A guide to the colonization and projected decolonization of Native America

In The Colonial Construction of Indian Country, Eric Cheyfitz mounts a pointed historical critique of colonialism through careful analysis of the dialogue between Native American literatures and federal Indian law. Illuminating how these literatures indict colonial practices, he argues that if the decolonization of Indian country is to be achieved, then federal Indian law must be erased and replaced with independent Native nation sovereignty—because subordinate sovereignty, the historical regime, is not sovereignty at all.

 

At the same time, Cheyfitz argues that Native American literatures, specifically U.S. American Indian literatures, cannot be fully understood without a knowledge of U.S. federal Indian law: the matrix of colonialism in Indian country. Providing intersectional readings of a range of literary and legal texts, he discusses such authors as Louise Erdrich, Frances Washburn, James Welch, Gerald Vizenor, Simon Ortiz, Leslie Marmon Silko, and others. Cheyfitz examines how American Indian writers and critics have responded to the impact of law on Native life, revealing recent trends in Native writing that build upon traditional modes of storytelling and governance. 

 

With a focus on resistance to the colonial regime of federal Indian law, The Colonial Construction of Indian Country not only elucidates how Native American literatures and federal Indian law are each crucial to any reading of the other, it also guides readers to better understand the genocidal assault on Indigenous peoples by Western structures of literacy, politics, and law.

John Milton is widely known as the poet of liberty and freedom. But his commitment to justice has been often overlooked. As Alison A. Chapman shows, Milton’s many prose works are saturated in legal ways of thinking, and he also actively shifts between citing Roman, common, and ecclesiastical law to best suit his purpose in any given text. This book provides literary scholars with a working knowledge of the multiple, jostling, real-world legal systems in conflict in seventeenth-century England and brings to light Milton’s use of the various legal systems and vocabularies of the time—natural versus positive law, for example—and the differences between them.

Surveying Milton’s early pamphlets, divorce tracts, late political tracts, and major prose works in comparison with the writings and cases of some of Milton’s contemporaries—including George Herbert, John Donne, Ben Jonson, and John Bunyan—Chapman reveals the variety and nuance in Milton’s juridical toolkit and his subtle use of competing legal traditions in pursuit of justice.
 

Demonstrating how emotion became central to the legal and literary meanings of piracy in nineteenth-century America

Pirates have long occupied a central yet unstable place in American law and national identity. In the decades leading up to and including the U.S. Civil War, the charge of piracy was leveled against an unusually wide range of figures: foreign heads of state, imperial filibusters, transoceanic enslavers, enslaved mutineers, radical abolitionists, and others who challenged established forms of authority. Early American literature reflects this instability, portraying pirates who vary dramatically in politics, race, gender, and allegiance. As Mark B. Kelley shows, these characters are united less by ideology than by their challenge to landed social norms and fixed national belonging. The pirate, in both law and literature, emerges as an individual defined by multiplicity rather than political coherence. 

Crimes Against Feeling examines how Americans made sense of this ambiguous figure by turning to emotion. Drawing on legal materials including treaties, trial transcripts, congressional debates, and U.S. Supreme Court decisions, as well as popular sentimental fiction (often written by women), Kelley argues that piracy was codified as an offense against moral feeling rather than being a singular political position. Legal thinkers and writers such as John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Maria S. Cummins relied on shared affective frameworks—sympathy, sentiment, and domestic vulnerability—to render piracy legible and punishable. American pirate law, Kelley demonstrates, was shaped by the same emotional logics that structured the era’s popular fiction. 

By tracing piracy across debates over domestic sovereignty, global enslavement and abolition, imperial expansion, postbellum reparations, and international copyright, Crimes Against Feeling reveals the pirate as a key figure for understanding gender, home, family, and nation in early America. Reading law and literature together, the book shows how emotional judgment—not political consensus—became a foundational tool for managing oceanic violence and transnational disorder in the nineteenth-century United States. 

Contrasting works by queer Chicano writers against the legal landscape of sexuality and migration to interrogate the “lawful fiction” that denies queer migrants citizenship and community.

Activists for immigrants and queer people under assault by US authorities focus overwhelmingly on protections presumed to be afforded by citizenship through narratives that have rarely had a place for queer immigrants, who have consistently faced special obstacles to legal entry and citizenship that only recently are being applied more widely. Queer in a Legal Sense studies literary works by gay Chicanx writers alongside instruments of law, showing through this juxtaposition how racialized queer people have been imagined as nonviable from the standpoint of citizenship. In stories by John Rechy, Arturo Islas, Rigoberto González, Michael Nava, and Jaime Cortez, José de la Garza Valenzuela finds what has gone missing in the migrant movement’s pursuit of gendered avenues to civic participation. Further, these works illuminate the production of fictions in canons of law, like those announced by the Florida legislature’s “Purple Pamphlet” and by the US Supreme Court in Boutilier v. INS and Bowers v. Hardwick. Queer in a Legal Sense argues that, through selective ommissions and inclusions, legal fictions place queerness outside the boundaries of citizenship and powerfully undermine queer representation in pro-migrant advocacy.

Did 19th-century American women have money of their own? To answer this question, Women, Money, and the Law looks at the public and private stories of individual women within the context of American culture, assessing how legal and cultural traditions affected women's lives, particularly with respect to class and racial differences, and analyzing the ways in which women were involved in economic matters. Joyce Warren has uncovered a vast, untapped archive of legal documents from the New York Supreme Court that had been expunged from the official record. By exploring hundreds of court cases involving women litigants between 1845 and 1875--women whose stories had, in effect, been erased from history--and by studying the lives and works of a wide selection of 19th-century women writers, Warren has found convincing evidence of women's involvement with money. The court cases show that in spite of the most egregious gender restrictions of law and custom, many 19th-century women lived independently, coping with the legal and economic restraints of their culture while making money for themselves and often for their families as well. They managed their lives and their money with courage and tenacity and fractured constructed gender identities by their lived experience. Many women writers, even when they did not publicly advocate economic independence for women, supported themselves and their families throughout their writing careers and in their fiction portrayed the importance of money in women's lives. Women from all backgrounds--some defeated through ignorance and placidity, others as ruthless and callous as the most hardened businessmen--were in fact very much a part of the money economy. Together, the evidence of the court cases and the writers runs counter to the official narrative, which scripted women as economically dependent and financially uninvolved. Warren provides an illuminating counternarrative that significantly questions contemporary assumptions about the lives of 19th-century women. Women, Money, and the Law is an important corrective to the traditional view and will fascinate scholars and students in women's studies, literary studies, and legal history as well as the general reader.