Apostles of Modernity : American Writers in the Age of Development [1 ed.] 9780803216464, 9780803213777

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Copyright © 2008. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved. Reynolds, Guy J. Apostles of Modernity : American Writers in the Age of Development, University of Nebraska Press, 2008.

Copyright © 2008. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Apostles of Modernity

Reynolds, Guy J. Apostles of Modernity : American Writers in the Age of Development, University of Nebraska Press, 2008.

Copyright © 2008. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln and London

Reynolds, Guy J. Apostles of Modernity : American Writers in the Age of Development, University of Nebraska Press, 2008.

Apostles of Modernity

Copyright © 2008. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

American Writers in the Age of Development

Guy Reynolds

Reynolds, Guy J. Apostles of Modernity : American Writers in the Age of Development, University of Nebraska Press, 2008.

Copyright © 2008. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

© 2008 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Chapter 7 has been revised from “‘Sketches of Spain’: Richard Wright’s Pagan Spain & African-American Representations of the Hispanic,” Journal of American Studies 34 (2000): 487–502. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Reynolds, Guy. Apostles of modernity : American writers in the age of development / Guy Reynolds. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8032-1377-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Internationalism in literature. 3. American literature— Foreign influences. 4. Literature and society—United States— History—20th century. 5. Foreign countries in literature. I. Title. ps157.r48 2008 813⬘.5409358—dc22 2007035398 Set in Bulmer MT by Bob Reitz. Designed by Ashley Muehlbauer.

Reynolds, Guy J. Apostles of Modernity : American Writers in the Age of Development, University of Nebraska Press, 2008.

Contents

1.

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2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Acknowledgments vii The American Writer and Development: Contexts of Cultural Internationalism 1 The “Skin Game”: Du Bois, Wright, Malcolm X, Baldwin 27 “You were in on the last days of Morocco”: Paul Bowles and the End of Empire 55 Sinophilia: China and the Writers 81 Nonalignment and Writing: Rich Lands and Poor 103 Stone Ages: Peter Matthiessen and Susan Sontag in Latin America and Asia 127 African American Representations of the Hispanic: Remaking Europe 153 Ugly Americans and Vanishing Europeans: American Presence, European Decolonization 175 “These great new times”: Cosmopolitanism and Contemporary Writing 199 Notes 223 Index 257

Reynolds, Guy J. Apostles of Modernity : American Writers in the Age of Development, University of Nebraska Press, 2008.

Copyright © 2008. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved. Reynolds, Guy J. Apostles of Modernity : American Writers in the Age of Development, University of Nebraska Press, 2008.

Copyright © 2008. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Acknowledgments

Many readers have helped me over the years, on both sides of the Atlantic. At the University of Kent, members of the Centre for American Studies deepened my understanding of postwar U.S. culture: the late Christine Bolt, George Conyne, Henry Claridge, David Herd, and David Turley. I am grateful to Kent’s English department for its encouragement of this project. Two departmental chairs, Lyn Innes and Peter Brown, helped me carve out time to push the work on. The British Arts and Humanities Research Board (now, “Council”) awarded me a term of research leave, which became the moment when much of my thinking crystallized. At the University of Nebraska–Lincoln Linda Pratt was the manuscript’s first American reader, and she provided telling commentary. Joe Rein, Tim Marcuson, Mike Page, and Erica Rogers helped variously, with proofreading and exhaustive editorial commentaries. At the University of Nebraska Press, Ladette Randolph has been a warmly encouraging presence. Finally, three anonymous reviewers returned a catalogue of enormously useful suggestions and insights that decisively shaped the book’s final draft. As always, I want to thank Caroline Anton-Smith, Zac Reynolds, Jamie Reynolds, and Izzy Reynolds for offering not just encouragement but distraction.

Reynolds, Guy J. Apostles of Modernity : American Writers in the Age of Development, University of Nebraska Press, 2008.

Copyright © 2008. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved. Reynolds, Guy J. Apostles of Modernity : American Writers in the Age of Development, University of Nebraska Press, 2008.

Copyright © 2008. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Apostles of Modernity

Reynolds, Guy J. Apostles of Modernity : American Writers in the Age of Development, University of Nebraska Press, 2008.

Copyright © 2008. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved. Reynolds, Guy J. Apostles of Modernity : American Writers in the Age of Development, University of Nebraska Press, 2008.

1

The American Writer and Development

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Contexts of Cultural Internationalism

Idly, I picked up the evening’s newspaper that lay folded near me upon a table and began thumbing through it. Then I was staring at a news item that baffled me. I bent forward and read the item a second time. Twenty-nine free and independent nations of Asia and Africa are meeting in Bandung, Indonesia, to discuss “racialism and colonialism.” . . . What is this? I scanned the list of nations involved: China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Burma, Egypt, Turkey, the Philippines, Ethiopia, Gold Coast, etc. My God! I began a rapid calculation of the populations of the nations listed and, when my total topped the billion mark, I stopped, pulled off my glasses, and tried to think. A stream of realizations claimed my mind: these people were ex-colonial subjects, people whom the white West called “colored” peoples. . . . Almost all of the nations mentioned had been, in some form or other, under the domination of Western Europe; some had been subjected for a few decades and others had been ruled for three hundred and fifty years. . . . And most of the leaders of these nations had been political prisoners, men who had lived lonely lives in exile, men to whom secret political activity had been a routine matter, men to whom sacrifice and suffering had been daily companions. . . . And the populations of almost all the nations listed were deeply religious.

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2  The American Writer and Development

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This was a meeting of almost all of the human race living in the main geopolitical center of gravity of the earth.1

Richard Wright’s 1955 epiphany led him to attend the Bandung Conference, and to write The Color Curtain.2 But other Americans, not least John F. Kennedy, remained ignorant of Wright’s “geopolitical center of gravity.” When Washington Post editor Phil Graham gave a copy of Germaine Tillion’s Algeria to Kennedy in 1958, he noted that “underdeveloped areas” of the world had received little attention from analysts in Washington: “I hope you will read it. You may or may not agree with her specific ideas on Algeria. But I send it for another reason. In her analysis of under-developed areas in general, I think she has great wisdom about a major problem of our immediate future.”3 Graham’s wife, Katharine, noted, “I know of almost no one in the First World who was then thinking about the Third World and the importance of development.”4 Her comment suffers from hyperbole, but one takes the point. Later, after her husband’s death, Katharine Graham assumed the management of the Washington Post, and in the 1970s she tried to revive Phil Graham’s commitment. She sat on the Brandt Commission in the late 1970s, with other members of the global great and good, and as the owner of a major U.S. paper she felt she could alert her readership to the commission’s global vision. She noted, “Bob McNamara, then president of the World Bank, had committed that institution to trying to help the nations of the so-called Third World. . . . he had tapped Willy Brandt, former chancellor of the West Germany, to lead it; the group came to be known as the Brandt Commission.” Graham was appalled that the American press seemed so uninterested in the commission’s report. Against the wishes of her editors, she urged them “to do a cover story on the Third World” since “it was something we owed our readers”: “To the not-so-secret satisfaction of the editors, it was the worst-selling issue of the year.”5 These are telling anecdotes. Katharine Graham was a woman of formidable connections; her memoir is an account, among other things, of the postwar Washington establishment in all its power and pomp. We hear, during the course of her narrative, of Kennedy’s unease during

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The American Writer and Development  3

the Cuban missile crisis, and the book also contains graphic testimony to the crisis of confidence brought about by Vietnam and Watergate. Could it be, then, that what Phil Graham called the “under-developed areas” of the globe had little impact on the mindset of American elites? And was it really the case, as Graham’s cynical editors sensed, that the public remained serenely indifferent to the wider world? In fact, there were a good number of writers and public intellectuals in the United States who had begun to think about what the French social scientist Alfred Sauvy termed in 1952 the “tiers monde” or “Third World.” Some U.S. commentators even wanted to insert their country into a “New World” framed by a decolonized global order. “Only if we can relate ourselves to, and acquire the new habit of comparing ourselves with, the cultures of Asia and Africa—with China and India, with the Arab nations and the rising peoples of Negro Africa,” wrote Daniel Boorstin in 1960. “Only then can we remain part of a New World.”6 In this book I want to present a counterthesis to Katherine Graham’s commentary on JFK by exploring American representations of the developing world in the aftermath of the Second World War. Richard Wright’s travel writing is one obvious point of departure: visiting decolonized West Africa in Black Power (1954), and then writing about the Bandung conference in The Color Curtain (1956), Wright directly addressed the postcolonial nations of Asia and Africa. Less obviously, in Pagan Spain (1957) Wright reversed Western ethnography by examining Spain as if it were a European heart of darkness marked by superstition, primitivism, and demagogic politics. And a further project, planned but never executed, would have seen Wright in French West Africa in 1959.7 Wright is a major figure in postwar literary internationalism, but he was not the only figure to explore what seemed to be new territory. His work entered into dialogue with other African American internationalists, notably the W. E. B. Du Bois of Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (1945). James Baldwin, in his 1961 essay, “The New Lost Generation,” had also described the world of “new expatriates” who moved to Europe after the war; but Europe was no longer the only show in town for the American writer. Figures as disparate as Paul Bowles, Pearl S. Buck, and John Dos Passos created a very different, post-European

