During the Progressive Era, the United States regularly suspended its own laws to regulate racialized populations. Judges and administrators relied on the rhetoric of sovereignty to justify such legal practices, while in American popular culture, sovereignty helped authors coin tropes that have become synonymous with American exceptionalism today. In this book, Andrew Hebard challenges the notion of sovereignty as a 'state of exception' in American jurisprudence and literature at the turn of the twentieth century. Hebard explores how literary trends such as romance and realism helped conventionalize, and thereby sanction, the federal government's use of sovereignty in a range of foreign and domestic policy matters, including the regulation of overseas colonies, immigration, Native American lands, and extra-legal violence in the American South. Weaving historiography with close readings of Mark Twain, the Western, and other hallmarks of Progressive Era literature, Hebard's study offers a new cultural context for understanding the legal history of race relations in the United States.
"Romantic Sovereignty" examines U.S. imperial governance in the Philippines in relation to popular turn-of-the-century romances. Placing these novels alongside bureaucratic and legal discourses, the essay looks at how the literary modes of realism and romance mapped onto modes of governance. By moving between realism and romance according to a particular narrative logic, these novels created a convention for transforming seemingly insurmountable contradictions between ordinary and extraordinary acts of governance into a powerful form of regulation. The essay claims that this form of regulation ultimately allowed the state to be a peculiar kind of narrative object, one that marked ordinary governance (civil service) as incongruous to extraordinary state actions (like state violence), and yet one that also articulated these forms of state power together. In other words, the convention that this essay explores produced a stable instability that allowed the imperial state a wide latitude for action over racially marked populations and yet still allowed it to appear as a coherent element within the romantic narrative of U.S. empire.
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