Quisumbing King, Katrina. 2024. “Dismantling Rights: Forthcoming Independence and the Revocation of U.S. Military Benefits from Filipino WWII Veterans,” Law and Social Inquiry 49(2): 1004 - 1035.
This article explores the plasticity of rights by examining how the U.S. government promised and revoked naturalization rights and military benefits from Filipino colonial soldiers who served on behalf of the United States in World War II. Rarely have legal scholars of the U.S. military, citizenship, and the welfare state addressed the rights of colonial subjects. Drawing on data collected from six libraries and archives, the Congressional Record, and oral histories, I document how key actors in the U.S. government dismantled the rights of Filipino soldiers. I find that colonialism, war, and a rapidly changing geopolitical situation—forthcoming Philippine independence—allowed members of the U.S. Congress and the administrator of Veterans Affairs to dismantle rights. By arguing that the Philippines was not a colony, that colonial subjects were not entitled to equal treatment, and that Filipino veterans were not U.S. military, members of the U.S. executive and legislative branches casually eroded rights. U.S. state actors thus were able to claim that Filipino veterans’ rights were merely cumbersome and expensive foreign aid. This case suggests that rights are more malleable during times of state transition.
Quisumbing King, Katrina. 2022. “The Structural Sources of Ambiguity in the Modern State: Race, Empire, and Conflicts over Membership,” American Journal of Sociology 128(3): 768-819.
How do we understand ambiguous state activities? How do state actors interpret, use, and produce ambiguous classifications? By asking what explains the simultaneous classification of Filipinos as citizens, nationals, and aliens during U.S. imperial rule, this article draws attention to modern states’ ideological commitments and the foundational role of concerns over race in shaping state institutions and ambiguous practices. In debating how to rule over Filipinos, U.S. state actors wrestled with tensions between territorial expansion and limiting the rights of nonwhite people. They institutionalized ambiguity into the legal architecture of the state. The coexistence of seemingly contradictory statuses was enabled by the decisions of the highest court in the land and reflected national and imperial conflicts over belonging. Debates over national boundaries—over who can belong—are key to understanding the structural sources of ambiguity in statecraft. In the United States, these questions are fundamentally about race.
* Best Scholarly Article Award, ASA Global and Transnational Sociology Section
* Research Paper Award, ASA Asia/Asian America Section
* Honorable Mention, Distinguished Article Award, ASA Sociology of Law Section
• Honorable Mention, Franklin Prize, Law and Society Association
For an earlier draft of this article:
* Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship, Graduate Student Paper Award, ASA Section on Political Sociology
* Reinhard Bendix Student Paper Award Honorable Mention, ASA Section on Comparative Historical Sociology
Quisumbing King, Katrina. 2019. “Recentering U.S. Empire: A Structural Perspective on the Color Line,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 5(1): 11-25.
In the past 20 years, scholars of top sociology and race and ethnicity articles increasingly have mentioned the term “color line.” Prominent among them are sociologists concerned with how waves of Latin American and Asian immigration, increasing rates of intermarriage, and a growing multiracial population will affect the U.S. racial order. While much of this work cites Du Bois, scholars stray from his definition of the color line in two ways. First, they characterize the color line as unidimensional and Black–white rather than as many divisions between non-white people and whites. Second, scholars portray the color line as the outcome of micro-level factors rather than the product of international geopolitical arrangements. I contend that in contrast to scholarship that portrays immigrants, and intermarried and multiracial people as shifting the color line, international and imperial policies related to immigration, intermarriage, and multiracial identification are longstanding sites of the construction of the U.S. racial order. Scholars should conceptualize the United States as an empire state in order to analyze the international political history of multiple color lines. In doing so, they can distinguish between differences in kind and degree of racial divisions
* James E. Blackwell Graduate Paper Award, ASA Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities
Quisumbing King, Katrina, Spencer D. Wood, Jess Gilbert, and Marilyn Sinkewicz. 2018. “Black Agrarianism: The Significance of African American Land Ownership in the Rural South,” Rural Sociology 83(3): 677-699.
Agrarianism is important in the American mythos. Land represents both a set of values and a store of wealth. In this paper, we ask how land matters in the lives of rural, Southern, Black farmland owners. Drawing on thirty-four interviews, we argue that, since the end of slavery, land has continued to operate as a site of racialized exclusion. Local white elites limit Black farmers’ access to land ownership through discriminatory lending practices. At the same time, Black farmland owners articulate an ethos in which land is a source of freedom, pride, and belonging. This we term Black agrarianism. They cultivate resistance to the legacies of slavery and sharecropping and contemporary practices of social closure. These Black farmland owners, then, view land as protection from white domination. Thus, we demonstrate how landownership is a site for the recreation of racial hierarchy in the contemporary period whilst also offering the potential for resistance and emancipation.