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4  The American Writer and Development

literary map. The expatriate writers’ colony in Tangiers is one obvious place to locate an emergent literary internationalism that was innovative and outside the traditional expatriate literary capitals of London and Paris. We can now see Paul Bowles’s work as a conflicted but fundamentally serious meditation on Western readings of Islam and North Africa. In The Spider’s House (1955) Bowles addressed the topic that Graham said remained outside Washington’s political culture: the “under-developed” world (the novel is set when Moroccan nationalists rise up against the French). But it was not just the mavericks mapping a nonEuropean literary space. Pearl S. Buck had won the Nobel Prize largely on account of fictions and travel writing set in China. Her two major nonfiction accounts of China, My Several Worlds (1954) and China Past and Present (1972) are central to the literary representation of Asia at a time when American engagement in the Pacific deepened. Indeed, if we reimagine the literary terrain of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s by turning the historical lens, we see that many established and emergent figures had begun to create distinctive representations of Wright’s “geopolitical center of gravity.” James Baldwin’s No Name in the Street (1972), Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King (1959), John Dos Passos’s Brazil on the Move (1963), Peter Matthiessen’s The Cloud Forest (1961), and Under the Mountain Wall (1962): across fiction, reportage, and political commentary an American version of the “under-developed” world was appearing. Once one begins to look, texts—and episodes and scenarios embedded within them—reveal a fascination with changing patterns of cultural internationalism. One of the first American accounts of the Islamic pilgrimage, the hajj, appears embedded within The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965). For a younger generation of writers, the first foreign trip beyond Paris or London was a highly significant moment. Susan Sontag’s “Trip to Hanoi” (1968) suggested a work of protest literature, but was in fact an extended meditation on the psychological transformation effected by one’s first contact with a non-Western culture. Writers emergent during modernism’s heyday spent the last years of their careers struggling to respond to a changed environment. Internationalists by instinct, they could sense the world’s contours shifting. Ernest Hemingway spent much of the mid-1950s working on a lengthy

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The American Writer and Development  5

and convoluted manuscript that would become the posthumous work published in abridged form as True at First Light (1999) and then in fuller form as Under Kilimanjaro (2005): a text whose stories of East Africa, decolonization, and empire provided a tantalizing image of Hemingway as a proto-postcolonial author. These authors and texts form an unmapped internationalist genealogy within postwar American writing and provide the backbone of this study. Alongside such evidently literary works I also place a range of intertextual sources that help suggest the broader intellectual climate of the 1950s and ’60s, works such as Burdick and Lederer’s infamous bestseller, The Ugly American (1958), and a Carnegie Report on foreign postings, The Overseas Americans (1960). The works I explore in Apostles of Modernity mark a proliferation beyond Europe and into an array of terrains where U.S. writers reflected on foreign cultures and on their own complex positions as Americans in a global context. My aim has been to embody that proliferation and to explore the cultural variety embodied in American literary internationalism. The sheer range and diversity of place is important: North Africa (Bowles), West Africa (Wright), East Africa (Hemingway), Southeast Asia (Matthiessen), South America (Matthiessen and Dos Passos), China (Buck). This was a period when the literary expatriate was giving way to the literary traveler. For the first time, cheap air travel and mass tourism meant writers could share in the democratization of travel. Rather than being bound to one place, they moved through many. The globe manifestly shrinks in postwar writing. Even an author such as Paul Bowles, who in many ways continues the old ways of the long-term expatriate, has a far more dispersed geographical focus than is often imagined (writing about Ceylon [Sri Lanka] and Central America, as well as the Maghreb). Whereas, as studies of modernism repeatedly show, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had seen literary Americans on the move to find the singular point of culture their own vast and decentralized nation-continent seemed to lack, they now moved in a decentralized world. The European-metropolitan model gave way to a more fragmented writing economy.8 Thus within a single work, such as Baldwin’s 1972 travelogue, No Name in the Street, one might find jour-

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6  The American Writer and Development

neys through Paris and the Deep South, reflections on the Vietnam War and Algerian conflict. One point is immediately apparent: this was an era when literary Americans were moving toward more and more varied engagements with the global community than before. This steady reorientation of the American literary imagination has led to recent works (discussed in detail in my final chapter) where the geographical net of a novel might stretch from the U.S. Heartland to the ravaged slums of Beirut. In Richard Powers’s Plowing the Dark (2000) and Don DeLillo’s Mao II (1991) the lives (and deaths) of Americans take place in semiruined Arab towns, as much as they do in Kansas. Much of my historical reconnaissance is recovery work.9 An original impulse I had when I began to write this book was simply to contest the notion that in some irrefutable way, American culture is and always has been ignorant of the wider world. Such a claim seemed in its sweeping banality to say so much as to say nothing at all. But many recent commentators, especially those writing after 9/11, and particularly Europeans, concur with Katherine Graham’s gloomy analysis: putative ignorance in the United States of the non-Western world has become a major topic for pundits, journalists, and analysts—all those clichés about the man from Peoria not knowing Mexico lies to the South.10 This study seeks to explore beyond these clichés by examining the American intellectual microclimate of the postwar period. Throughout a series of close readings of internationalist texts I explore a nexus of ideas about the global realm and America’s role in the international arena. Some of these ideas, I will argue, had deep foundations within U.S. culture, particularly the emphasis on the ideal of progress as a driver for social change. Others, of course, are part of a general Western paradigm structuring and shaping thought about metropolitan cultures, the colony, and the exotic. But my main concern here is to create a highly particularized and historically rooted reading of literary internationalism, and to stress the distinctive historical formation of representations of abroad, especially the world forged by decolonization, accelerating globalization, and America’s widening influence. My aim has been, above all, to demarcate and then understand these representations in a historically specific and nationally distinctive setting,

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to recover a sense of the historical and cultural distinctiveness of U.S. writings about the globe at the moment of transition from European empire.11 For this reason, though I use a good number of recognizable terms (“primitivism,” “development,” “progress”), I attempt to give a sense of how these keywords function at a moment we can now see as absolutely transformational, when the United States became the prime agency in the centuries’ old encounter between the West and the rest. As historical commentators insist, the paradigm for American accession to a decisive global position was in the first place a military-ideological one: the cold war. What Stephen Ambrose termed the “rise to globalism” was preeminently, in this analysis, a shift framed by the National Security Council and the Pentagon. Tellingly, Ambrose presents an overture to his classic account by listing the United States’s military growth after World War II: A half century later the United States had a huge standing Army, Air Force, and Navy. The budget of the Department of Defense was over $300 billion. The United States had military alliances with fifty nations, over a million soldiers, airmen, and soldiers stationed in more than 100 countries, and an offensive capability sufficient to destroy the world many times over. It had used military force to intervene in Indochina, Lebanon, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Central America, and the Persian Gulf, supported an invasion of Cuba, distributed enormous quantities of arms to friendly governments around the world, and fought costly wars in Korea and Vietnam. But despite all the money spent on armaments and no matter how far outward America extended her power, America’s national security was constantly in jeopardy.12

If this is not an empire in name, then it certainly looks like one in practice. Ambrose’s brute figures are testament to American power. What is particularly telling is the final sentence: “America’s national security was constantly in jeopardy.” His edgy cold war vision is a familiar touchstone in overviews of the postwar era: that troubling, recurrent sense of paranoia coursing beneath military supremacy. The period discussed in this book tends to be framed in many historical commen-

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taries by a reading of cold war culture that stresses such key motifs as Eisenhower’s prophetic warning about the military-industrial complex, the primacy of national security, and the concomitant rise of the culture of surveillance. Historians such as Paul Boyer have established paradigmatic readings of the late 1940s through to the mid-1960s around the image of the atom bomb’s shadow.13 And indeed, when we go back to some of the primary texts of the period—texts that diagnosed the culture’s dominant vectors—the emphasis on national security is paramount. For example, Partisan Review 22 (1955) featured a crucial and illuminating essay coauthored by David Riesman and Nathan Glazer, “The Intellectuals and the Discontented Classes.” This essay is a social-psychological snapshot of the mid-1950s liberal mindset. Riesman and Glazer tried to put their fingers on that most elusive of moments in cultural history, an intellectual turning point. “Many explanations have been offered for what appears to be a decisive shift in the American mind,” they wrote. “Fear of the Soviet Union is alleged by some to be the cause; others blame McCarthy, his allies, and his victims.”14 Deploying the topical midcentury language of social psychology, with its opinion polls and surveys (allied to what now seems a somewhat contradictory insistence on a hypostatized “American mind”), Riesman and Glazer argued that the national consciousness changed profoundly in the early 1950s. McCarthyism and the hardening of cold war politics triggered a revolution in the collective sensibility. Riesman and Glazer even wrote of “what happened between 1950 and 1952” as if an epochal shift could be precisely located at an absolutely particular historical moment. Even during the 1950s influential commentators recognized that cold war imperatives might produce a dangerously militarized society. C. Wright Mills’s jeremiad, The Power Elite (1956), argued that “The Military Ascendancy” had begun to condition the culture by shaping the economy, placing national security as a central policy dynamic, and leaving foreign affairs to the control of military analysts. Mills suggested that a cadre of experts from the armed services shaped America’s understanding of the wider world: “In America, diplomacy has never been successfully cultivated as a learned art by trained and capable pro-

