Race, Law and the Limits of Belonging in Paul Harding’s This Other Eden

Abstract

This paper examines Paul Harding’s This Other Eden through the lens of Critical Race Theory, focusing on how race is socially constructed and violently enforced through legal, medical and cultural discourses. Based on the historical eviction of Malaga Island, Maine, the novel dramatizes the displacement of a racially mixed community in 1912, whose hybridity and poverty were recast as evidence of “degeneracy.” Drawing on Ian Haney López’s argument that race is not a biological reality but a legal and social construction, the study highlights how the Apple Islanders are defined out of existence not by nature but by the juridical categories imposed upon them. Patricia Williams’s critique of law as a mechanism that codifies racial hierarchy under the guise of neutrality further illuminates the novel’s portrayal of state and medical authorities presenting eviction as reform, masking racial violence in the language of progress.

Harding resists the historical silencing of Malaga Island by granting his characters interior lives, communal bonds and moral dignity, making the novel into an act of counter-narration. Where official histories erased, Harding reimagines, producing a counter-history that restores humanity to those excluded from America’s so-called Eden. By situating This Other Eden within the theoretical framework of López and Williams, this paper argues that Harding not only revisits a neglected chapter of American history but also exposes the structures of racial construction and institutional enforcement that continue to shape the politics of belonging.