Constitutional Crisis and the Monstrosity of Empire

• In Event: Haunting, Horror, Monstrosity: Undoing Genres of Oppression

Abstract

In this paper, I situate the unfolding constitutional crisis in the United States in the context of its late-stage empire. Specifically, I focus on the figure of the zombie in the recent HBO series The Last of Us (2023) as illuminating what constitutional law scholar Maggie Blackhawk (Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe) has called the “constitution of American colonialism.” The zombie, I suggest, plays an important role in constitutional jurisprudence, reflecting its transit from the Caribbean to the United States in cultural representations produced during the latter’s early twentieth-century occupation of Haiti. Studying how the show uses these monsters helps to foreground what legal historian Aziz Rana has called the fundamentally settler imperial nature of the U.S. constitutional order, undermining scholars and commentators who see the Trump Administration as representing an aberrational, unprecedented threat to this liberal system. As the two main characters--a man named Joel (Pedro Pascal) and a young girl named Ellie (Bella Ramsey)—-together navigate the perilous ruins of a post-apocalyptic United States during their westward transit, they encounter a series of political communities, including revolutionary populists, radical anarchists, theocratic fundamentalists, communist utopians, and the authoritarian remnants of the collapsed U.S. federal government. Against these competing alternatives of political organization, the parent-child dynamic that develops between the two (unrelated) characters replicates the genetic strain of what Rana calls the U.S. “creedal constitutional narrative,” representing the show’s normative investments in a redemptive vision of the United States as an exceptional nation whose regrettable past of settler colonialism, chattel slavery, and empire does not corrupt the purity of its founding commitment to universal equality.⁠ Critically reading The Last of Us as instantiating an updated, multicultural vision of American values regenerated through violent encounters with savage zombies on the post-apocalyptic frontier, I argue that the series demonstrates how settler colonial ideologies continue to saturate our present constitutional system and influence the legal structures under which we live. I conclude, then, that accounts of our present constitutional crisis must contend with the authoritarian values encoded in and reproduced through such dominant, seemingly progressive cultural narratives, taking seriously the co-constitutive relationship between cultural production and constitutional law.

Biographical Information

Mark Firmani is an assistant professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College. He received his JD from Yale Law School and his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania’s department of English. He is currently working on two book projects. The first traces how contemporary Iraqi fiction—-written in Arabic and published in English translation—-critiques how the United States used international law to license the 2003 invasion and occupation. The second project explores how the figure of the monster and representations of monstrosity animate laws in the United States, surfacing in judicial opinions, legislative debates, statutes, regulations, and more. His writing has appeared in the Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Law and Literature, Middle Eastern Literatures, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Author

• Mark Firmani, Amherst College