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Race, Nation-Building And Legal Transculturation During The Haitian Unification Period (1822-1844): Towards A Dominican Perspective, Charles R. Venator Santiago Jan 2005

Race, Nation-Building And Legal Transculturation During The Haitian Unification Period (1822-1844): Towards A Dominican Perspective, Charles R. Venator Santiago

Cleveland State Law Review

This paper offers some preliminary reflections on the relationship between law, race, and nation building during the Haitian unification period. My contention is that, while the Haitian occupation can be described as a domination of Santo Domingo, it is also possible to discern some important ways in which Dominicans benefited from this relationship. More importantly, I suggest that there are some important moments where Dominicans participate in the Haitian nation building process. This paper also draws on a critical reading of Fernando Ortiz's notion of legal transculturation as articulated in his book, Cuban Counterpoint, to reflect on the multiple clashes …


Love And Architecture: Race, Nation, And Gender Performances Inside And Outside The State, Angela P. Harris Jan 2005

Love And Architecture: Race, Nation, And Gender Performances Inside And Outside The State, Angela P. Harris

Cleveland State Law Review

In this essay, I will use the metaphor of "performance" to describe the complicated interplay of power and identity. Each of the essays in this Cluster, I suggest, is concerned with some facet of identity performance within the power fields of gender, race, and nation. Perry calls our attention to how skin color, though typically subsumed by "race" in legal discourse, is a resource for performing identity that in fact complicates our understanding of racial subordination. Nancy Ehrenreich and Nicholas Espiritu are concerned with how states mobilize individual and collective race and gender performances as a way of inciting and …


Changes In Gender Ideology Among Professional Women And Men In Cuba Today, Marta Nunez Sarmiento Jan 2005

Changes In Gender Ideology Among Professional Women And Men In Cuba Today, Marta Nunez Sarmiento

Cleveland State Law Review

This presentation summarizes the reflections of what it means to be women and men in Cuba today, among a group of Havana professionals. I asked them to emphasize the influence in this process of women's employment and decision making among women, two citizen rights which have been strongly promoted in Cuba in the last forty years. I also asked them to think about the socialization processes, which took place in Cuba and which contributed to these changes. Therefore, this paper is divided into two main topics: First, changes in gender ideology among Cuban professional men and women under the influence …


(E)Racing Youth: The Racialized Construction Of California's Proposition 21 And The Development Of Alternate Contestations, Nicholas Espiritu Jan 2005

(E)Racing Youth: The Racialized Construction Of California's Proposition 21 And The Development Of Alternate Contestations, Nicholas Espiritu

Cleveland State Law Review

Illustrating the way in which conceptions of race and crime shape and are shaped by law is California's Proposition 21. Enacted in 2000, Proposition 21, also known as the Gang Violence and Juvenile Crime Prevention Act," was the product of California's direct democratic process through which voters are able to change the California Constitution through a simple majority vote. Part II address the ideological foundations of direct democracy and examines critically its ability to serve a democratic function. I examine the founders' rationale behind the decision not to employ a representative form of government, and look at direct democracy in …


Disguising Empire: Racialized Masculinity And The Civilizing Of Iraq, Nancy Ehrenreich Jan 2005

Disguising Empire: Racialized Masculinity And The Civilizing Of Iraq, Nancy Ehrenreich

Cleveland State Law Review

I will argue here that the rhetoric used by the Bush administration (and the media) to sell U.S. military aggression to the American public has played upon the gender insecurities and racial biases of the population. To be more specific, it has reinforced a racialized national sense of masculinity by playing on the association of maleness with violent domination of people of color - domination seen as laudable because it is undertaken "for their own good." In so doing, it has also reinforced the message that the way for people of color in this country to become true "Americans" is …


Law, Ethics, And Complexity: Complexity Theory & (And) The Normative Reconstruction Of Law, Julian Webb Jan 2005

Law, Ethics, And Complexity: Complexity Theory & (And) The Normative Reconstruction Of Law, Julian Webb

Cleveland State Law Review

My intention in this paper is a modest one, and a preliminary to more detailed analysis of the relevance of complexity theory to law. Accordingly, this paper presents an argument in three phases: it looks first at the nature of complexity and the philosophical grounds which, I suggest, inform a social theory of complexity; second, it ascribes characteristics which can be seen as constitutive of complexity, and applies those to the field of law, before looking (third) at how an acknowledgment of complexity can assist us in the process of normative reconstruction.