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fessionals . . . in the meantime, the military has been and is moving into the higher councils of diplomacy.”15 The immediate context for this militarization, Mills pointed out, was the culling of the State Department in the wake of Senator Joe McCarthy’s attacks on the diplomatic establishment. Mills identified three factors acting to undermine traditional diplomacy within the U.S. government: “The relative weakness of the professional diplomatic service”—there was little sense of career structure, and many ambassadorships (as they had been throughout the nation’s history) were political appointments awarded for party service; “The morale and competence of the career service had been severely weakened by investigation and dismissal of personnel”—the impact of McCarthyism; and finally, he lambasted “The ascendancy” among American diplomats “of the military metaphysics.”16 Mills meant that as military personnel entered the diplomatic corps in increasing numbers, the traditional ways of doing diplomacy were replaced by an ideology shaped by security and military rationale. He cited an acute analysis from the London Economist to the effect that the U.S. services had “successfully implanted the idea that there are such things as purely military factors and that questions which involve them cannot be adequately assessed by a civilian. British theory and experience denies both these propositions.”17 Mills’s argument, and this wider detour into cold war culture, is pertinent to an investigation of writing, cultural internationalism, and global engagement. At a time when diplomacy was becoming militarized, writing rooted in travel and personal engagement with foreign cultures became a form of literary diplomacy. When diplomacy seemed to become part of military planning, writers filled, at the very least, the role of diplomat-traveler, engaging with and interpreting foreign cultures for an American readership. Cold war literary culture, that is, had an international and transnational dimension often overlooked in commentaries centered on the “Bomb” and the domestic American scene. It is here we find Wright, Baldwin, Matthiessen, and Bowles—writers working in a cultural space adjacent to diplomacy (although one cannot imagine many ambassadors welcoming Bowles into their embassy). In many of their works we see the expatriate American, the traveler

Reynolds, Guy J. Apostles of Modernity : American Writers in the Age of Development, University of Nebraska Press, 2008.

10  The American Writer and Development

or the writer, pursuing what Mills argued was the “civilian” track of engagement with foreign cultures. McCarthy had shaken the State Department tree to dispose of supposed fellow-travelers; but in North Africa and Asia there remained Americans (a good number of them from exactly the Ivy League backgrounds one would find in the State Department) pursuing quixotic forms of literary diplomacy. And one of the period’s many ironies is that Richard Wright, an ex-Marxist under surveillance for some of the time by J. Edgar Hoover’s fbi, should, in his manifold attempts to interpret foreign cultures, have remained true to the ideals of traditional diplomacy.

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Modernization and Development Can we identify a common intellectual structure or a shared conceptual framework configuring the disparate genres of travel writing, fiction, and reportage? Is there a common discourse articulating relations between the United States and the developing world? There does seem to be just such a paradigm circulating through texts from this time: the articulation of what is sometimes called development theory (or what I sometimes term “developmentalism”) as a structuring model to frame and interpret the non-Western world. A number of America’s best and brightest turned their attention toward Asia and Africa and produced a string of interlocking texts examining ways that allegedly “underdeveloped” countries could catch up with the West. Thus J. K. Galbraith’s Economic Development (1964), which grew out of lectures given in India when he was U.S. ambassador, claimed, “the world . . . has been engaged in what it has agreed to call economic development.” The United Nations had announced, Galbraith pointed out, “the Decade of Development.” Galbraith divided the world between the developed and the undeveloped, arguing progress was possible “if an intelligent economic policy is pursued and certain missing components are supplied.” With “capital, manpower, and technical knowledge . . . there will be progress.” Galbraith used a telling image to describe this onward movement. It was essentially linear, a series of stages through which countries would move: “To see the process of development as

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a line along which the nations of the world are spaced, in their various stages of development, is to see both the process of and the policy for development with considerably enhanced clarity.”18 From the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, the study of development established a corpus of texts. In 1962 Max Lerner, author of America as Civilization (and then in his liberal-leftist phase), published The Age of Overkill—a study with an extended account of “The Undeveloped World.” Lerner’s bibliography is a good illustration of how far American intellectuals had traveled in this period. Now there was an extensive theoretical and historical literature exploring development across a range of economic and political contexts. These works emerged from the universities but rapidly established a broader intellectual currency among journalists and commentators, figures such as Lerner himself, who set the debate about the place of the United States in the changing geopolitical order. He cited Daniel Lerner’s The Passing of Traditional Society (1958), a text I will shortly turn to, as a fundamental theoretical text in this area, alongside Everett E. Hagen’s study, conducted at mit, On the Theory of Social Change (1962). Other texts in a long bibliography included Vera M. Dean’s The Nature of the Non-Western World (1957); Barbara Ward’s The Rich Nations and the Poor Nations (1962); A. O. Hirschmann’s The Strategy of Economic Development (1958); P. T. Bauer and B. S. Yamey on The Economics of Under-developed Countries (1957); L. W. Shannon, Underdeveloped Areas (1957); G. A. Almond and J. S. Coleman, The Politics of the Developing Areas (1960); and Max F. Millikan’s and D. L. Blackmer’s collection, The Emerging Nations: Their Growth and U.S. Policy (1961).19 These books were aimed at specialist audiences, but they helped establish an intellectual climate among policymakers, journalists, and a public for whom America’s role in the world (and the world’s role in America) was becoming steadily more important. From his reading of these texts Lerner constructed an overview of the decolonizing moment in a chapter of The Age of Overkill. The section headings for this chapter are thumbnail sketches of postwar intellectual preoccupations: “The Identity Revolutions”; “Modernization: The Leap into the Stormy Present”; “Two Designs for Growth.” Lerner’s text dem-

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12  The American Writer and Development

onstrates that Richard Wright’s work in the 1950s (Black Power, The Color Curtain) was prescient in its attentiveness to decolonization and the emergence of postimperial nations in Africa and Asia. Lerner referred, in a phrase seeming to echo Wright, to a “color revolution, with color becoming a badge of a new pride and prejudice where once it had been a badge of servitude.” Like so many writers from this midcentury era, Lerner looked to “the transition from the traditional to the modern” in Asia and Africa.20 The aim was to foster development through “growth” (a central term in this era); American development theory was firmly grounded in liberal economics. Lerner had identified a group of post-Keynesian economists whose work had been enthusiastically received in the “new nations”: Gunnar Myrdal, J. K. Galbraith, W. W. Rostow, and W. Arthur Lewis.21 In later chapters I will explore some of the very direct linkages between these figures, their ideas, and the period’s internationalist writing (Richard Wright was a good friend of the Swedish American sociologist Gunnar Myrdal and drew heavily on his work to fashion a commentary on postcolonial internationalism). It is important to note the breadth and depth of this circulatory system of ideas about development, evolving as it did when American intellectuals established conceptual systems to explain themselves as agents in an increasingly post-European world. Development theory or “developmentalism” is a postimperial paradigm where the laws of progress almost alchemically advance both the non-Western self and nation, or cause the “passing” of traditional societies, while the centrality of Western—now American—political hegemony is masked within arguments about the historical inevitability of such progress. Such paradigms for understanding the developing world were far from being dry, ivory-tower exercises. Again and again there are interstices where U.S. theorists created models of the international system that impinged directly on political and economic realities. That this was a distinctively American ideology of reading the non-Western world is made abundantly clear in Lerner’s account. Lerner repeatedly denounces an outdated, earlier model of European imperialism, for instance by attacking Belgian outrages in the Congo (a typical starting-point for critiques of European imperialism). He con-

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The American Writer and Development  13

structed arguments about progress and development where parallels were insistently drawn between current decolonization and America’s original rejection of the “European father” (an argument Lerner also deployed in America as Civilization). The thesis was neo-Emersonian: the colony throws off its father; it will then look forward to the future; it undergoes a form of “awakening” into modernity. He then locked onto this thesis an account of identity where the psychological focus of midcentury liberal thought becomes explicit. “Yet something more basic than economic exploitation prepared the harvest of hate and revolution,” he wrote. “It was the denial of identity.” And: “Whether the colonial masters viewed the natives as children or as savages, or quite simply as ‘they’—undifferentiated members of a group outside the pale—they squeezed them dry of their humanity.”22 In contrast, the developmental model of progress promised economic growth, decolonization and the primacy of the individual self. Skeptical policymakers and pundits had to incorporate refutations of development’s claims into their counterarguments. In 1958 George Kennan, author of the notorious “X” article for Foreign Affairs that had established some of the cold war’s inaugural theoretical positions, gave a series of lectures for the bbc. These talks (also published, in part, in Harper’s Magazine that year) formed Russia, the Atom and the West, a book dismissive of development’s claims. Kennan addressed an AngloAmerican audience in the wake of Suez; he imagined the voices of the “independent countries” calling on the West and the Soviets for aid: “‘We,’ they say, ‘are determined to have economic development and to have it at once. For us, this is an overriding aim, an absolute requirement; and we are not much concerned about the method by which it is achieved. You in the West owe it to us to let us have your assistance and to give it to us promptly, effectively, and without conditions; otherwise we will take it from the Russians, whose experience and methods we suspect anyway to be more relevant to our problems.’”23 As a straightforward proponent of Realpolitik, Kennan was doubtful about these pleas. “Why all the urgency?” he asked. It could be argued “that great damage can be done by altering too rapidly the sociological and cultural structure of any society” (Kennan was a conservative, not a

