Unbecoming Americans: Writing Race and Nation from the Shadows of Citizenship, 1945-1960

by Joseph Keith

Overview

During the Cold War, Ellis Island no longer served as the largest port of entry for immigrants, but as a prison for holding aliens the state wished to deport. The government criminalized those it considered un-assimilable (from left-wing intellectuals and black radicals to racialized migrant laborers) through the denial, annulment, and curtailment of citizenship and its rights. The island, ceasing to represent the iconic ideal of immigrant America, came to symbolize its very limits.

Unbecoming Americans sets out to recover the shadow narratives of un-American writers forged out of the racial and political limits of citizenship. In this collection of Afro-Caribbean, Filipino, and African American writers—C.L.R. James, Carlos Bulosan, Claudia Jones, and Richard Wright—Joseph Keith examines how they used their exclusion from the nation, a condition he terms “alienage,” as a standpoint from which to imagine alternative global solidarities and to interrogate the contradictions of the United States as a country, a republic, and an empire at the dawn of the "American Century.”

Building on scholarship linking the forms of the novel to those of the nation, the book explores how these writers employed alternative aesthetic forms, including memoir, cultural criticism, and travel narrative, to contest prevailing notions of race, nation, and citizenship. Ultimately they produced a vital counter-discourse of freedom in opposition to the new formations of empire emerging in the years after World War II, forms that continue to shape our world today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813559667
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	01/10/2013
Series:	The American Literatures Initiative
Edition description:	None ed.
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

JOSEPH KEITH is an assistant professor of English at Binghamton University, SUNY.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Shadow Narratives of the Transnational

Part I. Novel Forms: Writing at the Limits of Citizenship

1. Neither Citizen nor Alien: Rewriting the Immigrant Bildungsroman across the Borders of Empire in Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart
2. The Epistemology of Unbelonging: Richard Wright's The Outsider and the Politics of Secrecy

Part II. Peripheral Forms: Literatures of Alienage, Incarceration, and Deportation

3. Richard Wright's Cosmopolitan Exile: Race, Decolonization, and the Dialogics of Modernity
4. The Undesirable Alien and the Politics of Form: Telling Untold Tales in C. L. R. James's Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways
5. Talking Back to the State: Claudia Jones's Radical Forms of Alienage

Conclusion: An Empire of Alienage

Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Joseph Keith compellingly demonstrates how a select group of authors fashioneda radical cosmopolitan literary tradition at the subaltern limits of U.S. citizenship that subverted racial logics, reimagined the state, and addressed the question of 'how shall the human race be organized?'"

author of The New American Exceptionalism - Donald Pease

"A highly original work that is grounded in compelling literary and historical analysis. Unbecoming Americans illuminates Cold War America and U.S. critical race theory with insights drawn from subaltern historiography and postcolonial theory."

author of Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity, 1800-2000 - David Lloyd

"Keith has engaged an interesting topic that literary and cultural studies scholars will savor."

Journal of American History

"Unbecoming Americans provides a sophisticated synthesis of disparate texts, highlights the significance of discursive critique during the early years of the Cold War, and encourages scholars to investigate other neglected works in search of both alternative perspectives of social discourse and alternative conceptions of the social itself."

Reviews in Cultural Theory

"This is a great book, valuable for the light it sheds on a little known period in American literary history as well as for the way it rereads these texts. For students of narratives, official and otherwise, it is a compelling reminder of how stories function as the scaffolding on which we build our understandings."

Journal of American Culture

"A compelling book. Unbecoming Americans is built on the hope that reading, language, and form have the subversivepotential to promote new ideas."

Modern Language Studies

"Its overall value lies in its nuanced attention to how an outsider status can function as a corrective to US exceptionalism and engender a mode of resistance. [Unbecoming Americans] is not only timely—it is academically significant and politically germane."

MELUS

"Unbecoming Americans is a valuable addition to the study of mid-century and Cold War American culture, as it reveals to us in new ways how political history and literary form intersect at the dawn of the American century."

Literature and History

"Its overall value lies in its nuanced attention to how an outsider status can function as a corrective to US exceptionalism and engender a mode of resistance. [Unbecoming Americans] is not only timely—it is academically significant and politically germane."

From the Publisher