Constructing Deportable Subjectivity: Antiforeignness, Antiradicalism, and Antiblackness during the McCarthyist Structure of Feeling

Abstract

Building on Carole Boyce Davies’s important contributions to the discourse on “deportable subjects,” this article theorizes the ways in which the trifecta of foreignness, Blackness, and radicalism came to be understood as mutually constituting forms of subversion and sedition against which extreme forms of violence and exclusion were imposed. Using the repression of West Indians Claudia Jones and Cyril Lionel, Robert (C.L.R.) James, and U.S. radical Paul Robeson, I show that antiforeignness applied not only to origin, but also to ideas and internationalist politics. Radical Black internationalism in particular reified the Black—irrespective of citizenship status—as outsider that must be contained and circumscribed. These arguments are contextually situated in the regime of repression I call the “McCarthyist Structure of Feeling.” This era includes the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, the Alien Registration Act of 1940 (commonly known as the Smith Act), the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations, and the Internal Security Act of 1950 (also known as the McCarran Act). It was under this legal architecture that scores of radicals were indicted, deported, incarcerated, surveilled, and forced underground.

Keywords:

• antiblackness
• antiforeignness
• antiradicalism
• Claudia Jones
• C.L.R. James
• deportable subjects
• Paul Robeson
• radical Black internationalism

Notes

Antiblackness can be understood as an instrument of governmentality that confiscates the body and lifeworld of the Black, distorts it for the purposes of accumulation and exploitation, and returns that distortion to the Black as reality. It is a process of distortion that reduces the Black to “nigger,” and to economic, existential, and semantic surplus to be extracted by the state and its institutions. See George Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race (Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, 2008); James Baldwin, “The Nigger We Invent,” Equity and Excellence 7 (1969), 15–23; “Sartrean Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism,” in The Prism of the Self: Philosophical Essays in Honor of Maurice Natanson, edited by S. Galt Cromwell (Berlin: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995); and Lewis Gordon, Bath Faith and Antiblack Racism (New York: Humanity Books, 1999).

I use “Black,” “Blackness,” “Blacks,” and “the Black” synonymously. Alex Weheliye argues, “If racialization is understood not as a biological or cultural descriptor but as a conglomerate of sociopolitical relations that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans, then blackness designates a changing system of unequal power structures that apportion and delimit which humans can lay claim to full human status and which humans cannot.” Alex Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 14–15. Keeping his general framework, I replace his analysis of differences in humanity with an analysis of differences in citizenship and belonging. In other words, I argue that the Blackness designates those who cannot be fully citizen, cannot fully belong to the nation-state, and whose very constitution renders them adjacent to subversion, sedition, and suspicion. Such adjacency rationalizes the extreme forms of violence, dispossession, and exploitation used against them.

Carole Boyce Davies, “Deportable Subjects: U.S. Immigration Laws and the Criminalization of Communism,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 100 (2001): 955, 951. My usage of the term “pedagogy” is derived from M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations of Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory and the Sacred (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 4–14; and Louis Althusser, “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus,” in his Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127–86.

I Borrow this term from Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Also see Cheryl Higashida, Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945–1995 (Champaign: The University of Illinois Press, 2012).

Committee on Un-American Activities, U.S. House of Representatives, 100 Things You Should Know About Communism in the U.S.A. (Washington, DC, 1949), 20; Davies, “Deportable Subjects,” 958–59.

Walter T. Howard, We Shall Be Free! Black Communist Protest in Seven Voices (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013), 2.

W. A. Domingo, “Gift of the Black Tropics,” in The American Negro, edited by Alain Locke (New York: Arno, 1968), 346; Perry Mars, “Caribbean Influences in African-American Political Struggles,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 27 (2004), 574; Forsythe, “West Indian Radicalism,” 301, 573; Dennis Forsythe, “West Indian Radicalism in America: An Assessment of Ideologies,” in Ethnicity in the Americas, edited by Frances Henry (Stuttgart: Walter de Gruyter, 2011), 302; Ira Reid, “Negro Migration to the United States,” Social Forces 16 (1937–1938), 221.

Freeland, The Truman Doctrine, 219.

“Emergency Conference on Deportations,” March 1948, W.E.B. Du Bois Collection (MS 312), Special Collection and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Library (hereafter, Du Bois Papers).

George W. Crockett, “Rights of the Foreign Born,” 1951, Du Bois Papers.

Committee on Un-American Activities, U.S. House of Representatives, Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publications (and Appendix) (Washington, DC, 1957).

