No One is Illegal on Stolen Land

In “My Hometown,” part of his Born in the U.S.A. album, Bruce Springsteen sings nostalgically about growing up in Freehold, his hometown, in the 1950s. What is striking about this song is that the same story could be told about thousands of towns in the country. Indeed, as a key site during the Revolutionary War and the inspiration for Springsteen’s 1985 classic, Freehold Borough is invested in its authenticity as an historic and “all-American” city. Drawing on this poetic potential for abstraction, my work as Senior Fellow at RefLex at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin proposes Freehold as a site of inquiry and a point of departure: an unexpected yet auspicious site from which to appreciate important linkages between the colonial past and the colonial present of the United States.