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4 / The Undesirable Alien and the Politics of Form: Telling Untold Tales in C. L. R. James’s Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways We are not a nation, so much as a world. —herman melville, Redburn Buried beneath The Outsider’s main story of the existential antihero Cross Damon is another tragic tale that Richard Wright’s novel tells. It is the story of Bob Hunter, a minor character whose eventual fate reflects not only the broadly repressive political climate of the period but also curiously echoes a much more specific historical episode from the time of the novel’s writing. When first introduced to the reader, Hunter is working as a waiter on the train from Chicago to New York on which Cross is traveling in his escape from his former life. As we go on to learn after the two reconnect in New York City, he is also a labor organizer who is trying to develop a faction of the “Dining Car Waiters’ Union” and is also a member of the Communist Party. At first, the Party (CPUSA) supports Hunter’s organizational efforts but then changes its policy, even refusing to help Hunter in his defense against false accusations that he injured a white patron on the job—accusations that lead to his firing. The reason, a representative tells Hunter, is that the Party’s objectives in fighting worldwide totalitarianism would be better served through an alliance with American liberal democracy than by continuing to support an autonomous coalition of the black migrant working class. Feeling betrayed, Hunter refuses the directive and continues his radical labor activities on behalf of his fellow black workers. At the same time, he understands the implications of defying the Party and decides he must, as a result, go into hiding. As it turns out, this is the last the reader hears of Hunter. Only much later in the novel do we learn from his wife, Sarah, that the Trinidad-born Hunter—who had been living 132 / peripheral forms in the United States for more than a decade—has in fact been picked up by the INS after it received an “anonymous” tip that he was in the country “illegally,” and that he will be deported back to his home country . Hunter had previously fled British-controlled Trinidad to the United States under threat of incarceration because of his communist political activities there. Thus Hunter is ultimately left with no real “legal residence ”; his black radical political activities have relegated him beyond the boundaries of both nation-states—a criminalized nonnational status that has consigned him to a life of incarceration. Indeed, as his wife, Sarah, describes, it has all but ended his life. “Bob’s dead,” she declares. “He can’t live out those years in that prison in Trinidad.” In this subplot of Bob Hunter’s imprisonment and deportation, Wright stages a tragic example of the broad theme I have been charting over the last two chapters—namely, the repressive closing down of alternative public spheres and the criminalization of black and migrant radicalism and labor organizing activities through the politics of citizenship during the early Cold War. But if Hunter’s story bears general witness to a tradition of migrant black radicals and the harsh political climate it faced at the time, it also intimates perhaps the contemporaneous fate of one migrant radical black intellectual in particular: that of the Trinidadborn activist, writer, and intellectual C. L. R. James, who was similarly incarcerated as an “undesirable alien” in 1952. Indeed, the year before Wright completed and published his novel, C. L. R. James, like Bob Hunter, had been arrested by the INS and arraigned on “passport violations” after months of harassment by the state for his radical labor activities. The state subsequently designated James, who had been living in the United States for the previous fourteen years and had applied for legal citizenship in 1947, a “subversive” and therefore subject to deportation under the McCarran-Walter Act. Passed in 1952 in the climate of the Cold War’s founding years, the legislation linked immigration with other political and security concerns of the state through the discourse of anticommunism. It constructed the “alien subversive” as a figure who ostensibly embodied the fundamentally foreign threat of communism to subvert U.S. democratic political culture and the state. Under this logic, the act gave the INS, which had been moved in 1941 from the Department of Labor to the Department of Justice under the...

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