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The tragicomedy of democracy being bloodily imposed in Iraq and Afghanistan is a long-lived reality for Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, Puerto Ricans, and ever-rising numbers of those re-colonized through incarceration in the US. What hope, for the people in these groups and the many immigrants who become "people without a country" as soon as they cross these borders, what claim have they to sovereignty? How, furthermore, can a framework like sovereignty, used historically to exploit, dispossess, and even exterminate people, also constitute actual liberation?

Editor Frances Negrón-Muntaner and the contributors to Sovereign Acts argue that it can. Moving the idea of sovereignty beyond the narrow confines of the nation-state, beyond the concept of a power one either has or lacks, this paradigm-shifting work examines the new ways colonized people resist current forms of domination, placing both their subjugation and their resistance within broader contemporary political contexts. A valuable contribution to this debate around indigenous conceptions of sovereignty, Sovereign Acts goes further, to investigate the relationships between sovereignty, gender, sexuality, representation, and the body.

The scholars and artists featured in this unique volume demonstrate how the sovereignty of the displaced and the disenfranchised survives. It survives, they announce, in daily acts of resistance that include the border crossings that demonstrate the permeability of nations. It lives in peoples' individual and collective refusals to set aside their own languages and legislatures. It breathes in testimony before the United Nations and independently convened international tribunals. It endures in the relentless questioning of imperialism, of what it means to be a citizen, and the proper limits of a state. It replicates itself in body art, body movement, the turn of a hand-made rudder in water, the snatch of a remembered or newly created song.

The realities on the ground in Samoa, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and more, cannot be conflated with what has come to be recognized as the broad undermining of democracy for all who reside on US soil. Yet, in addressing these realities, Sovereign Acts ultimately proclaims, to this more inclusive "we," that, even as we organize for all peoples' right to self governance and land, sovereignty can be grasped and enacted in our lives. Every day. Sovereignty, is more, after all, than a kingdom and a crown.

Frances Negrón-Muntaner, also editor of None of the Above, is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, scholar, and media activist. Her most recent films are “For the Record: Guam and World War II,” released in 2007, and “Regarding Vieques,” due to be released in 2008. She has published widely on Latino culture, media, and politics.

For more information on her work, see her webpage, www.francesnegronmuntaner.net.