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

Abstract

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.

Introduction

As one scholar summarizes, the “texts of C. L. R. James are haunted by prophetic figures of imprisonment that seem attendant upon his narrative of emancipation” (Nielsen, 1997: xiv). In The Black Jacobins, James depicts the tragic life of the book’s hero Toussaint Louverture, with his silent battle against Napoleon, who has incarcerated him in a cold, mountainous area of France: “He had medical attendance at first, but his gaoler soon dispensed with it. ‘The construction of Negroes being totally different to that of Europeans, I have dispensed with his doctor and his surgeon who would be useless to him’” (1938: 300). This vivid description of incarceration and a warden’s racist attitude in denying Toussaint fair medical treatment precedes, and thus seems to prefigure, the author’s detention later at the US border. During his 15 years’ sojourn in the US, beginning in 1938, James was interrogated several times between 1948 and 1950 and was detained for six months, from June to December 1952, in Ellis Island. ¹ At that time, he suffered from an ulcer that did not heal due to maltreatment. Even after his temporary return to Trinidad in 1965, James was put under house arrest for six weeks by his former student Eric Williams (Worcester, 1996: 169). Viewed from this biographical and historical perspective, James’s Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways (2001/1953), a critique of Herman Melville, shows that writing about prison and confinement is inseparable from our understanding of liberation from colonialism. ²

Commentators concur that prison writing is susceptible to external causes of which the author cannot fully take control. Indeed, some autobiographical writings or letters may be published in their crude and original form to show the realities of prison life. These publications are faithful to their initial form that is fragmented or inconsistent (Davies, 1990: 24, 104). In other cases, integrity overwhelms a fragmented style. For instance, prison writings are strategically moulded into a format that fits the defendants’ testimony given during court procedures. ³ In such cases, it is expected that defendants or criminals have repented enough that society accepts them. Or society may need them as active participants to change an obsolete but obstinate value, such as racism. ⁴ James’s carceral writing shares both a tendency to become episodic and a strategic aspect of self-fashioning. By disguising himself as innocent, morally and politically, he prepared for court procedures and tried to prevent his own deportation (Johnson, 2011: 195, 187). Despite such a clear objective, James’s writing is filled with discontentment; he expresses frustration because he cannot convey the verisimilitude of his experience in Ellis Island. His frustration induces contradictions and inconsistency in style. Indeed, “linguistic experimentalism” is one of the most visible features of prison memoirs in postcolonial situations (Knighton, 2019: 19). ⁵ James’s idiosyncratic register of language has much in common with this tradition, but it also needs to be situated in its own contexts.

In the case of Mariners, the incongruous statements in the long conclusion cannot be located within a comprehensible framework. Dina Al-Kassim refers to the divergent style of James’s address as “the rant” and sees “the mode of address as a message sent out to a people who cannot hear him and a law that continues to bind him” (2010: 33). In line with this reading, I propose that in Mariners the contradictory claims on questions such as labour and race, literary analysis, and communism come from the insecurity of his physical and legal status within what I call a prison–detention continuum. I posit that James tried to write against the causes of this insecurity: ideological surveillance during the Cold War, and the conceptual ambiguity between imprisonment and political detention. Lastly, I argue that bodies in custody have occasions of encountering others beyond the walls. During his imprisonment, James became aware of the conditions of the prisoners of war (POWs) of the Korean War on Koje Island, prefiguring modes of interracial solidarity.

Cold War racism and the prison–detention continuum

The unclear demarcation between prison and political detention has its own causes and historical background. Here, I propose that the history of this ambiguity can be traced to the very role of incarceration during and after the practice of slavery in colonial territories. I also investigate how racial classification was used as a norm to arbitrarily apply the idea of criminality and thereby to efficiently secure labour. Until the beginning of the Korean War, the transnational Cold War regime accelerated racism by authorizing ideological criminalization in the US and elsewhere. ⁶

