Blueprint for interracial solidarity: C. L. R. James’s Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways as prison writing

Trinidadian thinker and activist C. L. R. James penned a criticism of Herman Melville’s work, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways, while incarcerated in Ellis Island, New York, in the early 1950s. I investigate how the contradictory claims on labour and race, literary analysis, and communism in the last chapter come from what I call the prison–detention continuum: a historical continuity allocated to prison and detention facilities despite an overt difference between the two. The distinction survived so as to maintain racial classification and labour force from the times of slavery and plantation to the Cold War era. The physical statuses of those incarcerated were insecure when the McCarran–Walter Act legalized ideological surveillance and accelerated racism inside and outside the carceral spaces. In his book on Melville, James clarifies the difference between prison and detention by emphasizing labour’s role in Ellis Island. He situates his personal experience of maltreatment of his ulcer as a structural issue, produced by the way the officers obey their authorities without any principle. To foreground the docile individuals in the totalitarian society, he compares the inmates and officers on Ellis Island with the shipmates of the Pequod in Moby Dick. Furthermore, he regards that if labour is racialized, it will necessarily culminate in revolt. I argue that James’s reference to the Korean War POWs on Koje Island prefigures an interracial solidarity that becomes visible after the Bandung Conference of 1955.

Binational Gatekeepers

While the 1891 and 1893 Immigration Acts established inspection protocols that remained in place for decades, less is known about how US agents initially translated gatekeeping laws into the durable policy directives that had a profound effect on the migration of working-class people. Before the “qualitative” restriction of specific racial, social, and economic conditions transitioned to a period of “quantitative” or enumerated exclusion by the 1920s, the US government had to establish a structure to carry out the work of exclusion, but this early era of qualitative gatekeeping is less understood. Italian encounters with federal agents at Ellis Island show how the 1891 and 1893 laws empowered the administrative state to carry out the work of exclusion shadowed by the banality of bureaucratic decision-making. The records of the short-lived Office of Labor Information and Protection for Italians (1894–99), the only outpost of a foreign government allowed to operate in the main processing building on Ellis Island, offers a rare snapshot of the gatekeeping process in its crucial early years. Given that Italians were the single largest ethnic group to be processed at Ellis Island over its sixty-two-year history and the primary target of inspectors in the station’s first decade, their experiences with bureaucratic exclusion illuminate how the United States moved to systematically control working-class migration.

A War Against Disease and Despair: Immigrants, Nurses, Soldiers, and the Transformation of Patient Care on Ellis Island During World War I

Located on what is today New Jersey soil, the hospital facilities on Ellis Island, run by the Public Health Service (PHS) to treat immigrant patients, were a medical marvel of their time. While known primarily for its use as an immigration facility, Ellis Island went through several major changes from the time war was declared in Europe in 1914, to the time that the last military members left the Island in 1919. During the First World War, Ellis Island and its associated hospital facilities would be the victims of German terrorism, a mobilization point for thousands of Red Cross nurses bound for the frontlines, and a debarkation hospital that was the first stop home for countless sick and wounded soldiers returning from the battlefield. This paper examines how the PHS, the Red Cross, and the Army Medical Corps tried to protect public health, screen immigrants for disease, and care for our military casualties, all under the tension and strain of a world war and a global pandemic.