Before Borders: A Legal and Literary History of Naturalization by Stephanie DeGooyer (review)

Reviewed by: Before Borders: A Legal and Literary History of Naturalization by Stephanie DeGooyer Sal Nicolazzo Stephanie DeGooyer, Before Borders: A Legal and Literary History of Naturalization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2022). Pp. 216; 1 chart. $34.95 paper, $94.95 cloth. Stephanie DeGooyer's Before Borders: A Legal and Literary History of Naturalization offers an exemplar of law-and-literature scholarship at its best: beyond simply tracing the "influence" of law on literature or vice versa, DeGooyer's richly historical and theoretical study of naturalization conceives of law and literature as convergent and mutually constitutive imaginative projects, yielding new understandings of both. The links she draws from legal debates regarding the possibilities of naturalization to the formally experimental history of the novel are compelling and rich; as DeGooyer argues, naturalization is a fundamentally creative process that produces new subjects—like the novel itself. One of the greatest strengths of Before Borders is DeGooyer's ability to think and supply precisely how literary texts enact, experiment with, and expand upon the legal concept of naturalization not only in their representational content but in their narrative form. At the same time, DeGooyer's extensive and theoretically astute engagement with the legal history of naturalization makes a convincing case for the further study of a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century legal and political transformation that has hitherto received little notice, especially among literary scholars. I confess I had not thought much about naturalization in this period before reading Before Borders, and I came away thoroughly convinced of the importance of naturalization to a fuller understanding of some of the period's major developments in political theory, legal practice, and literary form. Before Borders traces the development of the possibility of naturalization as an epochal shift in English legal and political understandings of allegiance, as early modern notions of perpetual allegiance give way to a more contractual model. This model foundationally transforms both sovereigns and their subjects, instantiating a form of individualism that is predicated not on a notion of stable, interiorized depth of national attachment, but rather on the overtly creative power of legal fictions to remake individuals' allegiance through voluntary, contractual arrangements. Beginning with the landmark of Calvin's Case (1606), DeGooyer traces how the Union of the Crowns under James I inaugurated an expansive legal and political series of quandaries regarding the basis, process, and legitimacy of naturalization, which emerged, crucially, as a legal process that created a new and counterfactual kind of subject: a subject who had the rights and privileges of a subject as if they had been born one. DeGooyer traces not only the surprising frequency with which novelists explicitly address naturalization and the question of national allegiance, [End Page 388] but also, more importantly, "the formal commitment that the novels share" both with each other and with naturalization as a legal procedure: "the contiguous process of bringing new subjects into existence through elaborate and obviously fictional procedures" (82). DeGooyer's attention to this self-conscious fictionality allows her to convincingly show how the experimental form of the novel enacted its own body of legal theory. The rewards of this study are rich for scholars of eighteenth-century British literature, and not just specialists in law and literature. As DeGooyer reveals, naturalization was at the center of the period's most pressing cultural and political concerns: "The question of how the English could take in foreigners and remain English was the very foundation of the naturalized identity and legal fiction of Britishness and of Great Britain" (18). DeGooyer makes a compelling case that all of us who teach courses in "British literature" should do so with the unsettledness of "Britishness" itself at the forefront, and that commonly taught texts such as Robinson Crusoe and Frankenstein can transform powerfully when read this way. Before Borders raises crucial questions about the intertwined histories of race, capitalism, the nation-state, and liberalism—and perhaps inevitably, given the scope of these questions, I see some of these tensions as unresolved. As De-Gooyer shows, while naturalization is "a far more radical procedure than we have realized" (2), it was nonetheless limited along lines of religion, race, class, and nationality, and this...