First, the prison system was instrumental in consolidating colonial rule and served to accelerate the capitalist mode of production by offering free labour. As it compartmentalized masses of inmates into individualized cells, prison was at the intersection of imperial surveillance and military governance. According to Michel Foucault, the disciplinary effect of modern prison was to atomize the dissent of the masses: it invalidated “agitations, revolts, spontaneous organizations, coalitions — anything that may establish horizontal conjunctions” (1978/1975: 219). Indeed, the expansion of military power and imperial rule was symbiotic to the prison system and essential to its establishment (Davis and Mendieta, 2005: 36). British colonial rule used prisons in the process of imperial expansion. “In nineteenth-century India”, as David Arnold points out, “the prison was one of the most visible manifestations and menacing symbols of colonial rule” (2004: 32). Furthermore, one of the earliest models of punishment included forced labour. Not unlike slavery, convict labour (as this would be later called) was introduced in prisons (Foucault, 2015: 69–70). In other words, prison was “integral to the wider dynamics of labour management under colonial rule” (Arnold, 1994: 186). For instance, the discourse of criminalization and racial hierarchy was reinforced in the US after the abolition of slavery and maintained the capitalist mode of production. In fact, the history of the US prison “corresponded to the authorization of slavery as punishment” (Davis, 1998: 99). The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, particularly the system of convict leasing, marked the continuation of a quasi-slavery system. The disproportionately high rate of people of colour in prisons demonstrates this (Davis, 1998: 74–95). ⁷ In the Caribbean region as well, prison was constitutive of the management of a plantation economy under British colonial rule from the late eighteenth century onwards. According to Diana Paton (2004), the number of prisons constructed by the colonial government increased in Jamaica as the emancipation process moved forward. ⁸ This historical background exemplifies that prison is no more than the continuation of slavery by offering labour for nothing. In other words, slavery survived after emancipation through the very existence of prison.

Second, colonial governments used imprisonment not only for the sake of maintaining a labour force but as an instrument of political detention. Political detention is intended to break down dissent for the purpose of maintaining national security or racial hierarchy. Nevertheless, these divisive attempts are not always successful. Barbara Harlow suggests that political detention establishes “the discursive grounds to challenge a dominant history of state-sponsored suppression of internal and external dissent” (1992: 5). In fact, writing from inside the walls has the potential to bridge the gap between the inside and the outside. In this way, prison becomes a fertile space where pedagogic processes between intellectuals and the masses are lubricated. This is precisely what C. L. R. James saw when he observed the experiences of colonial intellectuals who educated themselves in how to undermine British colonial rule. In 1966, he commented,

British colonial officials have understood nothing about the development of colonial peoples. They have stood in the way of their forward movement from colonial status to freedom. The people who understand this had to go to jail. Gandhi and Nehru went to jail for any number of years. Nkrumah went to jail. Dr Hastings Banda went to jail. Nyerere went to jail. All of them, and that priest from Cyprus, he went to jail also. So you notice that they didn’t learn about democracy in British schools, they learnt it in the jails into which the British had put them; and from those jails they taught the population and taught the Colonial Office what were the realities of independence. (James, 1980b: 182)

As James stresses, political detention ironically symbolizes the oppressive nature of colonial rule and thus the innocence of the inmates, rather than their criminality. As a result, it seems plausible to think that imprisonment is ultimately tied to the economic utility of convicts as a free labour force, while political detention is not. However, detention cannot be clearly dissociated from imprisonment as long as prison exists, for prisons expand the realm of criminality, confounding the distinction between the two. In other words, the realm of politics (incarceration as political detention) is indistinguishable from the economic objective (incarceration as offering one’s labour for free); they are located in the seamless continuum of a prison-based society.

Third, the very ambiguity in the idea of criminality culminates in the case of prisons used for deportation and border control. Deportation was inseparable from imprisonment in the colonial management of the labour force for the empires in Europe and elsewhere, as Clare Anderson argues (2018a: 3). In short, “penal transportation” was used “as a means of suppressing rebellion and exporting rebels” (Anderson, 2018b: 234). On the other hand, detention at borders aims at regulating the population flow to maintain the labour force necessary to manage a nation’s economy. To achieve this, eugenics and ethnographic typologies based on racism were paramount ideas, for instance, in the case of the US, as a means to delimit entry onto and expulsion from Ellis Island (Dolmage, 2011: 27). This intellectual atmosphere was disseminated through the Dillingham Immigration Commission’s Dictionary of Races or Peoples, compiled by an advocate of eugenics, Henry Cabot Lodge. ⁹ The “dictionary” was offered to Congress in 1911 as a special report. Used for years by officials of Ellis Island, it defined racial categories based on differences from Caucasians and normalized racial classifications. It converged with a “new” racism that deemed disabled bodies and defects to be hereditary traits that could not be removed by any means (Dolmage, 2011: 40–42). Immigrants were criminalized due to this racial doctrine, whereas they were often accepted as an inexpensive labour force. Race became a dominant marker of difference at Ellis Island, thus serving to lower the cost of labour. In short, both deportation and detention at borders regulate the labour force via imprisonment, drawing the outline of criminality according to a racial hierarchy that sustains colonial society.