See Gerald Horne, Black & Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963 (New York: State University of New York Press, 1986); Gerald Horne,Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois (New York: New York University Press, 200), 134–51; Gerald Horne, Black Revolutionary: William Patterson and the Globalization of the African American Freedom Struggle (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013); Barbara Ransby, Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 223–38; and David Levering Lewis, “Interview with Marvel Cooke, Tape #5,” David Levering Lewis Papers (MS 827), Interview Transcripts, University of Massachusetts Amherst (Subsequently, DLL Papers).

Gerald Horne, Red Seas: Ferdinand Smith and Radical Black Sailors in the United States and Jamaica (New York: New York University Press, 2005), xv, 267–84; David Levering Lewis, “Interview with Vick Garvin, Tape #H-1,” DLL Papers.

In The Long Revolution, Raymond Williams defines “structure of feeling” as “a structure in the sense that you could perceive it operating in one work after another which weren’t otherwise connected—people [are not] learning it from each other; yet it [is] one of feeling much more than of thought—a pattern of impulses, restraints, tones.” Additionally, “[S]tructures of feeling can be defined as social experiences in solution, as distinct from other social semantic formations which have been precipitated and are more evidently and more immediately available … it is primarily to emergent formations (though often in the form of modification or disturbance in older forms) that the structure of feeling, as solution, relates.” See Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution, (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), 64, emphasis in the original; Sean Matthews, “Change and Theory in Raymond Williams’s Structure of Feeling,” Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies 10 (2001), 179, 183; and Stuart Hall, “A Critical Survey of the Theoretical and Practical Achievements of the Last Ten Years,” in Literature, Society, and the Sociology of Literature edited by Francis Baker et al. (Essex: University of Essex, 1976), 2. The McCarthy Era is usually understood to span roughly 1947 to 1956, and to be characterized by anticommunist hysteria, political repression of communists and “fellow travelers,” red-baiting, and excessive and unsubstantiated claims of Soviet espionage in the public sector, in Hollywood, and in education. The latter was used to rationalize investigation, surveillance, firings, deportation, incarceration, and other forms of statist violence. See, for example, Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown, & Company, 1998); Ellen Schrecker, The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002); Gerald Horne, The Final Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); and Richard M. Fried, Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). I use “structure of feeling” as a way to expand not only the temporality of McCarthyism, but also the content to include other forms of antiradicalism, antiforeignness, anti-internationalism, and antiblackness, which informed, and were informed by, anticommunism.

Committee on Un-American Activities, U.S. House of Representatives, “Organized Communism in the United States” (Washington, DC, 1954), 69.

“Stepan, “Race and Gender,” 44.

Adolph Reed, Jr., “Marx, Race, and Neoliberalism,” New Labor Forum 22 (2013), 49.

Ibid., 42.

Ibid.

Ibid., 45.

Committee on Un-American Activities, U.S. House of Representatives, 100 Things You Should Know About Communism in the U.S.A. (Washington, DC, 1949), 5, 10.

Ibid., 60.

“Stepan, “Race and Gender,” 48.

HUAC, “100 Things You Should Know,” 20.

Davies, “Deportable Subjects,” 959–60.

National Committee to Defend Negro Leadership, “In Defense of Negro Leadership,” Du Bois Papers.

Marika Sherwood, Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1999), 21.

Ibid., 22; Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 137.

Buzz Johnson ed., I Think of My Mother: Notes on the Life and Times of Claudia Jones (London: Karia Press, 1985), 29.

Carole Boyce Davies, ed., Claudia Jones: Beyond Containment (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publisher, Inc., 2011), 17.

Ibid., 31.

Sherwood, A Life in Exile, 22–23.

Claudia Jones, An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman (New York: National Women’s Commission, CPUSA, 1949). Also see Claudia Jones, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” in Let Nobody Turn Us Around. 2nd ed., edited by Manning Marable (Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2009), 316–26.

Ibid., 317–18.

Louise Thompson Patterson, “Toward a Brighter Dawn,” Woman Today, April 1936; Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke, “The Bronx Slave Market,” The Crisis 42 (November 1935). Also see Mary Anderson, “The Plight of Negro Domestic Labor,” The Journal of Negro Education 5 (1936), 66–72.

Ibid., 316.

Ibid., 320.

Sherwood, A Life in Exile, 321–22.

Walter Rodney, Yes to Marxism! (Guyana: PPP Education Committee, 1986), 14.

