Unbecoming Americans writing race and nation from the shadows of citizenship, 1945-1960 / Joseph Keith.

By:

Keith, Joseph [Author]

Contributor(s):

American Literatures Initiative

Material type: Text

text

Media type:

computer

Carrier type:

online resource

ISBN:

9780813559681
9781461934950

Subject(s):

Genre/Form:

Electronic Books.

LOC classification:

PS153 .U534 2013

Online resources:

Click to access digital title | log in using your CIU ID number and my.ciu.edu password

Available additional physical forms:

Contents:

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.

Subject: "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."--Publisher's website.

Tags from this library: No tags from this library for this title. Log in to add tags.

Average rating: 0.0 (0 votes)

Holdings
Item type	Current library	Collection	Call number	URL	Status	Date due	Barcode
Online Book (LOGIN USING YOUR MY CIU LOGIN AND PASSWORD)	G. Allen Fleece Library ONLINE	Non-fiction	PS153.56 (Browse shelf(Opens below))	Link to resource	Available		ocn852896329

Browsing G. Allen Fleece Library shelves, Shelving location: ONLINE, Collection: Non-fiction Close shelf browser (Hides shelf browser)

Previous								Next
Previous	PS153.56 Multicultural poetics : re-visioning the American canon /	PS153.56 A translational turn : Latinx literature into the mainstream /	PS153.56 A World Not to Come A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture /	PS153.56 Unbecoming Americans writing race and nation from the shadows of citizenship, 1945-1960 /	PS153.56 Troubling nationhood in U.S. Latina literature : explorations of place and belonging /	PS153.56 A genealogy of literary multiculturalism /Christopher Douglas.	PS153.56 Fifties ethnicities : the ethnic novel and mass culture at midcentury /	Next

Includes bibliographies and index.

"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."--Publisher's website.

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.

https://lib.ciu.edu/copyright-request-form

There are no comments on this title.

to post a comment.