Category
Essays
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How I Learned to Fear AI
“This encyclical lacks the force of a papal bull and carries no claim of papal infallibility. Instead, Leo made his case with words and words alone.”
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The Right to Return: Chinese Merchants, the Scott Act, and Legal Knowledge in an Era of Exclusion
“For the first time, customs officials were authorized not only to block newcomers from China but also to turn away long-resident Chinese migrants returning from abroad.”
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The Struggle for America’s Ballot Box and the Making of Wong Kim Ark
“While the Supreme Court settled the issue of birthright citizenship in Wong Kim Ark’s case, lawmakers, lawyers, and civil organizations in California (and elsewhere) routinely tried to strip citizenship from the children of Asian immigrants throughout the twentieth century.”
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The Meaning of Alienage for Wong Kim Ark
The Fourteenth Amendment transformed American citizenship in the nineteenth century, but for Chinese immigrants and their American-born children, exclusion persisted.
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The Historical Paths to and from Wong Kim Ark
“The decision in Wong Kim Ark’s case marked the culmination of a three-year legal battle and reflected two decades of sustained efforts to deny citizenship to the U.S.-born children of Chinese immigrants following the Fourteenth Amendment.”
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“Dear Syria … ”
“Here I was, crossing from Lebanon into Syria and from the realm of other peoples’ stories into that of lived experience, including my own.”
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Who Benefits from Distorting American Studies?
“There is a movement undermining, constraining, and eradicating those who document, understand, and name the experiences of systematically marginalized communities in US history.”
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Edward Said, My Grandfather, and the Problem of Home
“Said’s ‘Reflections on Exile’ summoned to mind the only 7 words my grandfather ever said to me about Ireland, where he had cousins he never knew: ‘I don’t think I’ll go back there.’”
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Rash Reading, Slow Watching with Virginia Woolf and Chantal Akerman
In the hands of this writer and this filmmaker, “the mother” is someone with whom to have a lifelong conversation, a contested perspective through which to read the world.
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To Reach Beyond Ourselves Is Key to Our Survival
“We wanted to make a book that began to answer the questions Muriel Rukeyser asked. We wanted to make a book that continued to ask the questions she asked, of ourselves, of each other.”
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France’s Art Museums Remain Silent on Haiti
“It wasn’t that we expected an exhibition on Charles X’s coronation to be turned into an exhibition on the double debt. But we did expect the show to complicate the narrative around France’s last king.”
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Solo el pueblo: Migrant Justice Against Fascism in the Americas
Thanks to the politics of sanctuary and abolition, the multiracial city is, perhaps, challenging authoritarian power, even as liberal democratic institutions have faltered utterly against the rise of right wing, white ethnonationalism.
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Fascism’s Building Blocks: 30 Years of Secret Evidence
“Immigration law is a zone of exception where many American constitutional standards, the supposed safeguards against government abuse, simply do not extend.”
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The Double Edge of Border Security: 30 Years of Expanding Executive Power through Immigration Law
In the 1990s, lawmakers—including Schumer, Biden, and Clinton—invoked civil rights ideals, even while they narrowed legal protections from detention, deportation, and policing.
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Fascism’s Building Blocks: 30 Years of Criminalizing Black Migrants
“These two laws are inseparable. Together, they form a ‘prison-to-deportation pipeline’ that subjects Black migrants to a ‘double jeopardy’ of systemic racism.”
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Fascism’s Building Blocks: 30 Years of Breaking Welfare
“Today, as the Minnesota case shows, the welfare state is being turned into an instrument of mass deportation … Meanwhile, the specter of welfare usage is being used to bar the door to citizenship.”
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Republicans Debate Amnesty
“Being undocumented during my formative years … meant that I always lived with fear,” recalls Alberto Ledesma. “I thought that any misstep I took could endanger [my] entire family.” An artist and writer, Ledesma is one of the approximately 2.7 million formerly undocumented immigrants who were able to adjust their status because of the Immigration…
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Fascism’s Building Blocks: 30 Years of Destroying Families
“Women—who disproportionately carry the burden of caregiving and are often left alone when partners are kidnapped—are pushed into deeper poverty and isolation.”
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Fascism’s Building Blocks: 100 Years of Murdering Migrant Workers
“The KKK’s terror campaign took a bloody toll. Between 1917 and 1920, 170 IWW union organizers were lynched or murdered in extra-judicial killings.”
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Fascism’s Building Blocks: A US Infrastructure Decades in the Making
“Immigration constitutes a leading edge of fascism today, because it has become such a sharply honed weapon for dividing ‘us’ and ‘them.’”
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Style Guide: An Open Letter to the Editor of T Magazine
We here at Public Books are not averse to receiving homage; far from it. In fact we are proud of “B-Sides” and feel it deserves its readership. Let a thousand literary reevaluations bloom, we say!