Finally, a prison–detention continuum arbitrarily functions in border control according to the political and economic interests of the times. After the mid-twentieth century, an ideological element was added to the racial doctrine of Ellis Island. The United States Congress passed the Internal Security Act in the fall of 1950, when the nation participated in the war on the Korean peninsula. Renamed two years later as the McCarran–Walter Act (or the McCarran Internal Security Act), the law marked a significant shift in terms of racial quota regulations and deportation rules. First, the act identified who the enemies were at the territorial border of the US at a time of anticommunism and war in East Asia (Ngai, 2004: 237–38). It also demarcated “the exclusion of and right to deport” anyone of foreign origin who was deemed a threat to the security of the nation (Lowe, 1996: 9). Second, the legislation resulted in the escalation of racism and racialization within the US, especially affecting Koreans in the United States (Cumings, 1990: 637). Third, the act prohibited people of colour from the British West Indies from entering the US, due to the government’s requirement to reduce their number (Ngai, 2004: 238; Paul, 1997: 142). This implies the interrelation between US border control and British policies in the act. Lastly, it enabled US policymakers to retroactively criminalize suspects and produce “deportable” subjects “in ways that arguably violated Constitutional norms” (Ngai, 2004: 239). In other words, policymakers could arbitrarily register those opposed to their interests as “foreigners” and decide who should be deported and who should be allowed to stay. The McCarran–Walter Act justified criminalization via racial classification and enhanced the doctrine of national identity. Furthermore, by extending the realm of criminality into a temporal dimension of the historical past, it also implemented ideological surveillance and deportation policies under the carceral state.

Those potentially criminalized could be deported or remain incarcerated; they were forced to live under the prison–detention continuum. The McCarran–Walter Act authorized the ideological surveillance of these people under the norms of Cold War racism that emerged as the rationale of interimperial governance. ¹⁰ In view of such an indiscriminate criminalization of the inmates, a prison–detention continuum testifies to the structural continuation of colonial rule and the plantation economy after the abolition of slavery. The continuum was strengthened so that the ambiguous principle of what defines crimes seemed no longer ambiguous. Thus, the inmates were treated as detainees, not as prisoners, and it is this distinction that C. L. R. James was writing against in reading Melville’s works. Here the opportunity of interracial solidarity that connected incarcerated bodies on Ellis Island and those on Koje Island was embedded amidst the interimperial governance. As will be examined later, James inadvertently touches upon this in the long conclusion of Mariners.

Against totalitarian individuals: Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways

In “A Natural but Necessary Conclusion”, the last and the longest section of Mariners, the hardships of detention are narrated in four parts and can be summarized as follows. First, James describes his discontent at being categorized in the same group as a US communist called M; while the author felt fearful, M demonstrated his power over the staff of the FBI. The second part illustrates James’s physical pain caused by an ulcer, his torturous treatment due to his racial origin, and the medical and health care that he hoped for but was not given. The third part details the many examination processes and court hearings, the bureaucratic labour conditions in Ellis Island, as well as the political prisoners whom the author met there. In the fourth section, the author rebuts the Department of Justice’s justification for not allowing him to stay in the US. Such an allegation was based on the claim that he wrote books on revolution and communism. On the whole, the author offers this as a final plea to the Immigration Department and the Court of Appeals, arguing that he has a right to be a citizen of the US.

Mostly, James illustrates the injustices he suffered on the island, especially the poor medical care and ideological surveillance, as personal and individualized experiences. In associating the world of Moby Dick with that of Ellis Island, however, he also tries carefully to see his experience as both personal and public, individual and collective. That is why James asserts on the opening page of the conclusion: “my experiences there [in Ellis Island] have not only shaped this book, but are the most realistic commentary I could give on the validity of Melville’s ideas today” (125). The most distinctive methodology that James applies to himself to criticize the prison–detention continuum is to grapple with the way that his own experiences on the island intrude upon his understanding of Melville’s works, the way the literature teaches him about the degeneration of totalitarian society, and how he thinks it teaches society about its unrealized potential. Here, I explain how James confronts the way the continuum forces its inmates to individualize their own experiences.

