Unbecoming Americans: Writing Race and Nation from the Shadows of Citizenship, 1945–1960 by Joseph Keith (review)

With little celebration and no formal ceremony, the first federal immigration station on Ellis Island, New York opened its proverbial doors on January 1, 1892. The next day, a New York Times article titled “Landed on Ellis Island: New Immigration Buildings Opened Yesterday” detailed the station’s inauspicious beginnings and initial reception. Previously, would-be Americans traveled to the Barge Office, located on the southern tip of the Battery (in Manhattan). To manage increased waves of immigrants from Northern, Southern, and Eastern Europe, Congress originally appropriated $75,000 for the Ellis Island station; when completed, the federal government expended a total of $500,000 for its construction. Maintaining that the Immigration Bureau was quite satisfied with the new site, the unnamed correspondent largely focused on those waiting to be processed. According to the New York Times reporter, while many waited to be first in line, the honor would eventually be enjoyed by a fifteen-year-old Irish girl named Annie Moore, a recent resident of County Cork and one of the 148 steerage passengers aboard the Guion steamship Nevada.

While Moore remains relegated to the annals of immigration history, her journey from Ireland’s County Cork to America’s most famous way station strikes a familiar chord with regard to manifest destiny, e pluribus unum selfhood, and US exceptionalism. Unintentionally, the steamship’s very name, Nevada, coupled with Moore’s transatlantic trajectory, signals a recognizable story of east-west migrations and settlement. Analogously, Moore’s final destination—Ellis Island—functions as the locus classicus for an idealized narrative comprising unimpeded immigration, uncomplicated acculturation, and inevitable assimilation. Even so, the article’s mention of “[a]ll connected with the Immigration Bureau” renders visible an alternative characterization of Ellis Island as a problematic panoptic site. Indeed, what guided its very construction was a state-authorized desire to catalogue, contain, and detain immigrants. As US immigration policy became more restrictive in the first two decades of the twentieth century (evidenced by multiple prohibitions, including the 1921 Emergency Quota Act and the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act), Ellis Island’s official purview correspondingly shifted from immigration hub to deportation site.

This less celebrated characterization of the “Island of Hope” foregrounds Joseph Keith’s Unbecoming Americans: Writing Race and Nation from the Shadows of Citizenship, 1945–1960, which provocatively considers the ways in which the “shifting terms of restriction and detention for which Ellis Island was used reveal far more about the politics of citizenship, immigration, and ultimately the nation” (3). Keith’s transnational analysis of Carlos Bulosan, Richard Wright, C. L. R. James, and Claudia Jones compellingly “traces a radical cosmopolitan literary tradition fashioned out of the limits of U.S. citizenship during the mid-twentieth century by black and racialized migrant writers” (5). To be sure, Unbecoming Americans is in active dialogue with established and recently published work in comparative ethnic studies, American cultural studies, and critical race theory. Nevertheless, the book’s reappraisal of “a number of works that have been neglected and/or deemed—in varying degree [sic]—as failures” within Asian American, African American, Caribbean, and postcolonial studies marks a significant contribution. In particular, Keith productively destabilizes monolithic analyses of US citizenship that ignore the “politics of literary form” (7) and the rise of liberal pluralism in the first two decades of the post-war era.

This attention to form, and its critical relationship to US imperialism and exceptionalism, undergirds Unbecoming Americans’s five body chapters, which are organized into two sections: “Novel Forms: Writing at the Limits of Citizenship” (Part I) and “Peripheral Forms: Literatures of Alienage, Incarceration, and Deportation” (Part II). While a superficial evaluation of Keith’s project would suggest a temporal and archival narrowness (for example, the consideration of a period of fifteen years and an analysis of four authors), the exact opposite is the case. Unbecoming Americans consistently engages...