Unbecoming Americans

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

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Shadow Narratives of the TransnationalPart I. Novel Forms: Writing at the Limits of Citizenship1. Neither Citizen nor Alien: Rewriting the Immigrant Bildungsroman across the Borders of Empire in Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart2. The Epistemology of Unbelonging: Richard Wright's The Outsider and the Politics of SecrecyPart II. Peripheral Forms: Literatures of Alienage, Incarceration, and Deportation3. Richard Wright's Cosmopolitan Exile: Race, Decolonization, and the Dialogics of Modernity4. The Undesirable Alien and the Politics of Form: Telling Untold Tales in C. L. R. James's Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways5. Talking Back to the State: Claudia Jones's Radical Forms of AlienageConclusion: An Empire of AlienageNotesIndex

"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) "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) "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) "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) "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) "Keith has engaged an interesting topic that literary and cultural studies scholars will savor."(Journal of American History) "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) "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)