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14  The American Writer and Development

neoconservative). He dryly admitted he could not “fully share the basic enthusiasm on which this whole thesis is founded.”24 But just such change was envisaged, and welcomed, by the developmental idealists who made up the middle ground of the liberal consensus. By the mid-1960s development theory had produced powerful and synoptic accounts of the relations between the West and the rest. These studies offered the systematizing logic of a geopolitical overview of global affairs, and established both a theoretical and practical engagement with the international scene. Irving Horowitz’s Three Worlds of Development: The Theory and Practice of International Stratification (1966) is one of the classic works of this genre of internationalist social studies. Horowitz’s book blends (as do so many works in this vein) history, economics, and social psychology to provide a template for development and the developmental self. The thesis merges a systematic analysis of the forces that are reshaping the various “worlds of development” with a representation of the new individual produced by a global political economy. Following the social psychology pioneered by postwar commentators such as Sloan Wilson, David Riesman, and C. Wright Mills, Horowitz crystallizes his arguments in a symbolic figure, the “developing man” who emerges as the non-Western world steadily begins the ascent towards modernity. Drawing on fieldwork in Central and South America, Horowitz can point to “The Mental Set of Developing Man: Cultural Lag and Utopian Longings,” where he outlines what would become in this literature a recurrent opposition between “development” and “tradition.”25 And as with many of the developmental theorists, Horowitz added a distinctive post-Freudian reading of “discontent” to his analysis of the emerging nations. He saw the tension between development and tradition in psychological terms, as a contested process where the individual self experiences a crisis of identity, a “discontent,” as it is torn between two cultural orders. “The development process,” writes Horowitz, “is itself a cause for discontent and not just a response to a deterioration in the traditional ordering of things.”26 Perhaps the most telling illustration of the technocratic modeling of development theory is the Americanization of a French term

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The American Writer and Development  15

(“tiers monde”)to become the foundation of a managerialist paradigm: “stages” or “worlds” of progress. Horowitz’s book was central to this process of adaptation. As he noted, “While the French phrase le Tiers Monde is quite well known at this point, the English language equivalent is only now entering the vernacular.”27 Horowitz helped establish that entry into the English vernacular, and he did so by embedding the word in a theory of global political economy, while divorcing the term from its roots in a more European conception of class (the First, Second and Third Worlds). Four years earlier, in 1960, W. W. Rostow published The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto. As the title suggests, this is a classic instance of the distinctive anticommunist centrism that was so much a feature of the cold war liberal consensus. Rostow explicitly advocates a model of development to oppose a Marxist model of economic progress. He remodels a typically leftist historical paradigm to incorporate the free market, capitalism, and liberal democracy. The “non-communist manifesto” weds the ineluctability of Marxist dialectic to the idealism of Kennedy-era liberalism. W. W. Rostow was, of course, Walt Rostow, who was to become a speechwriter for the president and from 1966 served as Lyndon Johnson’s special assistant on national security. Rostow was a strong and unbending advocate of the war in Vietnam, and a liberal hawk (a position said to have later cost him Ivy League jobs). In a very direct sense, Rostow’s theory of development qualified him as an authority on Southeast Asia, establishing development theorists’ entrance to the real world of policy. David Halberstam noted Rostow’s fascination with the liberating and progressive force of technological modernity. “Walt Rostow . . . thought the old Administration had overlooked the possibilities in the underdeveloped world. . . . Rostow in particular was fascinated by the possibility of television sets in the thatch hutches of the world, believing that somehow this could be the breakthrough.”28 Johnson and Kennedy might have recognized a rather familiar model of progress underpinning Rostow’s work. At its argumentative core, development theory, with its ladder of stages of economic growth, is an internationalized and late twentieth-century version of eighteenth-and

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nineteenth-century “Stadialism.” Stadialism is the name given to the nexus of (Scottish) Enlightenment concepts that helped to shape the emergent America’s models of historical progress and societal evolution. Cultural historians trace Stadialism back to eighteenth-century Edinburgh, as in Susan Manning’s identification of a “Scottish Enlightenment model of stadialist history whereby all societies, like individuals, pass through identical stages of developments between infancy and maturity.” Societies evolved from a “savage” stage through the “barbarian” stage, then on to a “civilized” culture of herding, followed by the contemporary scene of commerce and manufacturing.29 The Stadialist saw the progress of civilizations as a steady upward movement through a series of distinct stages—from early pastoralism through a society of trade toward the modern industrial order. Commentators including Roy Harvey Pearce and George Dekker have demonstrated that intellectuals and writers built on late eighteenth-century philosophies of history to create detailed models of progress that informed the broader culture. From James Fenimore Cooper’s historical fictions to Thomas Cole’s series of paintings, The Course of Empire, nineteenth-century Americans envisaged distinctive representations of the relations between “civilization” and “savagism,” and they embedded their images or narratives within a theory of progress. Early, postindependence coastal commercial centers, frontier outposts, and Western wildernesses also offered compelling proof of Stadialism. The Stadialist model has had a long life. As late as the 1940s and 1950s, and probably through to the present day, forms of Stadialism shape the rhetoric Americans deploy in representing the non-Western world.30 We catch the rhetorical flavor of this model in some of the most unlikely places, as writers reach for these seductive images of stages, inevitable social progress, and the telos of cultural advancement. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, in a broad account of The Structure of Nations and Empires (1959), opened his sweeping overview (a world history, in effect), with one such typical statement: “The communities of mankind, like every human achievement and contrivance, are subject to endless variety and progression. The progression from the primitive community to citystate, empire, nation, and modern super-state is obvious.”31

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America as “Theory” The 1950s and 1960s saw the emergence of a distinct corpus of development studies in the United States; a number of these works became classic social science texts. The Princeton political scientist Manfred Halpern argued for the centrality of sociopolitical transformation (and attendant secularization) in his much-reprinted The Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa (1963).32 Another major text in development studies, and one whose ongoing relevance is evident in its title, was Daniel Lerner’s The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (1958). Lerner created a midcentury Stadialism adjusted to the post-Suez Middle East, fusing progressive ideology and the methods of modern sociology. He identified distinctively Western cultural forms (the media) as powerful engines to transform traditional cultures. The book appeared in the same year that Phil Graham was trying to get JFK interested in Algeria (1958), and was one of the first important U.S. studies of the Middle East to be written after it had become clear that this Anglo-French sphere of influence would now come under American sway. Lerner conducted his research in the Middle East just as U.S. involvement in the region was developing. In Iran in 1953 the cia helped to secure the Shah’s place on the throne; the 1956 Suez fiasco signaled the “passing” not of traditional Arab society but of the Europeans. And “in January 1957 Eisenhower asked Congress for economic aid and military assistance to protect states in the Middle East that requested such help against ‘overt armed aggression from any nation controlled by International Communism.’”33 Lerner used the new sociology’s quantitative methods (interviews, surveys, opinion polls), shaped by a keen awareness of the media, to argue that Middle Eastern societies were in the throes of massive cultural change. The media (film, television, newspapers) fostered a new “participant” style of society where traditional passivity gave way to modern forms of involvement and activism. He identified different groups within these traditional societies, most specifically the “transitionals” responsive to the West and modernity. In an incisive introduction to the book, David Riesman (himself a major figure in American cultural

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18  The American Writer and Development

commentary, and author of the seminal 1950 text The Lonely Crowd) identified a key to this transition: the spread of the idea(l) of America as symbol and agent of progress.

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A movie image of life in America, for all its documentary detail, is a radical “theory” when it appears on the screens of Cairo, Ankara, or Tehran. Yet it is to the credit of American empathy and generosity, as well as to our naiveté, that we have been willing to promote that theory, and to stand throughout the world as apostles of modernity. We may smile at the images of America that turn up in these interviews: the “clean and rich life” seen by a Turkish grammar school graduate; the grocery store with “myriads of round boxes, clean and all the same dressed, like soldiers in a great parade” which the grocer of Balgat, eager to visit America, had seen in a film.34

This is characteristic of Riesman’s clairvoyant intelligence. As a student of U.S. modernity, Riesman immediately sees that his colleague Lerner has identified a Middle Eastern modernity itself dependent on seductive images of the United States. In a tellingly perspicacious moment, Lerner recognizes that Americans have become the “apostles of modernity”; even their popular culture is a kind of “theory.” From an attentive study of his own culture’s particularities, Riesman recognizes the dangers of believing that cultures can simply be transplanted. Will the “American . . . theory” (a movie image of consumerist plenitude) be so easily transplanted into foreign and very different places? The power of Riesman’s introduction is that while acknowledging Lerner’s focus on the interplay between contemporary ideology and the “passing” of traditional Arab culture, Riesman remains presciently skeptical about whether that interplay will lead to an ascent up the developmental ladder. In a further and almost certainly accidental moment of insight, Riesman’s phrasing echoes one of the seminal accounts of the late Victorian colonial order. At the start of Heart of Darkness, as he looks forward to the journey into the African jungle, Marlow says he would become “one of the Workers. . . . Something like an emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle.” As we shall see, to become an

