for the naturalization of “any alien.”177 The question forced by the
Asian soldiers, as Salyer puts it, was whether “martial patriotism” or racial identity was
the “quintessential criterion of citizenship.”178
Most judges denied the citizenship applications of Asian soldiers. In the few cases
in which judges did naturalize Asian soldiers, federal officials were quick to issue bills
171
Seal Up Wireless on Foreign Ships, Radio Plants Warned, N.Y. TIMES 17 (Aug. 11, 1914).
GHADIALI, NATURALIZATION CASE, supra at 76.
173
See Salyer, at 851-853.
174
See id.
175
See id. (citing Act of June 29, 1906, as amended May 9, 1918, 34 Stat. 601, 40 Stat. 542.)
176
Id. at 852.
177
See id (citing Subdivision 7 of the 1918 statute).
178
Id., at 848.
172
DRAFT— PLEASE DO NOT CITE
5/11/2013]
Junior Scholar Workshop
41
of cancellation, on grounds of “racial ineligibility.”179 In United States v. Thind (1923),
the Supreme Court definitively established a racial bar to naturalization and decisively
closed down all other paths to citizenship for Asian immigrants. Emboldened by the
Court’s decision, exclusionists sought more explicit determination on the question of
naturalization of Asian soldiers. The Department of Justice made a test case of Hidemitsu Toyota, a Japanese immigrant who, after serving in the U.S. Coast Guard for ten
years, was naturalized under the provisions of the 1918 soldier naturalization law.180
His citizenship was later rescinded on grounds of racial ineligibility. In Toyota v. U.S.
(1925), the Supreme Court ruled that the 1918 solider naturalization act, though it
provided for the naturalization of “any alien,” could not unsettle the long-standing
“national policy to maintain the distinction of color and race.”181
Do the forms of identity connoted by the uniform naturalize Ghadiali’s apparent
difference? Or do the stubborn denotations of race impede our recognition of identity? Does the judge, do we, trace even in these black and white images the imprint of
color? This tension—between the connotation of national identity and denotations of
racial difference—I would argue, also structure Barthes’ reading of the image of the
“young Negro in French uniform.” The Negro solder, in Barthes’ reading, can only
signify French universalism by first appearing to us as Negro.
Disappearing Women
While the photographs described above reference an explicitly masculine path of
assimilation for Asian immigrants—through military participation, economic integration, performance of civic patriarchy—they imagine no place for Asian women. And,
indeed, conspicuously absent from Ghadiali’s later family portraits is the appearance of
his first wife, Manek.
In 1917, the same year Ghadaili became a citizen, his wife, Manek, abandoned
him and their children to return to India, alone.182 Citizenship laws at the time provided that the citizenship status of married women was, as a general rule, derivative of
her husbands. Alien women who married American citizens were naturalized by the
marriage, but as long as she herself “might be lawfully naturalized.”183 Leti Volpp has
shown that while marital naturalization generally extended citizenship to foreign-born
women who married American citizens—including some who never set foot in the
United States—the same law generally prevented Asian women, married to citizens or
179
See Salyer, 854-862.
See Toyota v. U.S., 268 U.S. 402, 406 (1925).
181
Id.
182
GHADIALI, NATURALIZATION CASE, supra at 45.
183
Leti Volpp, Divesting Citizenship: On Asian American History and the Loss of Citizenship Through Marriage, 53 UCLA L. REV. 405, 457 (2005).
180
DRAFT—PLEASE DO NOT CITE
42
Munshi
[5/11/2013
otherwise, from becoming citizens.184 The effect of the law was to ease the naturalization of white women, while impeding the formation of families among Asian immigrants—again, reproducing not only an ideal embodiment of citizenship but construction of the American family.
Whether Manek was denied citizenship on grounds of racial ineligibility or otherwise we cannot know. Ghadiali’s testimony about his wife is brief and opaque. Leaving only the faintest impression of her arrival in the United States, Manek recedes
from the record, and like so many women who shared her circumstances, returns to
historical obscurity. But even a casual survey of the laws regulating the immigration of
women in the beginning of the twentieth century allows us to imagine the particularly
inhospitable circumstances in which women like Manek would have found themselves.
Feminist historians note that the first racially restrictive immigration law, the Page
Act of 1875, predating the first Chinese Exclusion Act by seven years, was enforced
primarily to prevent Asian women from entering the country.185 The express purpose
of the law was to prevent the “involuntary migration” of contract workers and forced
prostitutes, but at Congressional hearings, representatives voiced a more general concern about the presence of “cheap Chinese labor and immoral Chinese women.”186
One Representative described Chinese women as the “most undesirable class” of immigrants because they “spread disease and moral death among our population.”187
Rendered presumptive prostitutes by the law and its administration, Chinese women
were figured as the foreign source of domestic degeneracy and a general threat to the
boundaries of the white home. As legitimate wives, Asian women embodied the more
menacing danger of reproducing an alien race within national borders.