“A Hot Radio Debate on Military Training,” Daily Worker, August 4, 1947; File NY-10018676, November 1, 1947, New York Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The Peace Information Center, along with five officers—Du Bois, Elizabeth Moos, Kyrle Elkin, Abbott Simon, and Sylvia Soloff—were indicted. David Levering Lewis, “Interview with Bernard Jaffe, Sylvia Soloff Steinberg, Abbott Simon (Peace Information Center), Tape C,” DLL Papers; New York Daily Mirror, February 10, 1951; Amsterdam News, April 21, 1951; Louise T. Patterson to Frazier, n.d.; Louise T. Patterson to Prattis, March 27, 1951; Council on African Affairs to Carl Murphy, March 27, 1951; Council on African Affairs to Nathan Otto, March 27, 1951; National Committee to Defend Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois and Associates in the Peace Information Center to Joint Board Fur Dressers’ and Dyers’ Unions, March 27, 1951; National Committee to Defend Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois and Associates in the Peace Information Center to Mary Van Kleeck, March 29, 1951; Louise T. Patterson to Sandra Ray, March 29, 1951, Du Bois Papers.

Alice Citron, who was the Secretary of and major corresponding force behind the National Committee to Defend Dr. Du Bois and Associates in the Peace Information Center, opined that authorities did not realize Du Bois’s influence until heads of state from all over the world started to send letters and messages to the U.S. State Department. She said her strategy was to start an internationalist campaign because the “little movements around the country” on Du Bois’s behalf could not have saved him, but international pressure could. David Levering Lewis, “Interview with Alice Citron, Tape # E-9,” DLL Papers.

On January 19, 1948, Jones was served with an arrest warrant. Immigration authorities asked to search her home, but she refused to let them do so without a search warrant. She then made a call to communist New York City Councilman Ben Davis, during which she told him she was receiving the “Bittleman treatment.” File NY 100-18676, April 2, 1948, New York Federal Bureau of Investigation. Alexander Bittleman, a Jewish communist born in Russia but living in the United States, was the first influential Communist to be subjected to deportation hearings, starting in 1947. See, for example, Peter L. Steinberg, The Great “Red Menace”: United States Prosecution of American Communists, 1947–1952 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), 70–91.

Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change: An Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 47; Scott McLemee and Paul LeBlanc, eds., C.L.R. James and Revolutionary Marxism: Selected Writings of CLR James, 1939–1949 (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1994), 4.

Andrew Ross, “Civilization in One Country? The American James,” in Rethinking C.L.R. James, edited by Grant Farred (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 75.

Ibid., 83.

C.L.R. James, “Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem,” in C.L.R. James and Revolutionary Marxism: Selected Writings of CLR James, 1939–1949, edited by Scott McLemee and Paul LeBlanc (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1994), 187; C.L.R. James, The Future in the Present (Westport: Lawrence Hill, 1977), 190.

C.L.R. James, “Revolution and the Negro,” in C.L.R. James and Revolutionary Marxism: Selected Writings of CLR James, 1939–1949, edited by Scott McLemee and Paul LeBlanc (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1994), 77.

James, “Lectures on the Black Jacobins,” 85.

Bogues, Black Heretics, Black Prophets, 72, 12–14.

Boggs, Living for Change, 58.

Ibid., 61.

James, “Revolutionary Answer,” 180.

C.L.R. James, Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin (London: Allison and Busby, 1980), 117.

Boggs, Living for Change, 68.

James, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways, 174–75.

Ibid., 149.

Ibid., 150–51.

Ibid., 195.

See Gerald Horne, Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary (London: Pluto Press, 2016).

Ibid., 10, 88–101.

See, for example, John F. Bugas to FBI Director, February 19, 1943; Roger F. Gleason to FBI Director, November 27, 1943; “Office Memorandum,” May 8, 1947; “Office Memorandum,” April 22, 1949; “Office Memorandum,” January 31, 1950; “Office Memorandum,” August 3, 1950; Hoover to Jack D. Neal, August 9, 1950; “Office Memorandum,” November 27, 1950, File 100-12304, Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Tony Perucci, “The Red Mask of Sanity: Paul Robeson, HUAC, and the Sound of Cold War Performance,” The Drama Review 53 (2009): 20.

Lewis, “Vicki Garvin.”

Hollis R. Lynch, Black American Radicals and the Liberation of Africa: The Council of African Affairs, 1937–1955 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1978), 17; Brock, “Black American’s Contradictory Politics,” 357.