First, James carefully sees that his personal experiences, such as his decline in health, should be problematized as a structural issue. He repeatedly states that his physical illness was not properly treated at Ellis Island due to the Department of Immigration’s negligence. Having suffered from a duodenal ulcer since 1937, even before he was incarcerated, James was not given enough food. For four weeks, he was only given milk, not the nutritious foods he requested. He adds that his detailed description of this torturous procedure might sound like ‘an inflation of a minor personal grievance’;

But far more is involved. The United States Department of Justice is involved. The attitude to aliens in the United States is involved. […] And finally the staff of Ellis Island, the American citizens who work there are also involved. (137)

Physical pains as well as personal dissatisfaction are problems caused by the degeneration of all of society. He tries to give consistency to the disconnected narrative of his illness. However, as his physical condition deteriorates due to constant fits of retching, his narrative comes to resemble the disrupted experience. Thus, James adds that “I have told the illness as a connected story. But it was not connected” (138). In addition, James was under constant surveillance for two months as he was hospitalized in Marine Hospital in Stapleton, Staten Island: “During that time I was guarded twenty-four hours a day by three guards in eight-hour shifts. The guards at night either sat just outside the door or actually in my room” (140). Receiving inhumane treatment for their physical illnesses and constantly watched by special guards, the inmates were no doubt tortured. As Anne McClintock indicates, torture is “the determination to break down the tortured person’s being and force them to ‘confess’” (2009: 72). ¹¹ Victims of torture might want to confess what they are accused of or to tell what the torturer demands of them to tell.

Second, an ideological surveillance severs the ties among the inmates. There is no doubt that such inhumane treatment was administered to James because he was recognized as a “security patient” (136). Here, the discipline of confession makes one docile and reinforces the ideological status quo. Foucault points out that “the confession became one of the West’s most highly valued techniques for producing truth” (1990/1976: 59). But this production of truth was at the same time “thoroughly imbued with relations of power” (Foucault, 1990/1976: 60). In fact, James was told by one examiner during his interrogation process that one of the reasons why he was not permitted to stay in the US was that he had written books such as World Revolution, A History of Negro Revolt, and The Black Jacobins. “My attorney had claimed”, says James, “that I was a writer. The founders of revolutionary movements, he said, had been writers” (155). To argue against the accusation of being a “subversive” writer, he portrays democracy as a political ideal that he learned in Ellis Island prison, just as other anticolonial intellectuals did. James aligns himself with this tradition by saying that, “I publish the protest with the book on Melville because as I have shown, the book as written is a part of my experience” (166). Consequently, the protest reveals the locus of power and turns the individualized experience into a collective one.

Third, James’s protest is undertaken in his reading of the characters in Melville’s works. They are diagnosed as prototypes of totalitarian society and racialized labour. As James associates the world of Moby Dick with that of Ellis Island, he regards Captain Ahab of the Pequod as one of the most totalitarian types ever invented by an American author. “Few dictators, however well-established, depend entirely on a regular army, a regular police, and the normal protection of power. […] Ahab has such a force” (54). Likewise, Ismael is the archetype of the intellectuals who follow the totalitarian leader, such as Ahab, just “as the guilt-ridden intellectual of today […] finds some refuge in the idea of the one-party totalitarian state” (42). There are New Englanders such as Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask. The three harpooneers — Queequeg, from the South Pacific Sea; Tashtego, a native American from Massachusetts; and Daggoo, an African — remain “each a representative of a primitive race” (18). A Parsi, Fedallah, and an African American, Pip, also belong to the lowest ladder of this racial classification (54–58). James suggests that although these members of the crew, “meanest mariners, renegades, and castaways”, do not revolt against Ahab’s monomaniac power, Melville tries to “make the crew the real heroes of his book, but he is afraid of criticism” (18). Despite these limitations, James evaluates that Melville at least illustrates these men as “seeking the universal republic of liberty and fraternity under the leadership of American officers” (78). In short, James thinks that Melville’s works potentially inscribe but do not achieve a multi-ethnic ideal because the racial hierarchy is maintained as it is. This hierarchy exists in the Cold War regime as well, since “[t]he McCarran Immigration Bill of 1952”, as James indicates, “is permeated with the doctrine of racial superiority” (13). Totalitarian society will not be undermined as long as the racism that sustains it is not dismantled.

Lastly, such a diagnosis of fictional characters is applicable to the analysis of Ellis Island to a limited degree. In narrating the totalitarian sphere of the Island, James associates Ahab with the communist called M, describing him as “a man as mad as Ahab” (132). He was trusted not only by his fellow inmates but also by the guards who were staunchly anticommunist. James is weary of his power, into which all the aspirations of the inmates and the officials were absorbed. Against this, James juxtaposes a democratic ideal that is almost realized in the detention centre, wherein the imprisoned people from around the world seek refuge. He notes: “The whole of the world is represented on Ellis Island. Many sailors, but not only sailors; Germans, Italians, Latvians, Swedes, Filipinos, Malays, Chinese, Hindus, Pakistanis, West Indians, Englishmen, Australians, Danes, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Canadians, representative of every Latin-American country” (151). Moreover, James highlights the fundamental difference between the inmates of Ellis Island and the crew of Moby Dick in terms of leadership:

