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U.S. colonial law and the creation of marginalized political entities
Author(s) -
Philips Susan U.
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1525/ae.2005.32.3.406
Subject(s) - sovereignty , colonialism , politics , state (computer science) , reservation , political science , law , government (linguistics) , relation (database) , popular sovereignty , identity (music) , political economy , sociology , physics , algorithm , database , computer science , acoustics , linguistics , philosophy
In this review essay, I offer a comparative perspective on books and films about the history of U.S. colonial law in Puerto Rican, Hawaiian, and North American Indian reservation contexts. The authors and filmmakers analyze the creation of marginalized political entities such as reservations and unincorporated territories with properties of sovereignty that make them different from U.S. states in their relation to the federal government. All view sovereignty as key to the maintenance of cultural identity. U.S. colonies participate in a common colonial legal discourse concerning the nature of political entities legally constituted as internal to the United States as a nation‐state.