In a time when mass deportations are framed as sound migration policy and Haitian communities become focal points in racialized political debates in the United States, and Haiti endures a prolonged multilayered humanitarian, political, and economic crisis, Jeffrey Kahn’s Islands of Sovereignty: Haitian Migration and the Borders of Empire (2019) emerges as a critical text. Kahn offers a profound contribution to our understanding of the juridico-political dynamics shaping U.S. immigration policies, the mechanics of the U.S. “liberal empire,” and the colonial frameworks that underpin US-Haitian relations. The book explores the legal and extralegal formations of the U.S. empire in the Caribbean and their enduring consequences for the racialized representation of Haitian migrants.
Kahn situates Haiti’s precarious condition within a historical continuum of Western imperialism and U.S. interventionism. The book underscores how Haiti’s current challenges – from its governance crisis to its economic instability – are deeply rooted in the legacies of U.S. and Western imperial interventions. Decades of U.S. occupation and Haiti’s forced isolation from global financial systems have left the Haitian state incapacitated, unable to serve its citizens adequately. Chapter 3 highlights the enduring and complex entanglements between Haiti and the United States, emphasizing how the first U.S. occupation of Haiti in 1915, ostensibly justified as a mission to maintain law and order, in reality served to solidify U.S. geopolitical control over the Caribbean. This occupation paralleled interventions in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, Panama, and the Dominican Republic, cementing imperial domination across the region.
Through meticulous legal and historical ethnography, Kahn unravels the legal architectures and political cosmologies underpinning U.S. policies of maritime interdiction of Haitian migrants. Islands of Sovereignty is remarkable in its methodological scope and ability to focus on Haitian asylum-seekers journeys to the United States between the 1970s and 1990s. The structure of the book mirrors the complexity of its subject. Organized into six chapters, it weaves together historical narratives, legal analysis, and theoretical insights. The opening chapters provide a historical account of Haitian migration, detailing how U.S. support for the Duvalier dictatorships fueled mass displacement. Kahn critiques the artificial legal distinctions between political and economic migrants, exposing how these categories were constructed to privilege some while excluding others. This process, Kahn argues, shaped both the asylum system and the legal and public discourses that define and reproduce the “other.” Subsequent chapters examine the evolution of U.S. interdiction policies, the racialized discourses underpinning them, and the institutional architectures that sustain exclusion. Particularly compelling is Kahn’s theorization of the “disjuncture gambit,” a spatial tactic that enabled U.S. officials to circumvent judicial constraints by establishing offshore regimes of detention and processing. The latter chapters delve into jurisdiction’s theoretical and legal dimensions, offering a nuanced analysis of how sovereignty is enacted through bureaucratic practices, legal texts, and spatial exclusions.
Kahn introduces the concept of “citational architecture” to describe how legal language and administrative protocols justify exclusionary practices. This framework highlights how low-level bureaucrats, through procedural authority, wield disproportionate power in shaping asylum outcomes. In Chapter 4, Kahn further illustrates this concept by examining how the United States delegated asylum decisions to these officials, whose actions were reinforced by legal texts and administrative protocols designed to maintain racialized governance. By monopolizing the authority to document and adjudicate asylum claims, bureaucrats solidified a regime of mobility governance that systematically excluded Haitian migrants. Furthermore, Kahn’s analysis extends to the “entry fiction,” a legal mechanism that renders migrants intercepted at sea physically present but legally absent, epitomizing the colonial logic of U.S. border governance. This fiction weaponizes legal infrastructures to legitimize exclusion while evading accountability. By deconstructing the legal and bureaucratic frameworks sustaining this fiction, Kahn traces how they are inscribed into the fragmented geographies of U.S. power – territorial, juridical, and policing borders alike.