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“emissary . . . a lower sort of apostle,” is the recurrent dream of those who journey into Conrad’s “uttermost ends of the earth,” be they European or, increasingly, American.35 Can we pull together the main features of The Passing of Traditional Society? Lerner founded development theory on the belief that technology creates attendant social change, which in turn triggers deeper ideological shifts. In a further step Lerner locks social psychology onto his model of modernity. He searches for “transitional” figures in a variety of societies (Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iran)—those locals who are becoming “modern” or Westernized. He frames these figures with the paraphernalia of quantitative sociology: charts, tables, and statistics. At the same time, Lerner founds his fieldwork on a large amount of one-to-one interviews with a wide range of Middle Easterners. Through these interviews he creates arguments about the texture of traditional Islamic societies. Specifically, he sees these societies as searching for a new consensus based on those “transitionals” caught between the traditional and modern: “The aim of modernization is precisely to narrow the gap between bottom and top, to create a substantial ‘middle’ sector—to increase the number of Transitionals who compose the living reality of transition.”36 Lerner’s text is a landmark in studies of the Islamic, postcolonial world. As he acknowledged, societies in transition would need to find a unifying form of Islam: “The modernist intellectuals of Islam uneasily acknowledge their obligation to devise and diffuse the new articles of faith that will unify the elites and enlist the masses.” Even though these intellectuals were “trained to think—like modern men,” “their modes of feeling are more equivocal, more accessible to solicitation from different sides.” Hence Lerner was worried the agents of modernity would drift back toward “Islamic self-glorification” as a gap opened up between the intellectual commitment to modernity and a residual allegiance to traditional Islam. One of Lerner’s most reflective comments comes at the end of the study, where he acknowledges the power of tradition. Look at the ways in which the analysis melds sociology and psychology to create an American reading of Islamic transition:

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20  The American Writer and Development

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The failure to create an appropriate new symbolism, in a rapidly changing society, produces an historical deformity—a psychocultural gap between words and deeds that widens through time and develops, ultimately, an explosive charge. If the new words are missing that efficiently relate changing lifeways to changing values, then events tend to take their meaning from traditional symbolism—and from the stock of available attitudes which are sustained by these symbols. . . . Under these conditions, as many Middle Easterners complain, “hypocrisy” becomes a public style and anxiety increases. The more attitudes and actions get out of phase, the more radical becomes the treatment required to restore equilibrium.37

I am interested in this distinctive rhetoric, a harbinger of a widely circulated American model for thinking about Islamic otherness in the post-European era. What is important is how Lerner weaves a language of psychological development forged in the social sciences academy (“psychocultural,” “lifeways,” “restore equilibrium”) into a reading of Arab society. Here are the very real differences between Said’s Orientalism (as mapped onto classic European imperialist texts) and U.S. late modern readings of otherness. The subject here is not the classic colonial subject of postcolonial theory, but the subject shaped by midcentury American social scientists such as Riesman, McLuhan, Park, Lerner, Stonequist, and Myrdal. This is a self capable of transition between different social orders; a self responsive to and shaped by modern media; the self with a “lifeway”; a consumerized self (Lerner imagines transitional Arabs picking from “the stock of available attitudes”). And this is a self that via the methods of modern social and psychological analysis can be traced, quantified, and interpreted. A critique of Lerner runs as follows. First, the regularizing methods of sociological analysis smoothed out individual differences, building particular human stories into “scientific” paradigms. And, without doubt, the creation of a “transitional” Syrian or Iranian was an act of naming by the Western viewer, Lerner. Second, Lerner’s development theory was founded on the thoroughly Enlightenment belief that technology enacts progressive change. Technology (phones, television, and film)

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spreads the gospel of modern, Western civilization—yet this was a book written shortly after Nazi death camps demonstrated a less cheering application of technology.38 Furthermore, Lerner’s paradigm understood cultures in terms of the traditional and the modern, with a phase of transition acting as a bridge between the two. Lerner, one senses, wanted to refute the possibility that the modern and the traditional might coexist. He established a recognizably “modern” rather than a “postmodern” conception of change—one era of history will succeed its predecessor, in a steady cultural movement onwards. Third, Lerner’s development theory barely addressed colonialism. Though much of his thinking must have been done at the time of Suez, a conspicuous lacuna was sustained engagement with colonialism’s aftershocks. He was dismissive of Arab nationalism and its antagonism toward empire. Of Nasser’s policies in Egypt, he commented that “seeking to compensate the fantasy life for damages inflicted in a no longer relevant past obscures the lines to a realistic political future.”39 But the Middle East is a place where the past is always relevant. Empire’s legacy, in the form of the Palestinian problem, had already shaped regional politics in ways Lerner failed to imagine. One might place against his analysis David Reynolds’s recent comment: “The partition of two British possessions—India and Palestine—in 1947–1948 created fault lines in South Asia and the Middle East that would outlast Europe’s cold war divide.”40 Yet Lerner’s developmental model was remarkably unconcerned with a near-term political factor of central importance. His impatience with the “no longer relevant past” led to a further problem, namely the relative neglect of religion as a vibrant cultural force; the Middle East’s transition is a movement toward secular modernity. A nice irony of the 1950s and 1960s intellectual zeitgeist is that although a great deal of effort was being made to resist Marxist influences in the U.S., the language used by development theorists shared with Marxist thought a basic progressivism and a belief that cultures evolved by stages. How else can we describe the interest in stages of development, or the faith in progress, or the search for secularism within Islamic cultures, or the recurrent deployment of terms such as “transition”?

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22  The American Writer and Development

The liberal consensus of the postwar period had its own internationalist ideology—a developmental model that adapted a Marxist sense of historical inevitability to the emergent global liberalism of the “American century” identified in Henry Luce’s 1941 Time essay. Thus, cultures would progress toward development, absorb the lessons of democracy, become steadily “Western” in terms of their technological modernity. In the analysis of a development theorist such as Daniel Lerner, these non-Western selves might then undergo a psychological transformation as traditional societies “passed” and gave way to modernity. Development ideology replaces a traditional politics of ethnicity, statehood, resources, and religion with a putatively “modern” politics of social change (particularly, secularization) and technologically driven progressivism. At the post-European moment in the middle of the century empire gave way to development as the governing paradigm for the meeting of the West and the Other. Developmental thought could be seen as a form of futurism: a model of Westernization where the West’s agency is often obscured or simply absent. Theories of development became a distinctively American response to the postimperial order, a way of suggesting that progress sanctioned the evolution of countries along Western lines. The catalyst for progress was now a managerial model of Keynesian and trade-based internationalism, not the British imperial economy. Development had filled the ideological space left by colonialism. It suggested ways to imagine America’s place in a radically altered postwar environment. Development was recognizably Western in its basic Enlightenment dynamic, but smoothed away the sheer supremacism that many Americans (not least figures such as FDR) loathed in the European colonial model. Development theory also offered a synoptic, technocratic model of geopolitics. Both postcolonial and broadly progressive, development theory offered a “systems analysis” model of international affairs. It would supersede in its logic and predictive capability earlier U.S. models of foreign policy that some historians have characterized as marked by inconsistency and a certain irrationality.41 Development also offered a model of political economy to set against the internationalist claims of the Eastern bloc: liberal development replaces international socialism. James E. Cronin observes that

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“the geography of development appeared starkly obvious: the capitalist West and the socialist East represented two rival paths that seemed to lead with equal assurance, indeed inevitability, to the creation of modern industrial economies.” Thus, “the so-called Third World was not merely backward economically and technically but was viewed as an open social space to be colonized, in an age of ‘decolonization,’ by capitalism or socialism and brought by one or another path to modernity.”42 Cronin describes the ideological bifurcation of the world by cold war polarities, but each system (Western capitalism and liberal democracy; Marxist communism and its attendant authoritarian regimes) nonetheless claimed universalism.

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One World This interplay between universal and bipolar models of development is very much a feature of the global visions explored by writers engaged in the development debate. One historical narrative applied to cultural internationalism during the last half-century sees a nascent sense of internationalized unity emerging after the First World War, developing strongly during the 1940s, only to be broken by the cold war and then replaced by bipolarity. David Reynolds begins his global history of the postwar period with an account of Wendell Willkie’s One World (1943). Willkie, the Republican presidential candidate in 1940, envisaged an emergent sense of global solidarity—“one world.” His book was widely translated and became a bestseller with 4.5 million copies sold.43 Various forms of what we might call “world consciousness” had become popular in the United States by this time. Looking back at this moment from the mid-1950s, Nathan Glazer and David Riesman recalled in elegiac tones those “utopian thinkers” such as Stringfellow Barr, Clarence Streit, and the United World Federalists.44 These figures emerged from what Akira Iriye, in one of the very few studies of the intellectual cross-fertilization between international relations and culture, has termed “cultural internationalism.” Iriye has studied the ways in which intellectuals, governments, and other nongovernmental organizations (the United World Federalists would be one example) explored global