But they knew nothing. These know everything. The symbolic mariners and renegades of Melville’s book were isolatoes, federated by one keel, but only because they had been assembled by penetrating genius. These were federated by nothing. But they were looking for federation. (153–154)

By rejecting totalitarian leadership and racial hierarchy, the inmates of Ellis Island fully understand and articulate the problems of the contemporary world in their own words. As an instance of this, James recounts the story of a Latin American sailor who had sheltered two men in Santo Domingo. While the government of Rafael Trujillo, the puppet regime of the US, pursued them, the sailor was incarcerated for his deed and remained in prison for three months. During incarceration, he collected from other political prisoners all the information that would be calamitous to the government, and upon his release, he shared these details with a journalist (152–153). In this way, bodies of isolated prisoners are somehow connected to international events.

Undeniably, the prison–detention continuum separates rather than connects the people. For the isolated prisoners can never reject the deportation orders. James records how the guards watched the prisoners taking their belongings to their home “on the day before deportation” (147). He also mentions the case of a Turkish student who suddenly received a deportation order and had to return to his own country (152). Despite such a grim situation, the question James is interested in is how such individuals can form associations among themselves without a totalitarian leader like Ahab. He suggests that it is through labour, and this is where a series of contradictions becomes visible.

Labour and revolt: Ellis Island and Koje Island

In his readings of Melville’s works, James emphasizes that labour is the shared condition of the members of the Pequod. According to James, labour turns the crew into autonomous beings independent of any national belonging and engenders a relationality that transcends a narrow individualism. He sees the shipmates that Melville illustrates as “a world-federation of modern industrial workers” and notes, “They owe allegiance to no nationality. […] They owe no allegiance to anybody or anything except the work they have to do and the relations with one another on which that work depends” (20). But this does not lead to strikes or a labour movement. James goes on to note that “they are not to be confused with any labor movement or what is today known as the international solidarity of labor” (20). As James understands Melville’s world, a sense of community among sailors is maintained as a “world-federation” as long as the occasions of revolt are made invisible or marginalized. James’s critique contains a contradiction whereby labour is undertaken within a racialized hierarchy, but it is also the tie that binds the shipmates. As described above, the prison–detention continuum glosses over the presence of labour there. Meanwhile, James highlights labour on Ellis Island, thereby revealing that the very practice of detention disguises it. Such a revelation is crucial in that incarceration could become the common ground James shared with those in the Third World who, despite their uncertain statuses, were equally threatened with deportation.

Above all, labour is always already racialized in James’s study of Melville. Reading Melville in Ellis Island, he repeatedly returns to the connection between labour and revolt: “The reader of today, however, may still ask: But if Starbuck, Stubb and Flask were incapable of resisting Ahab, why didn’t the men revolt?” He continues,

But to ask this question is not merely to see the book of 1851 with the eyes of 1952 which, however we try, we cannot avoid doing. It is to do much worse, it is to inject the social problems of 1952 into the social problems of 1851. Whereby it becomes impossible to understand either literature or society. (53)

Thus, James cautions the reader, and himself, not to pursue the anachronistic reading he undertakes in the conclusion: namely, to overlap the urgent question of the politics of the present, such as totalitarianism in the Cold War era, with the literary text written more than a hundred years ago. But he knows that such a reading is also unavoidable. Therefore, he hints at but does not delve into the possibility of revolt in the Pequod. Labour dominates on the ship in contrast to Ellis Island wherein cooperative work is absent.

To address this contradiction, it is necessary to consider what labour means for James. James claims that the form of labour Melville inscribes in his works is characterized by newness; it is new insofar as it is how his characters live in an industrialized society without being completely absorbed by the dominant doctrine of capitalism. On the relationship between labour and fiction, James calls Melville the author who could write something new that is closely tied to labour and labourers. This unprecedented ability to write “the living experience of the vast majority of living men” (113) is what modernist writers such as T. S. Eliot and Marcel Proust could not achieve. According to James, Moby Dick was written by an individual “who has thoroughly integrated his conception of life into modern industry” and who could articulate “new conceptions of the relations between man and man, between man and his technology and between man and Nature” (88). Notably, James sees labour not as what is essential to subjectivity. Rather, he recognizes it as something relational that creates and recreates fossilized and stratified relations that undergird subjectivity..

