04486nam 2200709 a 450 991078731590332120230803030712.00-8135-5968-510.36019/9780813559681(CKB)2670000000397266(EBL)1295721(OCoLC)853364242(SSID)ssj0000918776(PQKBManifestationID)11564778(PQKBTitleCode)TC0000918776(PQKBWorkID)10907307(PQKB)11460027(MiAaPQ)EBC1295721(OCoLC)852896329(MdBmJHUP)muse18913(DE-B1597)530256(DE-B1597)9780813559681(Au-PeEL)EBL1295721(CaPaEBR)ebr10733305(CaONFJC)MIL504612(EXLCZ)99267000000039726620120329d2013 uy 0engur|n|---|||||txtccrUnbecoming Americans[electronic resource] writing race and nation from the shadows of citizenship, 1945-1960 /Joseph KeithNew Brunswick, N.J. Rutgers University Pressc20131 online resource (254 p.)The American Literatures InitiativeDescription based upon print version of record.0-8135-5967-7 0-8135-5966-9 Includes bibliographical references and index.Neither citizen nor alien: rewriting the immigrant bildungsroman across the borders of empire in Carlos Bulosan's America is in the heart -- The epistemology of un-belonging: Richard Wright's The outsider and the politics of secrecy -- Richard Wright's cosmopolitan exile: race, decolonization and the dialogics of modernity -- The undesirable alien and the politics of form: telling untold tales in C.L.R. James's mariners, renegades and castaways -- Talking back to the state: Claudia Jones's radical forms of alienage -- Conclusion: An empire of alienage.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.American Literatures InitiativeAmerican literatureMinority authorsHistory and criticismImmigrants' writings, AmericanHistory and criticismCitizenship in literatureRace in literatureAmerican literature20th centuryHistory and criticismAmerican literatureMinority authorsHistory and criticism.Immigrants' writings, AmericanHistory and criticism.Citizenship in literature.Race in literature.American literatureHistory and criticism.810.9/920693Keith Joseph1508341MiAaPQMiAaPQMiAaPQBOOK9910787315903321Unbecoming Americans3739688UNINA