Unbecoming Americans - (American Literatures Initiative) by Joseph Keith (Paperback)

About the Book

Unbecoming Americans identifies a canon of writers who, during the years after World War II, explored forms of belonging in the world outside the domain of modern citizenship. It examines works by C.L.R. James, Richard Wright, Claudia Jones, and Carlos Bulos that show how these writers employed aesthetic alternative forms to the novel, including memoir, cultural criticism, and travel narrative, to contest prevailing notions of race, nation, and citizenship.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Unbecoming Americans provides a sophisticated synthesis of disparate texts, highlights the significance of discursive critique during the early years of the Cold War, and encourages scholars to investigate other neglected works in search of both alternative perspectives of social discourse and alternative conceptions of the social itself."
-- "Reviews in Cultural Theory" (1/1/2013 12:00:00 AM)

"A highly original work that is grounded in compelling literary and historical analysis. Unbecoming Americans illuminates Cold War America and U.S. critical race theory with insights drawn from subaltern historiography and postcolonial theory."--David Lloyd "author of Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity, 1800-2000" (5/29/2012 12:00:00 AM)

"Joseph Keith compellingly demonstrates how a select group of authors fashioneda radical cosmopolitan literary tradition at the subaltern limits of U.S. citizenship that subverted racial logics, reimagined the state, and addressed the question of 'how shall the human race be organized?'"--Donald Pease "author of The New American Exceptionalism" (10/24/2012 12:00:00 AM)

"Keith has engaged an interesting topic that literary and cultural studies scholars will savor."
-- "Journal of American History" (12/1/2013 12:00:00 AM)

"This is a great book, valuable for the light it sheds on a little known period in American literary history as well as for the way it rereads these texts. For students of narratives, official and otherwise, it is a compelling reminder of how stories function as the scaffolding on which we build our understandings."
-- "Journal of American Culture" (12/1/2013 12:00:00 AM)

"Unbecoming Americans is a valuable addition to the study of mid-century and Cold War American culture, as it reveals to us in new ways how political history and literary form intersect at the dawn of the American century."-- "Literature and History"

"A compelling book. Unbecoming Americans is built on the hope that reading, language, and form have the subversivepotential to promote new ideas."
-- "Modern Language Studies"

"Its overall value lies in its nuanced attention to how an outsider status can function as a corrective to US exceptionalism and engender a mode of resistance. [Unbecoming Americans] is not only timely--it is academically significant and politically germane."-- "MELUS"

About the Author

JOSEPH KEITH is an assistant professor of English at Binghamton University, SUNY.