James’s understanding of labour comes from his criticism of and opposition to a Trotskyist analysis of capital. Until the publication of World Revolution (1937), James devoted himself to criticizing the Soviet Union as a degenerate workers’ state and a Stalinist bureaucracy, and his views were mostly in line with the Trotskyist ideal of the Fourth International. Yet in establishing the Johnson–Forest Tendency with Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee Boggs, James transcended Trotsky and offered a critique of the Soviet Union as state capitalism. The essence of this critique concerned his reconceptualization of labour through his reading of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, the first English version of which he published with his colleagues from the Johnson–Forest Tendency. ¹² For instance, in 1946, James interpreted Marx’s alienation of labour as the loss of individual freedom and claimed that a planned economy should be based not on forced labour but on “the results of the freedom of individuals in society” (1980a: 67; emphasis in original). According to James, “When Marx says that production by ‘freely associated men’ will be ‘consciously regulated’ by them in accordance with ‘a settled plan’ he means literally and precisely that” (1980a: 67). For James, thinking about labour and its relation to revolt enables him to envision experience within a communal terrain rather than confined to a personal dimension, but without renouncing the autonomy of an individual being. ¹³

James visualizes the prevalence of labour in Ellis Island and questions whether the labour condition is inseparable from understanding the cause of racism there. James criticizes the working conditions on Ellis Island and partly sympathizes with the wardens, who he claims are “bombarded night and day by anti-alien propaganda” (146). The guards have nothing to do except to watch the prisoners; they have no rationale for their job, which makes them irresponsible for their position structured under the totalitarian society of the Cold War era. Thus, James says, “These men are as much victims of the anti-alien policy of the Department of Justice and the disorder in the administration as the unfortunate aliens themselves” (147). In such a society, individual workers are deprived of their freedom and morale but without visible coercion from authorities: they are “desperately trying to live up to their principles” (154). In other words, labour, which creates connections among labourers, is absent from docile bodies that are unresistant to, and accordingly cooperative with, the criminalization of the un-American “aliens”. By admitting the existence of labour in a place like Ellis Island, James analyses labour’s relation to race in the detention centre. For Ellis Island is deeply implicated in labour relations as long as it allows the entry and deportation of immigrants. Therefore, James prefers “prisoners” to “detainees”, the latter being the term prevalently used by the authorities on the island: “it would be a mockery for me to assist them in still more deceiving the American people. Under that administration the people on the Island are prisoners” (143). The doctrine of racial superiority is maintained by the retention of the prisoners’ epithet as “detainee”, thus cancelling the existence of labour.

Moreover, James’s use of terms such as “jail” and “revolt” in his analysis of Melville’s stories is relevant for understanding the complexity of what James says and what he leaves unsaid. For James, the degeneration of morality observed in Ellis Island is traceable to the fate of the archetypal middle-class intellectuals in Pierre and that of the twentieth-century office workers well explained in Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener”. The tragic fate of modern intellectuals, embodied by the protagonists of Pierre and “Bartleby”, culminates in scenes of confinement. The protagonist of Pierre tragically ends his life by killing himself in prison (104), while the eponymous protagonist of “Bartleby” also dies in a jail called “The Tombs”, having consistently refused to work by repeating the famous phrase, “I prefer not to” (107). Incarceration is the culminating phase of these revolts. If Pierre is a novel that represents a personalized and highly psychologized form of frustration that destroys a person, James places “Bartleby” along with “Benito Cereno”, highly valuing both as works on revolt: “Bartleby” depicts “the revolt of the white-collar workers”, whereas “Benito Cereno” portrays “the revolt of backward races” (105). The latter work “seems as if it was written not even after World War I but after World War II” (110). When labour is racialized to the point where the contradictions become untenable, it reaches its inevitable conclusion: revolt. Concluding his analysis of “Benito Cereno”, James even goes so far as to say that “Melville’s interest is in a vast section of the modern world, the backward peoples, and today from the continents of Asia and Africa, their doings fill the front pages of the newspapers” (112). Mariners at least hints at where those revolts might happen: the Third World. In so doing, James highlights the presence of labour and implies a possibility of revolt, as he associates the anonymous crew in the Pequod with the inmates of Ellis Island. But James finds commonality among the people under duress and therefore points to the place beyond where he was incarcerated.

