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

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.