Newsletter #102: Constitutional Bind Series Bibliography

By Aziz Rana

During my conversations with Dan, there were many books by scholars I wish I had mentioned. I engage with them in greater detail in The Constitutional Bind. Rather than giving a comprehensive list, I thought I’d mention some sources that were implicit in the exchanges about particular topic areas, such as the US in the Philippines, New Deal constitutionalism, or decolonization. 

• Dorothy Roberts’s classic “Abolition Constitutionalism” in the Harvard Law Review, exploring Black anti-slavery constitutional ideas.
• Paul Kramer’s exceptional book on the US in the Philippines, The Blood of Government.
• Maggie Blackhawk’s terrific “The Constitution of American Colonialism” in the Harvard Law Review on Native American nations and US constitutional politics.
• Amy Aronson’s great biography, Crystal Eastman: A Revolutionary Life.
• Willy Forbath’s and Joey Fishkin’s excellent book, The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution, on political economy and the Constitution, especially the New Deal imagination.
• Joel Modiri’s pathbreaking writing on constitutional veneration and South Africa, an interesting parallel example for the US, especially the essay “Conquest and Constitutionalism: First Thoughts on an Alternative Jurisprudence” in South African Journal on Human Rights.
• Robert Vitalis’s eye-opening “The Midnight Ride of Kwame Nkrumah and Other Fables of Bandung” in Humanity on the invocations of the American Revolution at Bandung.
• Mary Dudziak’s definitive account of Thurgood Marshall in Kenya, Exporting American Dreams.
• Sandipto Dasgupta’s great new book on the Indian constitutional project in the mid-20th century moment of decolonization, Legalizing the Revolution.
• Sam Klug’s terrific new book on ideas of colonialism in US domestic and foreign affairs, The Internal Colony.
• Charisse Burden-Stelly’s excellent Black Scare/Red Scare on state repression of Black and anti-capitalism organizing across the 20th century.
• Brandon Terry seminal essay in the edited volume, To Shape a New World, on the relationship between MLK and Black Power, “Requiem for a Dream.”
• Adom Getachew’s wonderful book on the global anti-colonial imagination, Worldmaking After Empire.
• Felicia Kornbluh’s essential The Battle for Welfare Rights, on Black feminism, the Constitution, and the politics around constitutionalizing welfare rights.
• Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin’s definitive book on the Panthers, Black Against Empire.

Separately, I also think it’s vital to read the actual texts by left voices, who offer alternative constitutional traditions, but who are rarely engaged with as part of American constitutional memory.  With that in mind, some – of many – pieces worth exploring include:

• Allan Benson, Our Dishonest Constitution (1914), for one presentation of the Socialist Party of America’s approach to the constitutional system in 1910s.
• Crystal Eastman, “Now We Can Begin” (1920) and Toward the Great Change, the latter an edited reader of her writings, for her version in the early 20th century of an anti-imperial and socialist feminism, including with respect to constitutional politics.
• Laura Cornelius Kellogg, Our Democracy and the American Indian (1920), on creative ways to imagine a plurinational constitutional system that respects Indigenous self-determination. You can read it alongside David Temin’s great recent essay on Kellogg, “Our Democracy: Laura Cornelius Kellogg’s Decolonial-Democracy” in Perspective on Politics.
• W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (1935) and Color and Democracy (1945) for a sustained analysis of American constitutional “fetishism” and how to approach projects of constitutional transformation, with Reconstruction as a guiding frame.
• Norman Thomas, “A Socialist Looks at the Constitution” (1936), in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, for socialist constitutional politics during the New Deal.
• Harry Haywood, Negro Liberation (1948), on the Black Belt thesis and structural changes to political representation in the US.
• Vito Marcantonio, I Vote My Conscience, his collected writings from 1935-1950, for a powerful entry into socialist lawyering and legal thinking.
• James and Grace Lee Boggs, “The City is the Black Man’s Land” (1966) in the Monthly Review on reconceiving American federalism to unleash Black political agency.
• Hank Adams, on Indigenous self-determination in the context of the US nation-state, especially in the “Trail of Broken Treaties” 20 point position paper (1972), and in his collected writings, The Hank Adams Reader.