Foreign bodies, alternative politics and the boundaries of Americanism

Abstract

Physical features have served as the basis for drawing distinctions between bodies identified with “us ” and bodies identified with “them ” in multiple contexts. Sometimes, however, the basis for defining “us ” and “them " lies beyond the realm of physical distinctions. Ideological and religious distinctions, for example, are often unrelated to one ’s physical appearance. These invisible distinctions can often seem threatening to authorities, who seek an immediate way to separate those who belong to the dominant group from those who do not. In some cases, authorities have addressed this issue by ascribing negative physical characteristics to members of groups they wish to exclude. By focusing on how capitalist journalists constructed anarchists as foreigners in the late nineteenth-century United States, this article examines one example of such a process.