File 100-8032, “Eslanda Goode Robeson, also known as Mrs. Paul Leroy Robeson and Essie Robeson,” December 18, 1943, New Haven Federal Bureau of Investigation. The document reads: “It should be noted that the Council on African Affairs, 1123 Broadway is reported as a Communist Front organization whose Chairman is PAUL ROBESON and whose Executive Director is MAX YERGAN.” Also see Committee on Un-American Activities, U.S. House of Representatives, “Guide to Subversive Organizations,” 35; and Horne, Paul Robeson, 99–120. The extensive FBI investigation of the Council on African Affairs, from New York to San Francisco, elucidates the U.S. government’s fear of the appending of Radical Black internationalism to anticolonialism and demands for Black and African liberation. See File 100-69266, Federal Bureau of Investigation; File 100-19277, New York Federal Bureau of Investigation; and File 100-24614, San Francisco Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Gerald Horne, “The Case of the Civil Rights Congress: Anti-Communism as an Instrument of Social Repression,” in Anti-Communism: The Politics of Manipulation, edited by Judith Joel and Gerald M. Erickson (Minneapolis: MEP Publications, 1987), 121.

Abner Berry, “Council on African Affairs Criticizes Max Yergan,” March 9, 1948; “Yergan Accuses Five of Assault,” New York Times, June 20, 1948; “Three Win Clear In Ruckus Charge,” New York News, June 29, 1948; “Settlement Reached in Suit Against Yergan,” Daily Worker, September 24, 1948; “African Council Disputes Ends as Yergan Resigns,” Herald Tribune, September 29, 1948; “African Affairs Council Wins Yergan Ouster,” Daily Worker, September 29, 1948; Frederick Woltman, “Dr. Yergan Denounces Commies as Wreckers,” World Telegram, October 13, 1948; “Ex-Official Asserts Reds Hurt 2 Negro Aid Groups,” Herald Tribune, October 13, 1948; Abner Berry, “Max Yergan’s Stint for the Free World,” Daily Worker, October 26, 1952; Lewis, “Marvel Cooke;” David Levering Lewis, “Interview with Doxey Wilkerson, Tape #7,” DLL Papers.

“African Affairs Council Dissolves,” The Daily Worker June 20, 1955; “Statement of the Executive Board, Council of African Affairs,” June 19, 1955; Mr. A.H. Belmont to Mr. L.V. Boardman, June 21, 1955; Director FBI to Assistant Attorney General William F. Topkins, June 23, 1955; File 100-69266, Federal Bureau of Investigation.

David Levering Lewis, “Interview with Dorothy Hunton, Tape #21,” DLL Papers.

Gerald Horne, “The Case of the Civil Rights Congress: Anti-Communism as an Instrument of Social Repression,” in Anti-Communism: The Politics of Manipulation, edited by Judith Joel and Gerald M. Erickson (Minneapolis: MEP Publications, 1987), 121.

W.N. Elam to J. Edgar Hoover, August 3, 1948, File 100-12304, Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Barbara J. Beeching, “Paul Robeson and the Black Press: The 1950 Passport Controversy,” The Journal of African American History 87 (2002): 339.

Ibid., 341. Horne, Paul Robeson, 99–142; Committee on Un-American Activities, U.S. House of Representatives, Organized Communism in the United States (Washington, DC, 1954), 138, 148.

David Levering Lewis, “Interview with Paul Robeson, Jr., Tape #A/1,” DLL Papers.

Lisa Brock, “Black America’s Contradictory Politics of Inclusion, 1898–1998,” Peace Review 10 (1998), 358.

File 100-25057, January 13, 1953, New York Federal Bureau of Investigation; “Robeson Denied Passport to Red China,” Washington Afro-American, September 18, 1951; “Robeson Files Visa Appeal,” The Washington Times-Herald, August 16, 1951; “Washington Exposes its Own Hand in Robeson Passport Case,” Daily Worker, April 6, 1952; “Appeals Court Dismisses Robeson Passport Suit,” Washington Evening Star, August 7, 1952.

Beeching, “Paul Robeson and the Black Press,” 353.

Brock, “Black America’s Contradictory,” 359–60.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Charisse Burden-Stelly

Charisse Burden-Stelly received her Ph.D. in African Diaspora Studies in May 2016 from the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Political Science at Carleton College. Her research interests include Black radical political theory, race, and political economy, the conjuncture of antiblackness and antiradicalism, and racial capitalism.