| Situated at the intersection of political theory, constitutional law, and ethnic studies literatures, this dissertation analyzes identity as a political category. Where most analysts have read racial identity as a source of political claims, pre-existing in most important aspects the interaction of political forces, I investigate how racial identity is shaped by legal procedures and decisions. I then develop the implications this holds for important questions of social justice.; Issuing from a conflict between the relative instability of social identities (such as race) and the legal demand for clear rules and stable subjects, my research suggests both that the law plays an important role in the formation of racial subjects in the United States and that judicial opinions tend to conceal this constitutive aspect of the law's power. Chapter One develops a theory of racial grammar as an alternative to all-or-nothing accounts in which race must either be accepted as an ahistorical essence or rejected as a biological fiction. Drawing from Wittgenstein's concept of "family resemblances," a racial grammar approach offers an understanding of racial difference without essentialism. |