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community and cross-cultural contact. Iriye theorizes that in spite of the twentieth century’s nationalist ideologies, state rivalries, and sheer racism, a global consciousness evolved. The establishment of such organizations as unesco is one testament to a rising tide of internationalism.45 Reynolds, Riesman and Glazer, and Iriye all identified a specifically American form of universalism that briefly flowered in the 1930s and 1940s and centered on organizations such as the United World Federalists. Internationalist Americans such as the polemicist Clarence K. Streit advocated what he called “Union Now,” “the establishment of Inter-democracy Federal Union” between the United States, northern European democracies from Scandinavia to Switzerland, and the “white” countries of the British Empire (Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa).46 After war broke out, Streit continued to promote his vision and contrasted the “Union” to the “Triangle” of Axis Powers. In part, the “Union” marked a resurgence of Woodrow Wilson’s global idealism; the Second World War, and the eventual Allied triumph, offered a “Second Chance” to assert a worldwide liberal order. It’s also worth noting that the Woodrow Wilson Foundation produced in 1944 a pamphlet entitled Our Second Chance, where Wilson’s calls after the First World War for a League of Nations were counterpointed against politicians’ statements made during the next war. Now, the foundation implied, was the moment to install Wilson’s grand project to forestall yet further conflict.47 We might meditate on the fate of 1940s “One World” rhetoric. Some of the impulses and the idealism behind this writing went into the work of figures such as Richard Wright and Pearl S. Buck: the attentiveness to the foreign, especially the foreign terrain of Africa and Asia, the liberalism, the attempt to transcend military antinomies. But it is difficult not to sense that the relative marginality of these figures as thinkers about globalism is in some ways the result of liberal internationalism’s fragility in the United States. Such an argument, which I will explore at various points in this book, would suggest that current arguments about the post-9/11 bifurcations in the Atlantic alliance have a far deeper seedbed in cold war culture.48

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The chapters in this study form an interlocking synoptic account of postwar internationalism. Throughout, we see American writers representing the globe at a moment when decolonization and the cold war created powerful international crosscurrents. Chapter 2 explores perhaps the most powerful form of critical internationalism within the overseas genealogy: the African American tradition that runs down from Du Bois through Wright to Baldwin and Malcolm X. The third chapter takes the argument to North Africa and to a close reading of Paul Bowles’s unduly neglected study of mystic Islam and decolonization, The Spider’s House. In the fourth chapter, the web is widened further, to incorporate Pearl Buck and what has been termed the “sentimental imperialism” of U.S. commitments in East Asia; that chapter concentrates on Buck’s memoirs and her account of the missionary project. Chapter 5 examines the central developmental concepts of nonalignment and historical transition through a comparative study of Richard Wright’s The Color Curtain and texts by Gunnar Myrdal and John Dos Passos. The sixth chapter then investigates U.S. travel writing in the 1960s through close readings of Peter Matthiessen and Susan Sontag. In this section, and those that follow, a key motif is the complex writing back to European intellectuals that occurred in many postwar American texts. For Sontag and Matthiessen, the classic anthropology of figures such as Malinowski and Lévi-Strauss formed a paradigm framing their own readings of such non-Western spaces as the Amazon or Southeast Asia. In my seventh and eighth chapters European presence is encountered and often remade, either through Wright’s ironic revisioning of Spain (chapter 7) or through the insertion of American agents—apostles of modernity—into regions now undergoing decolonization and the “vanishing” of the Europeans. My eighth chapter uncovers these motifs in Burdick and Lederer’s iconic fiction, The Ugly American, and places alongside that book other ugly Americans from works by Ernest Hemingway and Saul Bellow. And in a final essay, I carry the argument forward into the 1990s and the twenty-first century, in an account of how Richard Powers and Don DeLillo have reconfigured foreign affairs and the figure of the American cosmopolitan. My concern throughout has been to respond to the global multiplicity of

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works by literary intellectuals, and to chart the written heterogeneity of their internationalism: novels, travel books, political commentary, and reportage. I thus investigate deliberately diverse materials, including the often overlooked genealogy of speeches, polemics, and essays that includes Malcolm X’s late talks on American power, Sontag’s “Trip to Hanoi” and Don De Lillo’s 9/11 elegy, “In the Ruins of the Future.”

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2

The “Skin Game” Du Bois, Wright, Malcolm X, Baldwin

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Few Americans have looked at an Asian or African country without reflecting (and commenting) on the favorable effect a little American ambition would have. —John Kenneth Galbraith, Economic Development (1964)

In a 1915 Atlantic Monthly essay, “The African Roots of War,” W. E. B. Du Bois applied a presciently globalized analysis to the capitalist exploitation of Africa: “The present world war is, then, the result of jealousies engendered by the recent rise of armed national associations of labor and capital whose aim is the exploitation of the wealth of the world mainly outside the European circle of nations.”1 That is, colonialist rivalries fed the fires before the First World War; the European conflict represented the return of international rivalries to the metropolitan center. Although he would later inflect this analysis, Du Bois remained a keen advocate of a materialist internationalism that saw colonial expansion as the key to modern turmoil. In this chapter I chart how this African American understanding of colonialism, repeatedly modulated in the face of historical change, created genealogies of analysis. Examining Du Bois, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin intertextually, one sees how literary internationalism evolves across and between writers,

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28  The “Skin Game”

as an intellectual dialogue develops across decades. These writers did not always agree with one another, but their disagreements of political analysis create a compelling narrative. I suggest that African American internationalism forged an analysis of empire that has few parallels. The strength of this dissenting analysis lies in a historical longevity reaching back to the early twentieth century. Alain Locke, for instance, had argued in 1914 that imperialism caused the war.2 A recent discovery in Locke scholarship has also been a series of 1916 lectures at Howard University exploring racial difference in an international context. As Jeffrey Stewart notes in an introduction to this milestone in the African American critique of empire: “For Locke modern races resulted from the praxis of modern imperialism, which defined as ‘inferior’ those races such as Arabs, Africans, East Indians, and African Americans who were unable to free themselves from colonial subordination. Even those peoples such as African Americans who were not directly subject to an empire were subjected to the imperial attitude on the part of Anglo-Americans.”3 After the United States entered the Second World War Du Bois continued to develop his materialist globalism. In “The Realities in Africa: European Profit or Negro Development” (1943) he declared that “the primary reality of imperialism in Africa today is economic” (note Du Bois’s very specific usage of the term “Negro Development” to oppose “European Profit”). It’s worth quoting an extended passage of this internationalist critique: The fact is that so far as government investment is concerned, the money which Great Britain, France, Portugal and Germany as governments have invested in Africa has yielded small returns in taxes and revenues. But this governmental investment and its concomitant political control have been the basis upon which private investors have built their private empires, being thus furnished free capital by home taxation; and while the mass of people in the mother country have been taxed and often heavily for this governmental gift abroad, the private capitalist who has invested in the colonies has reaped not only interest from his own investment but returns from investments

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which he did not make and which are protected by armies and navies which he only partially supported. Immense sums have been derived from raw material and labor whose price has been depressed to a minimum while the resulting goods processed in the mother country are sold at monopoly prices. The profits have not been evenly distributed at home; but the net return to the white races for their investment in colored labor and raw material in Africa has been immense. That, very briefly, is the fundamental fact of the situation which confronts us in Africa today.4

Du Bois counters the argument that colonization has in some way been “good” for Africa. He also teases the paradox that the British government was expanding imperially while campaigning against slavery. Du Bois identifies what we might now call the synergies between private capital and governmental action: “The slave trade and slavery would not only be unnecessary; they were actually a handicap to profitable investment.”5 So the Western government creates networks (of “political control,” of “armies and navies”) that enable the private capitalist to purchase materials and African labor at low cost while selling the goods in the metropolitan center at “monopoly prices.” Du Bois’s account of the Second World War’s origins extended these arguments. Now colonialist conflict shifted to Asia, to competition for new resources; and Japan entered the game. Running alongside this critique, Du Bois developed a thesis emphasizing the formative impact of race ideology on world politics. “Prospect of a World without Race Conflict” (1944) asserted that “the philosophy of biological race differences” would continue after the war had ended. Planning for the new world about to emerge would need to address this cancer. In parallel to his trenchant materialist hypotheses, that is, Du Bois examined racism’s social psychology and ideological structures. The “supertragedy” of the Holocaust and Anglo-American “race philosophy” showed the way the world was going: “The philosophy of biological race differences which divide the world into superior and inferior people will persist after this war.”6 But was Du Bois correct in his premise? “Prospect of a World with-

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out Race Conflict” raises in a most fundamental way the question of how foresighted a public intellectual can be. Du Bois often looked to the future and attempted to read out the international system’s deep structures. His sense that “postwar planning” omitted an analysis of race seems broadly correct. As the State Department’s own minutes demonstrate, government research was trained on Europe and East Asia and remained broadly Eurocentric, even if the 1941 Atlantic Charter had supported political self-determination on a global scale. Africa merited a mere five indexed references in the massive digest of wartime preparations for the postconflict world.7 President Roosevelt might have registered his opposition to British imperialism while visiting West Africa in 1943, but his administration’s planning implicitly accepted European spheres of influence in what became known as the “Third World.”8 Moreover, as Du Bois pointed out, the emergent architecture of international relations ignored race: “The Atlantic Charter as well as the agreements in Moscow and Tehran have been practically silent on the subject of race.”9 In a pithy encapsulation of relations between the West and the East, Du Bois anticipated conflicts that would eventually erupt in Vietnam and the Middle East: “The greatest and most dangerous race problem today is the problem of relations between Asia and Europe: the question as to how far ‘East is East and West is West’ and of how long they are going to retain the relation of master and serf.”10 Yet Du Bois overestimated European hegemony, overlooking the sheer attrition of total war. He thought the postwar period would see a revival of empire, but this was the beginning of the end. The picture, like most, is a mixed one. In his tenacious hold on race as a determining factor, Du Bois wove colonialism into his readings of the post-1945 situation (while figures such as Daniel Lerner read out colonialism’s impact): this proved shrewd. On the other hand, he was overly committed to a model of global politics where Europe remained preeminent. Here, perhaps, the sheer longevity of Du Bois’s career, and his early experience of late Victorian and Edwardian Europe, were significant; European empires provided the first and formative grounding for his global analysis. Europe remained central to his thought, even when the United States’s rise to globalism was helping to de-center the continent’s power.