In “A Natural but Necessary Conclusion”, James grapples with the ideology of anticommunism, which was prevalent in the early years of the Cold War era. In response to such an overwhelming atmosphere, James did not disguise himself as an anticommunist but emphasizes his difference from other communists. James’s plea to the officials to understand this distinction might certainly provoke the reader to interpret this as an ambivalent attitude to McCarthyism. On the one hand, James envies his fellow inmate, the communist M, who is active in improving the prisoners’ conditions, because the communist as US citizen does not question his national belonging and does not have to be afraid of deportation. He could not behave like M, who “was using the American tradition against those who were supposed to be its guardians” (132). On the other hand, his anger is directed towards a monolithic perception of authority that bracketed him into the category of the communists. This attitude resonates with the popular sentiment of anticommunism when he says, “the reader of this book will not need to be told how deep in me is the revulsion from everything they stand for” (126). Indeed, his critique of the Soviet Union as state capitalism was not properly understood by his former comrade George Padmore. James was baffled by his friend’s criticism of anticommunist tendencies in Mariners (James to Padmore, 22 June 1953, qtd. in Peterson, 2009: 127).

Nevertheless, James’s antipathy towards one of the members of the US Communist Party is fundamentally contradictory. Especially when he refers to what happened to prisoners of war on the Korean peninsula, James seems to identify himself with the victims of the UN (US) army — the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army and the Korean People’s Army — rather than with anticommunist forces (the US and South Korea):

Within a few days the press and the radio were filled day after day with the self-admitted blunders of the American Government in its treatment of the prisoners on Koje Island. It was at that time that I began to be aware that what was happening to me and the others on Ellis Island was, in miniature, a very sharp and direct expression of what was taking place in the world at large. (127)

A series of riots had occurred on Koje Island. The first was in June 1951 in protest against the miserable diet provided to the POWs. The second happened on 18 February 1951, just after the US officially announced that they would not be sending all the POWs back to their own countries (Cumings and Halliday, 1988: 176–179). At that point, the number of POWs had reached 170,000 including 21,000 members of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army (Robin, 2003: 146). The fact that the US and Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) did not sign the Geneva Convention, which decreed that POWs should be deported to their own nations directly after armistice, was one of the major reasons why the negotiations dragged on during the second ceasefire, from 25 October 1951 to 8 October 1952. The communist side insisted that the POWs should be instantly deported in accordance with the spirit of the Convention, whereas the US proposed “(uncoercive) deportation based on free will” (Cumings and Halliday, 1988: 174). The latter would have meant that it was the choice of the POWs whether to return to their own countries, travel to a third nation, or remain in an “enemy” state. Yet the idea the US held on to was a euphemism for torture and threat, in both physical and psychological ways (Cumings and Halliday, 1988: 178). In May 1952, Brigadier General Francis T. Dodd was kidnapped and held hostage. In retaliation for this, in December 1952, the UN army launched one of the most famous massacres of the war, during which 85 POWs from the Volunteer Army and the People’s Army were killed in a single incident (Halliday, 1984: 161 n76). These are the revolts that James must have heard of over the radio.

If James’s reference to Koje Island is read within this context, his reading of Melville entails the following expectation: namely, what happened in the POWs’ uprising on Koje Island during the Korean War stimulated the very expectation that a similar kind of riot might also happen where he was. James “draws a crucial connection between the US immigration policy and US international involvement in the Third World during the years after World War II” (Keith, 2013: 150). According to Joseph Keith, James could thus narrate “the story Melville wanted to tell but could not” (2013: 137). In other words, the captive status under the policing eyes seeking out communists is not a solitary condition but rather, through war and imprisonment at the edge of the Pacific, transforms itself into a shared condition. This may seem to cancel his previous gesture of differentiating himself from US communists in prison cells.

In fact, James tried to show that he was more tameable than the “notorious” communists at Panmunjom and on Koje Island, and more faithful than the communists in prison. The following remark, which comes after the above comment on the Koje uprising, invites the reader to read his situation as incarcerated on Ellis Island. There he was surrounded by communists, just as Francis Dodd was kidnapped by communists in Koje Island:

Government officials, and those intellectuals who think they know so much [meaning Trotskyists] (most of them ridden with fear because of their past association with Communists) may believe or affect to believe that my troubles with Communists do not concern them. I hope that the Koje Island events and the negotiations at Panmunjom which have wracked the nerves of the whole world for so long, have taught them differently. (127)

James suggests the possibility of solidarity with POWs of the DPRK and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), whereas he asks US officials to understand his position. Such ambiguous and contradictory attitudes exist on the same page. Despite his claim for US citizenship, James was to be given the undesirable label of “native” of the British Caribbean. He relates what he was told by Mr Shaughnessy, the District Director of Immigration and Naturalization of the Port of New York: “I could always leave and go to Trinidad, where I was born, and drink my papaya juice” (138). The District Director’s racist comments erase the difference between the communists and James’s post-Trotskyist radicalism, and support a racialized divide between Americans and un-Americans.

