Strange Hybridities?

Abstract

Strange Hybridities? Jacqueline Stevens (bio) Vicki Hsueh, Hybrid Constitutions: Challenging Legacies of Law, Privilege and Culture in Colonial America. Duke University Press: 2010. US $21.95 (paper). US $74.95 (cloth), 208 pages. ISBN 10: 082234632X, ISBN 13: 978-0822346326. Vicki Hsueh's Hybrid Constitutions: Challenging Legacies of Law, Privilege, and Culture in Colonial America explores how the constitutions and charters issued by the British government during the century leading up to the American Revolution emerge from a variety of legal authorities, rules of sovereignty, and political-economic objectives. The thought that the British Crown issued grants of sovereignty designed for a uniform consolidation of its subjects' authority over non-British nations, or even each other, is a legacy of "law, privilege, and culture in colonial America" Hsueh in her subtitle claims to challenge. (The book offers 133 pages of body matter, and 60 pages of notes and other back matter.) Hsueh develops the concept of "hybrid constitutions" in order show that the grantees of proprietary charters and other settlers in territory staked out by the British Crown invoked in their various struggles among themselves and with other nations a variety of legal authorities. These different political contests emerged from a range of idiosyncratic and political contexts that produced a changing line up of winners and losers. Hsueh's hybrid constitutions are part and parcel of the era and exemplify its contingencies: "To re-characterize colonization in this way shifts the terms of debate," Hsueh writes, "There may have been unabated colonial desire for settlement during the seventeenth century and eighteenth century, but those ambitions were nonetheless shaped by practices that stressed flexibility and change over time" (116). Hsueh also explains that those relying on what turn out to be fantasies of stadial histories, that is, histories implying necessary stages of political development, would expect a stronger and more complete exercise of sovereign power by the center over the periphery than the constitutions or charters of this era in fact reveal by their plain language or observed practice. Historians, as Hsueh shows, are well-aware of the patchworked affair called British colonialism, but their scholarship has not sufficiently permeated other fields' analysis of U.S. political development. The scholarship that most troubles Hsueh, the debate she wants to shift, appears in portions of work by Bhiku Parekh, Iris Marion Young, and James Tully, all singled out in the introduction (6). She is especially troubled by Tully's view of England's fusion of constitutionalism and colonialism toward the end of achieving an "'empire of uniformity'" (6, quoting Tully). On Hsueh's account, Tully's Strange Multiplicities: Constitutionality in an Age of Diversity (1995) misleadingly links "elements of homogeneity, exclusion, and coercion in modern constitutional forms to the entangled development of English colonialism and constitutionalism in the early modern period" (6). Tully, according to Hsueh, claims the English legal documents implementing their colonial institutions assumed a homogeneous and exclusive political community that their legal documents themselves created. Hsueh's main quarrel with Tully appears to be about his framing of these documents, as opposed to claiming that he is inaccurately describing or excluding any document in particular; nor does Hsueh engage at length any specific theoretical claims about colonialism or modern constitutionalism. Hsueh's original argument advanced through her reviews of the charters and constitutions, and against Tully and stadial history more generally, may seem somewhat modest. The historiography of colonialism should note contingencies and specific contexts: "while much contemporary theory seeks to unearth the instrumental and coercive forces helping to form modern constitutionalism, its reliance on macro-historical narratives of colonialism and more formal accounts of constitutionalism often thwarts this ambition" (7). The truth is in the details, Hsueh suggests. English colonialism was a bit of a mess and its methods and objectives have no necessary relation to those of modern constitutionalism. The addressees of Hsueh's second line of arguments, about the disparate sources and uses of early modern legal instruments of colonialism, are less obvious. She stresses colonialism's tensions and their implications for narratives that might or might not connect the multiple sources of legitimacy, political tensions, and the different parties' uneven win-loss records with the...