Naturalization A Queer Genealogy of US Citizenship, Race, and Sexuality

At a time when heated political and social debates are escalating within the United States of America about borders, citizenship, and laws of belonging, the book “Naturalization: A Queer Genealogy of US Citizenship, Race, and Sexuality” stands out as one of the most important contemporary intellectual publications issued by Duke University Press by researcher Chopin B. Somerville, associate professor at the University of Illinois. This solid academic work is 318 pages and includes 23 visual illustrations, where it beginsFrom a bold critical premise that seeks to destabilize the traditional liberal narrative surrounding the concept of “naturalization” as the pinnacle of success in immigrant stories, to instead reveal how citizen-making processes have historically been embedded within normative assumptions that serve the American settler-colonial project.In her book, Somerville relies on a transdisciplinary approach that links federal law, photographs, letters, and personal memoirs. The work is divided into five main chapters, a conclusion, and an appendix of the most important pivotal dates. The first chapter examines the roots of the white settler nation through the Naturalization Act of 1790, followed by chapters examining forced citizenship ceremonies for indigenous people under the Dawes Act, and black citizenship issues such as the Dredd and Harriet Scott case and the Civil Rights Act of 1866.The book monitors the mechanisms of colonial alienation and the mass naturalization of citizens of territories belonging to the United States without their consent, leading to an analysis of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 and the case Boutilier v. Department of Immigration in 1967 to highlight the concept of “hetero-settler citizenship” and cases of systematic exclusion.The book received wide critical praise from leading academics. Letty Volpe, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, called the work “a stunning and original intellectual achievement that reframes our assumptions about the making of citizens by shifting the focus from individuals seeking naturalization to the practices of the racialized and settler state.” For his part, Nayan Shah, professor of American and ethnic studies at the University of Southern California, pointed out the importance of the book in stripping citizenship of its romantic character and revealing howBroad categories of freed slaves, American Indians, conquered Mexicans, and Pacific Islanders are caught up in colonial and sexual projects of race and state. This book represents a very important historical and intellectual review that deconstructs the deep structure of contemporary American state power and its cognitive tools.