Historians note that the Page Act had almost no effect in restricting the migration
of Chinese laborers.188 The ban on prostitution, on the other hand, was aggressively
enforced, discouraging even wives from joining their husbands.189 Even before immigrating to the United States, Chinese women were subject to prolonged investigation
by consular officials in China. Those who made as far as the United States border
were often separated from other family members, their bodies examined for signs of
184
See id. (citing Low Wah Suey v. Bakus , 225 U.S. 460 (1912)).
See Kerry Abrams, Polygamy, Prostitution, and the Federalization of Immigration Law, 105 COLUM. L.
REV. 641, 677 (2005).
186
See George Anthony Peffer, “Forbidden Families: Emigration Experiences of Chinese Women
Under the Page Law, 1875-1882,” in 6 J. OF AM. ETHNIC HIST. (Fall 1986), 28 (citing Representative
Horace F. Page, sponsor of the Page Act.)
187
Id.
188
The number of Chinese men entering the United States during the period of Page Act enforcement exceeded that of any over seven year period before the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882.
See EITHNE LUIBHEID, ENTRY DENIED: CONTROLLING SEXUALITY AT THE BORDER, 31-54 (2002). See
GEORGE PEFFER, IF THEY DON’T BRING THEIR WOMEN HERE: CHINESE FEMALE IMMIGRATION BEFORE
EXCLUSION (1999)
189
See TATAKI, at 40.
185
DRAFT— PLEASE DO NOT CITE
5/11/2013]
Junior Scholar Workshop
43
“immorality.”190 A law passed in 1907 made prostitutes among the first classes of deportable aliens, extending the reach of the earlier immigration law by allowing for the
surveillance of any resident alien suspected of prostitution for an indefinite period of
time.
Again, while we cannot know whether it was the effect of these laws that prevented or discouraged Manek from pursuing a life in the United States, it is not difficult to recognize that her disappearance would ease the unfolding of Ghadiali’s own
narrative of Americanization. The “Hindu” wife, denied entry to the labor market or
public sphere—her movement out of the home always shadowed by the suggestion of
sexual illicitness—was at best, the keeper of the home. But the immigrant home,
grossly disparaged as the object of reform, was itself the repository of sexual pathology,
illiberality, and unwelcome cultural difference. As such, the claim to becoming
American asserted in Figure 3 is advanced as much by the disciplining of the bodies
depicted as by the disappearance of the Asian wife and mother.
With Manek out of the picture, Ghadiali would improve his claim to Americanness by introducing evidence of his new wife, Irene Grace, native-born and of
“German descent.” As he said to the court, “My wife is a White woman; if I were a
Hindu, she would never have married me.”191 But Ghadiali’s second marriage would
produce its own set of tensions. Marriage to a white woman evidenced acceptance by
white Americans, entry to respectability and the American family. But marriage to a
white woman inevitably raised the specter of miscegenation. In his voluminous selfwriting, Ghadiali says relatively little about his marriage to Irene. In his brief and
muted descriptions of her, he is only careful to distance her from the image of the
“New Woman” who flouted social conventions. As he wrote in Railroading a Citizen, a
testimonial of the events leading up to his Mann Act conviction, Ghadiali says only in
passing that it was her Protestant industriousness, her “simplicity in dress, nonfollowing of the foolish fashions, so dear to the average flapper [that] were so to my
liking that I began to consider her qualifications as a wife.”192
Figure 12 depicts Ghadiali’s five sons from his second marriage. The youngest
are perched on tricycles, the oldest is on his bicycle, the sentimental properties of middle-class American childhood well-displayed. Though all of Ghadiali’s children were
schooled at home—at a time when Asian American children in some parts of the country were prevented from attending white public schools—their matching uniforms seem
to place them within a metonymic sequence that extends from brotherhood to mem-
190
SHIP,
See MARTHA GARDNER, THE QUALITIES OF A CITIZEN: WOMEN, IMMIGRATION, AND CITIZEN50-72 (1870-1965).
191
GHADIALI, supra, note 1, at 35.
192
GHADIALI, RAILROADING A CITIZEN 75 (1925).
