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 writersC.L.R. James, Carlos Bulosan, Claudia Jones, and Richard WrightJoseph 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.
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 writersC.L.R. James, Carlos Bulosan, Claudia Jones, and Richard WrightJoseph 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.
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Unbecoming Americans: Writing Race and Nation from the Shadows of Citizenship, 1945-1960
240![Unbecoming Americans: Writing Race and Nation from the Shadows of Citizenship, 1945-1960](http://img.images-bn.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.11.4)
Unbecoming Americans: Writing Race and Nation from the Shadows of Citizenship, 1945-1960
240Paperback(None ed.)
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780813559667 |
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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 |