 | Unbecoming Americans: Writing Race and Nation from the Shadows of Citizenship, 1945-1960 Subjects: American literature -- Minority authors -- History and criticism; Immigrants’ writings American -- History and criticism; Citizenship in literature; Race in literature; American literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism; 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." JOSEPH KEITH is an assistant professor of English at Binghamton University, SUNY. |
