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Introduction: Shadow Narratives of the Transnational On November 12, 1950, the New York Times ran a lengthy exposé by the journalist A. H. Raskin on what the article’s title deemed the “New Role for Ellis Island.” At the top of the page there is a large black-and-white photograph, shot from behind, of a person sitting in deep shadow staring out through a gated window toward the Statue of Liberty, which stands in the distance bathed in sunlight. Beneath the photo, the article chronicles in sober terms how with the passing of the Internal Security Act earlier that year, Ellis Island had come to serve as a holding prison for immigrants and aliens the state wished to deport. The act, which passed over President Harry Truman’s veto, forced communists and other “subversives” to register with the government and gave the state broad powers to ban any aliens who either had advocated “totalitarianism” or had been affiliated with an organization that had done so. “Ellis Island is probably the most cosmopolitan bit of earth in the world,” Raskin wrote, and then likened it to a more recently founded institution. “It is One World in microcosm, a prototype of the United Nations spirit. Yet the institution that occupies this global dot of land is the antithesis of the U.N. idea. It is the embodiment of isolationism and exclusion, the shutting of America away from the world.” Ellis Island, Raskin concluded, had become a “symbol of an institution that for many newcomers means the end of hope, not its beginning.” Ellis Island’s use as a detention center for unwanted aliens is a much less well-known story about the institution than its iconic role as the largest port of entry for immigrants.1 It is also a story that began not in 2 / introduction the early Cold War but several decades earlier in the years after World War I. Indeed, by the mid-1930s, Edward Corsi, the commissioner of the island at the time, regretfully assessed that deportation had become “the big business at Ellis Island.”2 Later, in December 1941, soon after Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt issued three presidential proclamations declaring nonnaturalized Japanese, Germans, and Italians living in the United States to be enemy aliens. The FBI, which had been collecting information for close to three years on noncitizens living in the United States suspected of sympathizing with Nazi Germany or fascist Italy, quickly moved into action, interning thousands of “enemy aliens” in facilities across the country, including Ellis Island. By September 1942, close to seven thousand aliens of German, Japanese, and Italian ancestry had been arrested by the Justice Department; hundreds, mostly German, found themselves on Ellis Island. “For the time being,” the New York Times editorialized, “New York has a concentration camp of its own.”3 After the war, Truman issued Presidential Proclamation 2655, which commanded that all presently detained enemy aliens considered “dangerous to the public peace and safety of the United States” be deported.4 Many enemy aliens fought their deportation orders, and so by the beginning of 1947, almost a year and half after the end of the war, more than three hundred still remained at Ellis Island. By August 1948, the government had finally resolved all the cases of detained enemy aliens at Ellis Island. But by 1950, in the climate of the early Cold War, things changed once again as the government passed the Internal Security Act, followed by the McCarran-Walter Act in 1952.5 Ellis Island was once again turned into a key detention center, now for suspected communists and other political radicals—including two of the figures I examine in this study: C. L. R. James and Claudia Jones. This story of Ellis Island’s conversion into a prison for unwanted aliens illuminates a dark and tragically ironic history not only of Ellis Island but of America itself and the liberatory narrative of American citizenship that has been so powerfully articulated through Ellis Island— namely, the story of America as a land of incorporation and assimilation , offering the immigrant on his heroic quest from persecution or poverty the promise of freedom, prosperity, and progress. Indeed, as such a compelling cultural narrative of America, Ellis Island has long served to inspire not only the immigrant but also the native-born subject to identify with the national project of America. And during the 1940s and 1950s, specifically, Ellis Island provided a perfect and oft-repeated symbol for invoking an...

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