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These World War II essays formed the groundwork for a major exploration of colonialism, Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (1945). This book expanded earlier points, intertwining materialism and a critique of racism into a panoramic survey of the new international order. Du Bois then assaulted the system fashioned by the allies, repeatedly attacking Anglo-American internationalism because it paid insufficient attention to the colonial heritage. The postwar system, he felt, was tacitly complicit with racist ideology. In his first chapter, he discussed the Dumbarton Oaks Conference of August–October 1944, which helped establish the United Nations. For Du Bois, Dumbarton Oaks overlooked China and reinstated a white Euro-American hegemony: “The Security Council, therefore, which is the executive center of the proposed new world organization, will practically be under the control of white Europe and America; while the yellow peoples will be recognized as having the right to share in this partnership, their effective assertion of this right will depend upon the long and difficult path which the reorganization of China and the rebuilding of her culture will surely demand.”11 He saw that with a Security Council membership of China, Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States, China was the only non-white representative in the U.N.’s inner core. In a rather unusual configuration, Du Bois thus took his stand alongside Pearl S. Buck, Agnes Smedley, Malcolm X, and Philip K. Dick as an American commentator with a keen sense of China’s geopolitical significance (and elsewhere he drew telling parallels between Africa and China as the major sites of non-Western power).12 From this insight Du Bois built a sustained attack on the white world’s grip on global power. At hegemony’s heart were colonies: “Colonies are the slums of the world. They are today the places of greatest concentration of poverty, disease, and ignorance of what the human mind has come to know.”13 Color and Democracy marked an advance over his early work in that he now developed increasingly pluralistic, multitiered readings of the colony. Even though the overall argumentative stance remained a conflation of economic analysis and social psychology, Du Bois now moved toward a cultural account of “primitive peoples”: “Perhaps the greatest disaster that the colonial system has

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brought to primitive peoples is the ruthless and ignorant destruction of their cultural patterns. . . . Only in recent days have scientists called to the attention of the world the values of primitive culture—the fact that in many respects these ways of living have solved social difficulties better than civilized lands have been able to do.”14 At such moments Du Bois foregrounds a form of cultural relativism to stake a claim for “primitive culture” over “civilized lands.” Crucially, he also locked the ideal of “development” onto the ideal of due respect and care for “African art” and “Asiatic religion”: “Something has been rescued of African art, of Asiatic religion; but so long as colonial exploitation is looked upon as a necessity despite all its cost, just so long the development of human progress in colonial areas will be frustrated and misled.”15 That is, Du Bois had worked his way to an argument where “development” and “progress” had to accommodate “cultural patterns.” The unironic usage of “primitive” (a trait he shares with Richard Wright) leads to a distinctive reading of development and cultural progress. There is a dawning sense of the primitive’s innate cultural value, but he remains rooted in what was a form of “pre-postcolonial” thinking. That is, Du Bois wrote at a time when one could safely invoke “human progress” without worrying too much about whose “human” values were at stake. It would be, I think, a little too pat to pick apart Du Bois’s arguments on these postmodern grounds without also acknowledging that an embracing, enveloping, and liberal notion of progress enabled him to draw telling comparisons across national and cultural boundaries. For if one believes in an internationalized formula of development, then one is also likely to be drawn to comparative evaluations of how different countries move forward progressively; the contemporary embodiment of such classic liberal progressivism is the United Nations’ Human Development Index. The emphasis on generic progress also meant that Du Bois teased out comparisons between the United States and the wider world. He then formulated the classic comparison between racism at home and racism abroad. The naacp position, articulated by Du Bois himself as its Director of Special Research, was that domestic racism had hamstrung foreign policy: “The Negro problem forces the United States to abdicate its natural leadership of

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democracy in the world and to acquiesce in a domination of organized wealth which exceeds anything elsewhere in the world. It gives reign and legal recognition to race hate.”16 His case rested on a trenchantly global progressivism: we can talk of “democracy in the world” only in the context of the transnational development of all societies. It is important to dwell on Du Bois’s readings of the colony so as to contextualize the development theory discussed in chapter 1. A countertradition or counternarrative can be placed against mainstream development theory: a longstanding African American reading of global politics, with its sensitivity to race and its thoroughly materialist awareness that when the West got involved in Africa or Asia, economic gain was the aim. Development represented the official language of America as it moved toward global center; the African American critique is the heckler’s voice that mistrusts this official language of progress. This critique had its foundation in Du Bois’s early reflections on what the twentieth century would be like. In his commencement address at Fisk University in June 1898 Du Bois caught the tones and aspirations of late Victorian progressivism, not only in his Romanticism (his phrasing recurrently echoes Wordsworth), but also in his calls to “world-service.” The later Du Bois was explicitly anti-colonial, but the early Du Bois responded enthusiastically to the increasing integration of global cultures (of which empire was both symptom and engine). He had noticed that the economic realities of global circulation and a world market were now evident on a daily basis: “On our breakfast table lies each morning the toil of Europe, Asia, and Africa, and the isles of the sea; we sew and spin for unseen millions, and countless myriads weave and plant for us; we have made the earth smaller and life broader by annihilating distance, magnifying the human voice and the stars, binding nation to nation, until to-day, for the first time in history, there is one standard of human culture as well in New York as in London, in Cape Town as in Paris, in Bombay as in Berlin.”17 A century before the 1990s Internet craze and the “death of distance” heralded by digital acolytes, Du Bois saw that goods were circulating through an increasingly integrated world economy. He had established this economic circulation as the base on which a new superstructure of culture, the “one standard of human culture,” would be built.18 The recognition of this “one stan-

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dard of human culture” aligned Du Bois with a universalistic theory of development. But in his work, the “one standard” establishes a radical critique, an early transnationalism where the communality of cultures enables an evaluation of how this “one standard” is deformed or neglected. For Du Bois, this global integration of societies could only reveal empire’s oppressions.19

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Wright in West Africa Richard Wright developed this form of analysis in his 1950s travel writing. On the ground in West Africa at the moment of decolonization, Wright used a similar compound of materialist analysis and social-psychological readings of racism to cut through the rhetoric surrounding empire. Du Bois’s essays on colonialism, empire, and the postwar world provide an immediate and telling context for Wright’s major study of Africa, Black Power (1954). Wright and Du Bois form a pair of interlocking African American progressives, writing at the end of empire, at the beginning of the emergent Americanized order but (crucially) before the decisive advent of postcolonial theory as heralded by Fanon’s work. Nonetheless, Black Power—not to mention Wright’s broader response to Africa—appeared to Du Bois himself to be less a critique of the West than one of its author’s recurrent betrayals of origin. Wright had known Du Bois since the days of Native Son; but the two figures seemed to move toward divergent positions regarding Africa. Du Bois disliked Wright’s account of West Africa and felt that he had betrayed his leftist beginnings. Writing to George Padmore, Du Bois admitted that “Wright has great talent and his descriptions of West Africa are literature.” Yet he felt Wright had in effect underwritten capitalism, even though “the degradation of Africa is due to that Capitalism which Wright is defending.” Wright had betrayed the Left: “I don’t like Wright. The Communists of America started him on his career.”20 Wright has also had a bad reception among African critics, some of whom share Du Bois’s sense of betrayal. His refashioning of existentialism to create a philosophy of the “outsider” seemed to smack too much of good old American individualism; and his willingness to

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imagine a black American identity suggested a racial identity sacrificed to the dominant culture: “His self-hate, resulting from White racism and Black rootlessness,” writes Femi Ojo-Ade, “pushes him to become the Outsider. . . . He has never, indeed, left America, to which he remains attached psychologically and ideologically after he has dabbled into communism and after his self-exile in Paris.”21 In Kwame Anthony Appiah’s trenchant phrases, Black Power was marked by a “paranoid hermeneutic” and became an “anthropological fantasy” about Africa rather than a searching, sympathetic exploration.22 Wright was not a black nationalist, but his writing formed part of a midcentury progressive literary internationalism. He had left the Communist Party in the early 1940s. In contributing to Richard Crossman’s collection of essays on the failure of Marxist Communism, The God That Failed (1949), he then joined the “vital center” of the anticommunist and postcommunist “liberal consensus” occupied by figures such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr.23 To dismiss Wright as someone who simply “dabbled into communism” is to underestimate the lasting impact on Wright of a certain form of historicist, materialist analysis. Black Power might have been written by a self-elected outsider, but it is also a considerable work of modified Marxist analysis. In Black Power a midcentury American internationalist, now distanced from the Communist Party but shaped by Marxism, tests theory against history. Wright’s travels in Spain, Africa, and Indonesia produced books where the personal encounter between the black American and a foreign culture become opportunities for the traveler-writer to focus his political readings. Black Power, like all his travel books, is a tapestry of meetings, conversations, dialogues. Much like his other 1950s works, it is constructed around vignettes where a curious traveler directly encounters otherness. Wright grounds an economic and political critique in a humanist’s receptivity to personal encounter and conversation; the text foregrounds particularized and detailed but theoretically sophisticated street scenes. Thus the African market: In front of the Indian, Syrian, and European stores African women sat before wooden boxes heaped high with red peppers, oranges,

