UC Berkeley

This dissertation rethinks the contours of American liberalism through a historical ethnography that illustrates the imbricated relationship between security, racialization, police power, and civil rights. It sidesteps the question of citizenship and national belonging in order to think about the deeper historical, political, and social groundwork that compels demands for civil rights and security in racialized Muslim American communities. As such, the dissertation does not examine the ways in which racialized or marginalized communities are incorporated within the contours of American liberalism. Rather, it traces the production of racial subjectivity in tandem with the early sedimentation of civil rights as a technology wielded against and born out of racial violence and white terror. How does civil rights, as a technology produced out of liberalism and structured by police power, become a tool for racialized Muslim American communities who seek to remedy and secure their corporeal and spiritual livelihoods in the face of racism and encroaching governmental surveillance? The dissertation answers this question in two parts that historically span the post-Civil War era (circa 1865) up to the present of counterterrorism programs. In the first part, I outline “A Genealogy of Civil Rights” and demonstrate how such rights entangle with the force of police power. Across three different chapters, I reconstruct the incipience of civil rights through a reading of court briefs, legal documents, and political speeches and debates. I first show how civil rights acquired significance for racialized communities through their differentiation from political and social rights. Then, in the next two chapters, I illustrate how the differentiation between civil, political, and social rights solidified the authority of police power in matters concerning racial violence, political and social conflict, and the protection of racialized communities. By illustrating the conditions of civil rights through my conceptual labor in part one, I set the framework for my ethnographic engagements that I depict in part two. In “Securing Islam,” I follow the life of security and rights in racialized Muslim American communities in North Carolina. In this part, I am not exclusively concerned with Muslim Americans’ demands for civil rights or their transactions with police power. Instead, this part demonstrates how police power, civil rights, and securitization fundamentally transform the practice of the Islamic tradition in a site of racial violence. While I am influenced by recent studies on and critiques of state action, rights discourses, and the legal recognition of racial and religious minorities, I extend these debates by looking at how the vitality of the Islamic tradition in the US is, in fact, reinforced by the technologies of liberalism that paradoxically seek to repress it — technologies that include surveillance, security, and rights. Rather than examining the horizons of assimilation and integration that rights discourses bespeak, I illustrate an unexamined genealogy of civil rights that is oriented toward a horizon of security and preservation of ethical, theological, and corporeal life.