Outsider Citizenships And Multidimensional Borders: The Power And Danger Of Not Belonging, Pedro A. Malavet Jan 2005

Outsider Citizenships And Multidimensional Borders: The Power And Danger Of Not Belonging, Pedro A. Malavet

Cleveland State Law Review

In this closing for the LatCrit VIII symposium, I adopt a collective view of the articles, and attempt to develop how the themes discussed in them fit within LatCrit scholarship. I will then interrogate the future of our enterprise by discussing the danger of succumbing to the seduction of the real or perceived need "to reinvent the wheel," or at least to clothe ideas in overly-developed language. Last, the Conclusion discusses how LatCrit scholarship is both promoted and challenged by the articles published here. I further include some suggested institutional responses to the opportunities for mentoring and nurturing that I …


City And Citizen: Community-Making As Legal Theory And Social Struggle, Francisco Valdes Jan 2005

City And Citizen: Community-Making As Legal Theory And Social Struggle, Francisco Valdes

Cleveland State Law Review

The Eighth Annual LatCrit Conference met in Cleveland in May, 2003 to engage a timely and topical theme - City and Citizen: Operations of Power, Strategies of Resistance. Importantly, the theme explicitly drew critical attention not only to operations of power but also to strategies of resistance, and thereby implicitly invited LatCritical analysis of how the two converge in the messy and multifaceted processes of building communities on any human scale. To open and introduce this symposium, this Foreword similarly proceeds in two parts: the first Part, reviewing the four "clusters" of essays comprising the symposium, focuses mostly on "operations …


Citizen And Citizenship Within And Beyond The Nation, Tayyab Mahmud Jan 2005

Citizen And Citizenship Within And Beyond The Nation, Tayyab Mahmud

Cleveland State Law Review

The Latina/o Critical Legal Theory (LatCrit) movement, whose point of departure was the ground furnished by Legal Realism, Critical Legal Studies, Feminist Legal Theory, and Critical Race theory, has over time incorporated teachings of Queer Theory, Postcolonial Studies, Culture Studies, and Subaltern Studies. The three contributions to this cluster in the Symposium are worthy exemplars of this legacy as they open new avenues to broaden and deepen the project of critical legal scholarship. Jointly, the three interventions constitute a formidable spatial and temporal canvas. One explores the past, one interrogates the present, and one contemplates the future. One has the …


Of Desi, J. Lo And Color Matters: Law, Critical Race Theory The Architecture Of Race, Imani Perry Jan 2005

Of Desi, J. Lo And Color Matters: Law, Critical Race Theory The Architecture Of Race, Imani Perry

Cleveland State Law Review

In this article I want to posit two ways in which a critique of the black white binary leads us to understandings of race and racism that are useful for the struggles of all peoples of color. The first is, the critique should lead us to advocate for an understanding of race as an architecture rather than categorical. The second argument is that when we focus upon race as an architecture it leads us away from a linear notion of racial hierarchy with white at the top and black at the bottom, and towards a sense that the distribution of …


Cities In (White) Flight: Space, Difference And Complexity In Latcrit Theory, Keith Aoki Jan 2005

Cities In (White) Flight: Space, Difference And Complexity In Latcrit Theory, Keith Aoki

Cleveland State Law Review

This essay introduces three articles by Reggie Oh, Aaron Monty and Julian Webb that share themes related to the idea of decentralization and decentering. This essay obliquely approached the three LatCrit pieces by first evoking James Blish's science fictional vision of "Cities in Flight" - cities enabled by anti-aging and antigravitation technology to depart from the face of the Earth and roam interstellar space, a picture of radical physical decentralization. The essay then moved on to consider three justifications and visions of decentralization from Robert Nozick, Frank Michelman and Iris Young articulating libertarian, deliberative communitarian and arguably, postmodern approaches to …


Mapping A Materialist Latcrit Discourse On Racism , Reginald C. Oh Jan 2005

Mapping A Materialist Latcrit Discourse On Racism , Reginald C. Oh

Cleveland State Law Review

This Essay will analyze the call for a return to a discourse on the material reality of racism, and offer two ways to develop a materialist LatCrit and Critical Race critique of dominant, inequality reinforcing legal narratives: by (1) critically analyzing the narrative structure of dominant legal narratives, and by (2) incorporating a critical geographical consciousness into LatCrit and Critical Race critique and discourse. This Essay contends that any critical discourse must explicitly recognize the multi-dimensional, multi-faceted, multi-causal reality of racism and racial subordination, and it must expose dominant legal narratives for obscuring and obfuscating that reality.


Traveling The Boundaries Of Statelessness: Global Passports And Citizenship , Berta Hawk Esperanza Hernandez-Truyol, Matthew Matthew Jan 2005

Traveling The Boundaries Of Statelessness: Global Passports And Citizenship , Berta Hawk Esperanza Hernandez-Truyol, Matthew Matthew

Cleveland State Law Review

This essay proposes a model of a formal global citizenship that will prove both practically and theoretically feasible. The model flows from the concept of dual or multiple nationality and offers global citizenship only as an elective nationality. To appreciate the interplay between the proposed formal global citizenship and the citizenship tradition, our discussion will first review citizenship theories grounded in the nation-state. We then will turn to critiques of these traditionalist approaches which suggest that not all questions of citizenship can be dealt with in national terms. The conflict between these two approaches is clear in the case of …