DRAFT—PLEASE DO NOT CITE
44
Munshi
[5/11/2013
bership within the national community.193
Figure 12. A photograph of Ghadiali’s sons from his second marriage (1929)
In Thind, the Court determined that no amount of education or discipline could
prepare the children of Ghadiali’s first marriage to incorporate themselves into the
national body. As Justice Sutherland explained, “the children… of Hindu parents
would retain indefinitely clear evidence of their ancestry… of such extent and character
that the great body of our people instinctively recognize it and reject the thought of
assimilation.”194 Compare the representation of the children from Ghadiali’s first
marriage to those of his second. In the earlier image, the children are pictured in
training. Here, we are invited to imagine the children at play. Here, the children fix
their gaze narrowly upon the projector, the symbol of Americanness in the photograph; they hold their bodies open to display. Here, Ghadiali’s mixed-race children
look directly into the camera, their look eliciting what Marianne Hirsch has described
as “familiality,” a recognition of the continuity in the domestic arrangements that extend from subject to spectator—in this case, the Judge, who seemed far more captivated
193
See Lum v. Rice, 275 U.S. 78 (1927) (state laws providing separate educational facilities for white
children and colored children—“black, yellow, and brown”—did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment
rights of an American-born child of Chinese descent).
194
Thind, 261 U.S. at 215.
DRAFT— PLEASE DO NOT CITE
5/11/2013]
Junior Scholar Workshop
45
by Ghadiali’s family album than he was by any other evidence of racial identity.195 In
Figure 3, Americanness is represented by the children themselves, their lighter skin,
the relative comfort with which they seem to inhabit their environment—here, a natural setting—and their own bodies.
But while Figure 12 gestures at a continuity between Ghadiali’s family and the
nation, what is noticeably absented from Ghadiali’s family album is any impression of
racial discontinuity within the family. The photographs assemble as family either the
Parsi Ghadialis (Dinshah, Manek, and their two children), or the mixed-race Ghadialis
(the sons from his second marriage), but in none of these photographs are Ghadiali
and Irene Grace pictured together. The suppression of the mixed-race couple of
course signals the limits of the family portrait, what its conventions can familialize or
naturalize. I have come across only one published photograph in which Ghadiali and
his second wife, Irene, are pictured together. Though they are shown together, presumably working an invention, alongside Ghadiali’s daughter, Kashmira, it was framed
as a scandal. The photograph was published in the Dearborn Independent, a newspaper
known to reflect the anti-Semitic and xenophobic leanings of its owner, Henry Ford.
The caption to the photograph reads, “Dinshah P. Ghadiali… who has come out of the
Orient to heal the ills of mortal man… and his wife, Irene Grace Ghadiali, who claims
to be an American.”196 Behind the rhetorical withholding of recognition of national
identity lay a real threat of expatriation. While the citizenship of wives generally followed that of their husbands, the Expatriation Act of 1907 provided that “any American woman who marries a foreigner shall take the nationality of her husband.”197 In
1922, in response to outcry by newly enfranchised women voters, Congress passed the
Cable Act generally repealing the martial expatriation provisions, but with important
exception: American women who married “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” a category
reserved for Asian immigrants, might herself lose her citizenship. At his denaturalization hearing, as the Judge scanned the images of Manek and Irene Grace, Ghadiali
pointed out the awful irony of his situation. He explained that he was deserted by his
first wife, “because I would become a Citizen. Now America throws me out and my
second wife will desert me because I did not become a Citizen. The government puts
me in a funny position.”198
CONCLUSION
195
196
MARIANNE HIRSCH, FAMILY FRAMES: PHOTOGRAPHY, NARRATIVE, AND POSTMEMORY 48 (1997).
Morgan Robert, Colored Glass Now Cures All Our Ills, THE DEARBORN INDEPENDENT 4 (MAR. 15,
1924).
197
Expatriation Act, ch. 254 §4, 34 Stat. 1228, 1229 (1907).
Act Relative to the Naturalization and Citizenship of Married Women (Cable Act), ch. 411, 42
Stat. 1021 (1922).
