"A Queer Genealogy of Naturalization in the United States takes an interdisciplinary approach to the history of naturalization law in the US from 1790 through 1952. Challenging the tendency to subsume naturalization under studies of immigration, Siobhan B. Somerville attends not only to the naturalization of individual immigrants, but also to the considerable role of collective naturalization in transforming populations-including American Indians, US territorial inhabitants, and formerly enslaved African Americans-into US citizens, often without consent. Working to complicate familiar understandings of naturalization within classical liberal models of consent, Somerville argues that naturalization should be understood as both a citation and an obfuscation of the USs (white) settler colonial project. Each chapter focuses on key laws or court decision on US citizenship, including: the Naturalization Act of 1790, the Dred Scott case, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the General Allotment Act (Dawes Act) of 1887, organic laws governing U.S. territories, the Insular Cases, the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act (McCarran-Walter Act), Boutilier v. INS, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, Tuaua v.

the United States, and Fitesemanu v. the United States. A Queer Genealogy of Naturalization in the United States develops the notion of "heterosettler colonialism" to describe the ways in which naturalization law has been structured around shifting discourses of race, reproduction, family, sexuality, and indigeneity"-- Provided by publisher.