Unbecoming Americans: Writing Race and Nation from the Shadows of Citizenship, 1945-1960

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. It is a story that speaks, in fact, to another enduring tradition of the island as a site of cultural hierarchy and policing, wherein many white “ethnic” families had hostile encounters with the authorities of Ellis Island, often resulting in being rejected entry into the country or in drastic name changes. 2. Quoted in Vincent Cannato, American Passage: The History of Ellis Island (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 349. Cannato provides a succinct history of Ellis Island’s transformation into an immigration prison (350–76). 3. “Harbor Camp for Enemy Aliens,” New York Times, January 25, 1942, quoted in Cannato, American Passage, 352. 4. Quoted in Cannato, American Passage, 357. 5. The 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, or Immigration and Nationality Act, revised but continued the national-origins quota system of immigrant selection in effect since 1929. Crafted as a government tool in the battle against communism, the act also gave immigration officials the unprecedented authority to arrest without warrant, hold without bail, and deport for an action that was legal when committed, any alien residing in the United States. 6. Louis Adamic, A Nation of Nations (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1945). 7. My use of the term “unbecoming Americans” is intended to invoke three interrelated ideas at the heart of this book. First, it describes those individuals whose racialized identity and/or political beliefs rendered them unfit for American citizenship during the early post–World War II period. Second, it underscores how the construction of the assimilated or abstract citizen-subject in the United States—that is, the process of becoming American—is founded upon the abjection of certain forms and figures of particularity that come to signify its constitutive outside. And finally, it describes the effort of each of these figures to transform their alienage from the United States into a political, epistemic, and aesthetic standpoint from which to imagine 206 / notes to pages 4–7 other forms of belonging in the world beyond the discourse of American citizenship and national belonging. 8. C. L. R. James, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (1953; reprinted with an introduction by Donald Pease, Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2001). 9. Claudia Jones, “Claudia Jones Writes from Ellis Island,” Daily Worker, November 8, 1950. A copy of the letter is also located in the Claudia Jones Memorial Collection , Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. 10. Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart (1946; repr., Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976), 285. 11. Richard Wright, The Outsider (1953; reprinted and restored text established by the Library of America, New York: HarperCollins, 1993). 12. See Mae Ngai’s Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Linda Bosniak’s, The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); and Chandan Reddy’s Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality and the US State (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). On other citizenship scholarship related to questions of race, immigration, and national identity, see, for example, Leti Volpp and Mary Dudziak, Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); and David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic, 1995). 13. Bosniak, The Citizen and the Alien, 140. 14. My use of the term “alien citizen” is taken from Mae Ngai, who defines it in Impossible Subjects as “persons who are American citizens by virtue of their birth in the United States but who are presumed to be foreign by the mainstream of American culture and, at times, by the state” (2). 15. Some of the pioneering work on black radicalism in U.S. history includes that of Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Zed, 1983); Robin Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); and Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). For works that have sought to situate black radicalisms in a context of literary production, see William Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left: AfricanAmerican Writing and Communism...