Unbecoming Americans : Writing Race and Nation from the Shadows of Citizenship, 1945-1960 /
Keith, Joseph
Unbecoming Americans : Writing Race and Nation from the Shadows of Citizenship, 1945-1960 / Joseph Keith. - 1 online resource (240 p.) - The American Literatures Initiative .
restricted access http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec
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.
Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
In English.
9780813559667 9780813559681
10.36019/9780813559681 doi
American literature--History and criticism--20th century.
American literature--Minority authors--History and criticism.
American literature--History and criticism.--20th century
Citizenship in literature.
Immigrants' writings, American--History and criticism.
Race in literature.
LITERARY CRITICISM / General.
810.9920693
Unbecoming Americans : Writing Race and Nation from the Shadows of Citizenship, 1945-1960 / Joseph Keith. - 1 online resource (240 p.) - The American Literatures Initiative .
restricted access http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec
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.
Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
In English.
9780813559667 9780813559681
10.36019/9780813559681 doi
American literature--History and criticism--20th century.
American literature--Minority authors--History and criticism.
American literature--History and criticism.--20th century
Citizenship in literature.
Immigrants' writings, American--History and criticism.
Race in literature.
LITERARY CRITICISM / General.
810.9920693