198
DRAFT—PLEASE DO NOT CITE
46
Munshi
[5/11/2013
After both parties made their final arguments, as Ghadiali narrated, “there was a
tense silence pervading the Court… The Honorable Judge was seated on his bench,
with his hands folded behind his neck, for a few short moments, gazing steadily into
space.”199 The Judge finally spoke, somewhat uneasily:
The real issue, I suppose, laying aside all the technicalities, is as to whether or
not the Respondent was and is a White Person, as contemplated in the Statute. The decision of this question is rather difficult, in view of the fact that
the Races of the Earth are considerably mixed at the present time, have been,
of course, for years, by reason of transfer from one locality to another and that
there is no tracing of the descent of this Respondent, excepting in his own
recollection or tradition, I suppose, coming down through his family and the
works that have been produced of different persons, with relation to the separation of the Races.200
Throughout the trial, Judge Boyd had expressed some reluctance to apply the ruling in
Thind to make a determination about Ghadiali’s racial identity. In the end, rather
than apply the rule, Judge Boyd decided the case on procedural grounds. In his view,
the question of Ghadiali’s eligibility for citizenship had been litigated once before,
more than fifteen years before, and that res judicata precluded its reopening. As he
said,
I am inclined to think… that the Respondent is a White Person, in the contemplation of the Statute. But regardless of that, here is a man who was naturalized after a hearing… authorized to be admitted as a Citizen, and that the
[Common Pleas Court in Bergen County,] either on its own motion or with
the assent, consent, and approval of the Government, authorized, found, concluded and decided that the Respondent was a White Person, entitled to be
naturalized under the Statute which is now in question… I think that in the
instant case, the case we are now trying, that it is res adjudicata… that the
Court has not the power at present to grant the Prayer of the Bill of Complaint and cancel the Naturalization Certificate, now held by the Respondent,
and as a result, I feel it my duty to dismiss the Bill of Complaint.201
Thus, Ghadiali prevailed in his case. But his win did little to unsettle prevailing white
supremacy. For instance, the New York Times, in an editorial about Ghadiali’s case,
199
GHADIALI, NATURALIZATION CASE, supra at 85.
Id.
201
Id. at 85-86.
200
DRAFT— PLEASE DO NOT CITE
5/11/2013]
Junior Scholar Workshop
47
supported Ghadiali’s claim to citizenship—but on grounds of the “scientific evidence”
he presented to the court. From the opinion:
The defendant contends that he is not a Hindu but a Parsee of the IndoIranic or Indo-European family to which all the leading racial white strains belong. But even if he were a Hindu, the argument from ethnology and philology would carry force. If anybody was entitled to an Indo-European club it
ought to be a native of India.202
The Times opinion, rather than challenge white supremacy calls for the slightest enlargement of “club” membership. But it would be a mistake to collapse Ghadiali’s
narrative into the grand narrative of national progress, of gradual but eventual inclusion and incorporation.
What do these images disclose to us? What can they represent about Ghadiali
beyond the strangling circumstances in which he found himself? Ultimately, the images reveal far less about Ghadiali than about those who scrutinized him. What the
photographs images reflect is something about the character of nation itself, the particular narrowness with which it would regard others. They convey, I think, the failure
to establish a vision of equality that extends beyond recognition or familiarity.
Rabindranath Tagore, visiting the United States in the beginning of 1917, speaking before massive audiences, addressed himself a that perennial question, “What is a
Nation?”203 He spoke just before the United States entered the war and closed its borders to new immigrants. He warned his audience that the nation was a paranoid form
of self-idolatry, an organized selfishness that reproduced itself around the world by
goading its neighbors with greed and fear. Tagore suggested to his American audience,
“a parallelism exists between India and the United States—the parallelism of welding
together into one body various races.” Refusing the nativist construction of the
United States, Tagore recognized about the United States its constitutive diversity.
“What India has always been,” he further observed, “the whole world is now.” By
that he meant that just as India had come to receive a diversity of foreigners,
innovations of travel and communication had made it possible to flood geographical
limits as never before. But while “India tolerated differences from the first,” in the
new world colonies, “Europe had simplified her problem” or difference through extermination and exclusion. He continued,
During the evolution of the Nation the moral culture of brotherhood was limited
by geographical boundaries, because at that time, those boundaries were true.
Now they have become imaginary lines of tradition divested of real obstacles. So
the time has come when man’s moral nature must deal with this great fact… Man
202
203
RABINDRANATH TAGORE, NATIONALISM (1917).
DRAFT—PLEASE DO NOT CITE
48
Munshi
[5/11/2013
will have to exert all his power of love and clarity of vision to make another great
moral adjustment which will comprehend the whole world of men and not
merely fractional groups of nationality…. If it is given at all to the West to struggle
out of these tangles of the lower slopes to the spiritual summit of humanity, then
I cannot but think that it is the special mission of America to fulfill this hope of
God and man. You are the country of expectation, desiring of something else
than what is.
These images, I think, compel us to re-envision, to recognize the stranger, not in terms
of recognition, but in terms of the occasion for “moral adjustment” his difference
brings.
DRAFT— PLEASE DO NOT CITE