This form of extreme racialization was not only sustained and legally justified by the racial quota of the McCarran–Walter Act. Academic knowledge and its tendency to psychologize others also served to dehumanize their enemy. For instance, think tanks, such as the Rand Corporation, and sociologists from the University of Chicago, funded by the army, researched the POWs of the DPRK and the PRC in Koje Island. They sought to investigate the certainty of their hypothesis that the POWs must have been strongly affected by communist indoctrination. They found that their assumption was proven incorrect, but instead opportunistically used behavioural psychology to conclude that the soldiers were dominated by group think (Robin, 2003: 144–166). Furthermore, a fragment of forgotten history in the usage of the term “communists” may be relevant here. The term had been used to name critics and resistance fighters against the Japanese Empire, who were arrested, investigated, and tortured around the border between Manchuria and Korea from the late 1930s to the early 1940s (Cumings, 1981: 85–86). This historical use of the term contributed to the production of communists which, within and outside of US territory, gradually became synonymous with enemies of the state, especially after the Korean War.

In the subsequent period, after James voluntarily left the US, a transnational and anticommunist complicity ensued between the US and Japan. ¹⁴ Under the command of Lieutenant General Joseph May Swing, who had just retired from the Sixth Army’s occupation of Korea after the war, Operation Wetback had, since 1954, been cracking down on “both immigrant workers and political dissidents”. Eisenhower appointed Swing as a commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Among those who were targeted in this campaign were three dissident Koreans who were highly critical of Japanese colonization and the subsequent establishment of Syngman Rhee’s puppet regime (Buff, 2008: 535–536). African American society also responded to the racist structure of the Korean War, albeit partially (Widener, 2008: 55–87). Paul Robeson gave a speech in Harlem in July 1950, just a week after the Korean War had started (Cumings, 1990: 639–640; Swindall, 2013: 134). Robeson said it “falls on our shoulders here in the United States to halt our government’s intervention on behalf of the corrupt Rhee regime” (1978: 253). ¹⁵ Without an outright tone of denunciation like Robeson’s, James’s reference to the POWs of the Korean War has a peculiar resonance that reverberates beyond the walls of the detention centre. Reading Melville’s works in search of revolt, James’s criticism adumbrates the possibility of reading against the grain of the history of intra- and international anticommunism, thus prefiguring a critique for future solidarity.

Conclusion

James’s experience of imprisonment was neither a failure in his political life nor a nightmare that continued to haunt him. In fact, the situation of being detained in Ellis Island structured the impossibility of narrating his own experience in a coherent manner. Nevertheless, reading Mariners as prison writing clarifies two contributions that James offers in his criticism on Melville. Essentially, James highlights the importance of labour by comparing the shipmates of the Pequod in Moby Dick with the inmates on Ellis Island, and reveals the continuity of political detention between colonial regimes and immigration detention centres. Combined with deportation, incarceration as political detention has also been a key factor in the history of colonialism and anticolonialism. In particular, the ambiguous border between imprisonment and detention was instrumental in strengthening the colonial regime, as it has been in maintaining immigration control in Ellis Island. Using the term “prisoners” rather than “detainees”, however, James visualizes the presence and prevalence of labour in a detention centre, such as Ellis Island, where labour was assumed to be absent while race was the dominant factor for classifying immigrants. Thus, James discerns that the inmates and guards alike are stratified according to racialized labour.

Furthermore, Mariners expands the accepted ideas of prison writing due to its unconventional structure as literary criticism and prison memoir. Amid this structural hiatus, a series of contradictions, such as the relation of labour and race, the principle of literary analysis, and the attitude to communism in general, are scattered as they are without being resolved. In the reading of Melville’s works that James pursues throughout Mariners, he places literature as a principle of analysing totalitarian society, and at the same time reads Melville’s text as what prefigures a liminal space beyond that same society. One exemplary instance is the association between James’s detention in Ellis Island and the Koje Island POWs during the Korean War, wherein the author envisions the possibilities of labour and revolt in both places. Even though it is certain that his attempt could not have been reciprocated by the POWs on Koje Island, James’s analysis of Melville’s work vis-à-vis his experience of imprisonment hinges on labour and its relation to revolt. Moreover, the association thus established stretches towards a horizontal and collective terrain of international struggle for anticolonial liberation. By doing so, the concluding chapter in Mariners overlaps isolated bodies in one prison with those in other prisons. Beyond an appeal to the democratic ideals of the US, James’s call from Ellis Island predates and prefigures the interracial solidarities that became prominent after the historic Bandung Conference.