Race, Nation, and Refuge: The Rhetoric of Race in Asian American Citizenship Cases by Doug Coulson (review)

Abstract

Bringing new evidence and thinking to examples of racially charged cases of U.S. naturalization, Douglas Coulson’s Race, Nation, and Refuge: The Rhetoric of Race in Asian American Citizenship Cases offers a rhetorical emphasis in legal studies. The text focuses on pivotal cases and legislative debates that set precedents on eligibility for naturalized citizenship during a time when only white immigrants could be granted citizenship by the courts. The first two examples in the book are Supreme Court cases that declared Japanese (Ozawa, 1922) and high-caste Hindus (Thind, 1923) were not white for the purposes of naturalization. The third federal case came out of Oregon and was met with success; Cartozian (1925) allowed Armenians to naturalize on the basis of the case’s appeal to whiteness. In addition to the three case-focused chapters, Coulson examines the context of WorldWar II alliances. Working through these studies, Coulson argues that success or failure largely hinged on their appeal to sharing external threats and adversaries to the United States. Unlike Ozawa for Japanese naturalization and Thind for high-caste Hindu naturalization, which argued their status as equals or greater to white Europeans, Cartozian appealed to harm by an external threat (x). Coulson refers to contested cases of naturalization as “racial eligibility cases” (xi). In contrast to what Coulson describes as an existing legal studies bias toward technical language, he emphasizes “racial eligibility discourse” through a critical rhetorical approach (xi, xii, xv). Coulson distinguishes his book in two additional ways. First, it is supported by newly addressed primary sources, including often unexamined and underpreserved materials (e.g., trial exhibits, congressional hearings and debates, and memoranda from the U.S. Bureau of Naturalization) (xx–xxi). Second,