Amid contentious debates about citizenship, borders, and belonging, naturalization tends to stand apart, widely celebrated as the culmination of immigrant narratives and American ideals of liberalism. In Naturalization, Siobhan B. Somerville unsettles this story, showing how the process of citizen-making has historically been embedded in normative assumptions about race, indigeneity, and sexuality that have sustained the US settler colonial project. Tracing an alternative genealogy of naturalization from the eighteenth century through the mid-twentieth, Somerville investigates overlooked stories not only of immigrants but also of Indigenous people, formerly enslaved people of African descent, and inhabitants of US territories, many of whom became US citizens through collective naturalization, often without their consent. Somerville’s interdisciplinary approach to a wide-ranging archive—including federal law, photographs, letters, and memoirs—shows how naturalization has long functioned as both a powerful metaphor and a contradictory material practice at the core of the US settler colonial state.

Siobhan B. Somerville is Associate Professor of English and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture, also published by Duke University Press, and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies.

Introduction  1
1. Naturalization and the Origins of the White Settler Nation: John Remond and the Naturalization Act of 1790  24
2. Unsettling Naturalization: The Dawes Act and Citizenship Ceremonies  61
3. Settling the Question of Black Citizenship: Dred and Harriet Scott and the Civil Rights Act of 1866  93
4. National Attachments, Colonial Dispossession: Collective Naturalization in U.S. Territories  130
5. Heterosettler Citizenship and the “Racial Break”: The 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act and Boutilier v. INS (1967)  158
Conclusion: Naturalization Now  188
Acknowledgments  205
Appendix: An Incomplete List of Key Dates for a Queer Genealogy of Naturalization  211
Notes  217
Bibliography  267
Index  269