M. C. Loureiro (Leicester Law School) has posted Prelude: The one and the Other (M. C. Loureiro, Colonial Citizenship: Law, Race and Rights through the Portuguese Empire (Bristol University Press 2026)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This prelude introduces the personal and intellectual origins of Colonial Citizenship. Beginning in a two-bedroom apartment in São Cristóvão, Rio de Janeiro, it narrates the author’s search for Portuguese documents in his grandmother’s wardrobe: a search that yielded a birth certificate, a passport, and a path to a European nationality. Structured around the asymmetry between two grandmothers, one whose paper trail offered a claim to citizenship and one whose silence carried only colonial erasure, the prelude reflects on citizenship as a racial sorting mechanism that rewards legibility and punishes those whose histories were never meant to be recorded. Drawing on Fanon and Young, it situates this personal trajectory within the book’s central argument: that postcolonial nationality law carries colonial structures forward through altered legal form. Citizenship, it concludes, is not a legal gift but a historical residue built on the racial architecture of empire that the book invites the reader to burn.