Through these mechanisms, Islands of Sovereignty demonstrates how legal and bureaucratic practices of border enforcement are deeply embedded in the histories of U.S. imperialism, racial exclusion, and contested sovereignties. Offshore interdiction, Kahn argues, represents a deliberate reconfiguration of sovereignty and jurisdiction, transcending territorial boundaries to create hyper-legal spaces where legality and exception coexist – transforming the oceanic borders of the U.S. empire into instruments of exclusionary power.
Logics of exceptionality and emergency powers have long shaped the operativity of the offshore interdiction system, with Guantánamo Naval Base emerging as a central site of Kahn’s analysis. Far from being an aberration, Guantánamo’s role as a detention center for Haitian migrants builds on its long history as a space of imperial carcerality. Kahn situates Guantánamo within a genealogy of extraterritoriality, arguing that its existence allows the United States to circumvent constitutional protections while asserting sovereign power. This legal architecture is rooted in the Insular Cases – a cornerstone of the U.S. empire’s juridical framework (Jiménez Reference Jiménez2024) – and reflects the oceanic vision of manifest destiny that enabled the extension of U.S. authority into the Caribbean. Kahn further connects Guantánamo’s contemporary use during the War on Terror to the revival of the Insular Cases in U.S. legal discourse, revealing the enduring legacies of imperial governance.
The transformation of Guantánamo into a detention site for HIV-positive Haitians exemplifies the racialized biopolitics underpinning U.S. immigration policy. As Kahn notes, the American fascination with Haitian pathology – both medical and political – has long framed Haiti as a source of contagion, justifying exclusionary practices under the guise of public health. Kahn’s exploration of these biopolitical frameworks reveals how the association of Haitians with contagion, particularly during the HIV/AIDS crisis, justified policies of exclusion. This discourse persists in contemporary times, as evidenced by Donald Trump’s 2017 remarks linking Haitians to AIDS. These enduring narratives illustrate how U.S. governance continues to medicalize and pathologize Haitian bodies to sustain exclusionary practices. Nevertheless, this racialized framing of Haiti predates U.S. imperialism and can be traced back to European discourses surrounding the Haitian Revolution and its perceived threat to enslaved populations across the Atlantic (Atiles Reference Atiles2018; Buck-Morss Reference Buck-Morss2000). Haitian bodies and their strive for self-determination have been met by the West, since the Haitian Revolution, with racial violence and imperial contempt.
Islands of Sovereignty is also a study of resistance. Haitian activists and their legal allies mobilized networks across the Caribbean and the United States, creating a counter-architecture of advocacy to challenge the imperial infrastructures of exclusion. These efforts, which Kahn terms “siege litigation,” represented a dialectical opposition to the racialized exclusionary policies of the U.S. immigration system. Legal mobilizations briefly reshaped the legal geography of the U.S. border, exposing the systemic violence embedded in its governance. However, this resistance was met with fierce institutional backlash as the United States expanded its carceral apparatus into a dispersed system of detention centers and prisons, further entrenching the spatial and legal violence of the empire.
Kahn highlights how these litigations, while significant, were ultimately undermined by a system of executive orders and administrative maneuvers designed to reinforce exclusionary practices. As Kahn notes, “the juridical conditions of possibility for interdiction had been largely crafted on a scaffolding of executive orders, proclamations, and memoranda” (93–94). This demonstrates how jurisdiction operates as a spatial order, with jurisdictional cartographies systematically enabling exclusion and sustaining imperial power.
At a time when mass deportations and racialized debates dominate U.S. immigration policy, Islands of Sovereignty compels us to confront how histories of empire and exclusion continue to shape contemporary governance. By foregrounding offshore dynamics, racialized biopolitics, and the fraught tensions of legal mobilization, Kahn offers a profound critique of the spatial and legal underpinnings of the liberal world order. This masterful study of U.S. imperialism, law, and migration illuminates how sovereignty operates at the edges of legality, turning the Caribbean into a laboratory for exclusionary statecraft. For scholars of law, political geography, and postcolonial studies, Islands of Sovereignty is an indispensable resource, offering a resonant analysis of the enduring interplay between race, law, and empire.
