Date of Award

Fall 2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

American Studies

First Advisor

Lui, Mary

Abstract

My dissertation brings legal history, Asian-American history, and studies of racial capitalism into conversation to explore how corporations became the dominant actors in the U.S. economy between 1870 and 1943. It begins with two cases, decided by the Supreme Court on the same day in 1886: Yick Wo v. Hopkins, a San Francisco Chinese civil rights case, and Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, a California county tax case against the state’s largest railroad company. These rulings expanded the constitutional definition of personhood to offer both Chinese noncitizens and corporations the same Fourteenth Amendment protections. Bureaucratic Violence investigates the impact of treating individual noncitizens and corporations as equals under the law in the wake of Reconstruction. These changes to personhood allowed the federal government to recant on its newly established duty to fight state racism. In ceding a range of its governing authority to corporations, the state effectively permitted privatized structural racism to persist into the present. Government privatization is usually theorized as a late twentieth century phenomenon, often identified with neoliberalism, but my dissertation shows that this privatization and its reliance on racial thinking has been intrinsic to corporate infrastructure since the late nineteenth century.

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