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plantains, cigarettes, cakes of soap cut into tiny bits, okra, tomatoes, peeled coconuts, small heaps of matches, cans of tinned milk, etc. Men from the Northern Territories, dressed in long smocks, sold from carts piled with cheap mirrors, shoestrings, flashlights, combs, nail files, talcum powder, locks, and cheaply framed photos of Hollywood movie stars. . . . I was astonished to find that even the children were engaged in this street trade, carrying their wares on their heads either in calabashes or brass pans that had been polished until they glittered. Was it a lack of capital that made the Africans sell like this on the streets?24

Wright is simply overwhelmed, and tries to overwhelm the reader, with a West African market’s teeming textures. But look at how the scene closes, with a question (“Was it a lack of capital?”) about the market’s formation. In West Africa a raw, unmediated capitalism appears. The problem is not that Africa is insufficiently capitalist but that its capitalism is too chaotic; Wright’s admiration for a planned Soviet-style economy is mirrored by evident distaste when faced by frantic exchange: “Everything is on sale: chickens, sheep, cows, and goats; cheap European goods—razor blades, beds, black iron pots three feet in diameter—nestle side by side with kola nuts, ginger roots, yams, and silk kente cloths for chiefs and kings.” And so, “this is the Wall Street of the Gold Coast” (294). Given that much of our current debate about sub-Saharan Africa focuses on the economic failures of these nations, it is revealing that Wright’s analysis turns on the continent’s anarchic hypercapitalism. Wright remained enough of a leftist to call for government intervention in the economy and the industrialization of backward economies. Ghana presents him, though, with a form of raw capitalism where the market is everything, where all things can be bought and sold, including women, and where the establishment of an industrial economy seems a dream. This is a Marxist nightmare of what capitalism does. Human intercourse is a frenzy of buying and selling; everything has a price; foresight and regularity are sacrificed to immediate financial reward. These street scenes imply there is something typically “African” in these markets but also that this is a highly distinctive for-

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mation of capitalism created by British imperialism.25 At the culture’s base he discovers a market produced, in fact, by imperialism’s deformations. The processes of economic circulation within the colonial system have led to this madness:26

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Perhaps it can be partly explained by the manner in which British firms ship their products to the Gold Coast. The British exporting firm generally deals through a certain one firm; that firm in turn sells to another, and that firm to yet another. . . . An African “mammy” finally enters this elaborate process, buying a huge lot of a certain merchandise, which she, in turn, breaks up and sells in fairly large lots to her customers. And her customers now sell directly to the public or maybe to other sellers who sell to the public. African wives are expected to aid in augmenting the income of the household and they thus take to the streets with their heads loaded with sundry items. (112)

Wright noted that “capitalism here reaches surrealistic dimensions, for even an ordinary match gains in value if it must afford profit to each hand through which it passes.” One made a profit by selling a “piece of a piece of a piece of cloth,” which he considered “one of the most pathetic sights of the Gold Coast” (112). Faced with an imperial economic hegemony, the individual African can only make a profit by breaking into the logistical chain and dividing up the few goods available. There is barely a productive base to the economy; instead, commercial circulation and exchange have become parodies of themselves, as goods are chopped into tinier and tinier pieces for each vendor to take a share. It’s worth spending some time with extended passages from Black Power to appreciate the insights of this visionary text. In Black Power political economy leads the analysis; but Wright finally shows that colonialism’s degradations have penetrated further to become woven into the post-colony’s social psychology. Wright is at his most Fanonlike when he evaluates the colonized subject’s psychology: “The gold can be replaced; the timber can grow again, but there is no power on earth that can rebuild the mental habits and restore that former vision that once gave significance to the lives of these people.” And so, “today

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the ruins of their former culture, no matter how cruel and barbarous it may seem to us, are reflected in timidity, hesitancy, and bewilderment. Eroded personalities loom here for those who have psychological eyes to see.” And, “even if the Gold Coast actually won its fight for freedom (and it seems that it can!), it could never really win. . . . The real war was over and lost forever!” (153). The 1950s were a period of anticolonial rather than postcolonial thought, but Wright anticipates the turn into postcolonialism with his supple, ironic meditation on empire. The central focus is on the “eroded personalities” that “psychological shackles of foreign misrule” (153) have produced. Wright hovers on the brink of calling for a decolonization of the mind, but the paragraph ends instead with a pessimistic sense that even with decolonization, “the real war was over and lost forever!” (153) Wright’s sensitivity to history’s shaping power here backs him into an acceptance of psychosocial determinism. Nonetheless, for a writer grounded in traditionally materialist analysis with political economy at its center, this paragraph breaks new ground by adding mordant psychological critique to the lexicon. While development theory posited a non-Western self unsettled by the transition between tradition and modernity (but ultimately on the move toward modernity), Wright pessimistically presents “eroded personalities” scarred by colonialism’s radioactive half-life. Commentators such as Daniel Lerner posited a difficult but ultimately successful “passing” into modernity, but Wright moved toward the conclusion that “the real war was over and lost forever” because colonialism had become internalized. In its synthesis of denunciatory anticolonialism and a postcolonial account of psychological depredation, Wright’s analysis was moving in parallel to the work of Frantz Fanon. Fanon’s Les Damnés de la Terre (1961) was translated into English as The Wretched of the Earth (1963), and by the end of the decade had sold 750,000 copies.27 Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton then quoted Fanon in their polemic, Black Power (1967). Eldridge Cleaver, reviewing The Wretched of the Earth in 1967, noted that among black liberationists the book was now known as “the Bible.”28 An intellectual transformation had taken place in the decade from Wright’s text to the circulation of Fanon’s

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ideas in America. Ironically, though, Fanon and Wright had both spoken at the 1956 Paris Congress of Black Writers and Artists where, in the words of one biographer, “Fanon’s speech, touching on the same subject of black racism, was lost in the deeper shadows cast by Richard Wright and Leopold Senghor.”29 But at least one commentator has identified the similarities rather than the differences between Wright and Fanon. Grouping Du Bois, Wright, and Fanon in a black radical tradition, Ato Sekyi-Otu writes: “It is to this extended family of interlocutors of Marxist allegory and kindred metanarratives that Fanon incontestably belongs.”30 This seems to me correct in its broad delineation of an intellectual genealogy; but the point is also that Wright “belongs” to the Fanon family of postcolonialists, just as Fanon belongs to the “interlocutors of Marxist allegory.” Fanon takes center stage in accounts of the radicalization of race theory in the 1960s; but Wright was moving in a similar direction, and Black Power demonstrated a synthesis of materialist understanding of empire with a polemical anticolonialism—even if (and this is the fundamental difference between Wright and Fanon) Black Power failed finally to call for the decolonization of the mind.31 Wright differed from Du Bois in his reading of the West African transition, but he shared the older man’s regard for Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah. For Du Bois, Nkrumah was the authentic African Marxist and empire’s foe; for Wright, Nkrumah was the supreme pragmatist able to fashion compelling ideology from heterogeneous beliefs.32 These divergent analyses tell us a great deal about where Wright and Du Bois had arrived in their respective intellectual journeys. But each man admired Nkrumah, and their respect contrasts sharply with establishment accounts of the Ghanaian prime minister and president. The leader’s plans for the rapid modernization of his country “made Nkrumah a thorn in the U.S. side,” observes Michael Hunt. “John Kennedy complained that he was ‘unnecessarily difficult’ despite American patience and economic assistance, while the U.S. ambassador in Accra offered the president a thumbnail sketch as a ‘badly confused and immature person.’”33 The foreign policy establishment was alarmed by Nkrumah’s modernization project, and in calling him “immature” ef-

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fectively accused him of being insufficiently “developed” as a personality (as so often in these arguments, languages of social and psychological development cross and merge). Nkrumah’s own analyses of the African political economy, notably Neo-Colonialism (1965), were anything but “immature.” Neo-Colonialism bore the classic developmental subtitle, “The Last Stage of Imperialism,” and was a relentlessly sober account of how Western corporate interests continued to maintain a controlling interest in many African countries. Nkrumah also provided a flatly assertive definition of “non-alignment” (a topic I will discuss in a later chapter): “Non-alignment, as practiced by Ghana and many other countries, is based on co-operation with all States whether they be capitalist, socialist or have a mixed economy.”34 It was the encounter with Nkrumah that allowed Wright to understand development (as ideology and historical process) as it unfolded at the moment of decolonization. Black Power is a study of development in action, and also a close reading of Nkrumah’s project. In order to interpret development as it unfolds in the present, Wright has to reach back into the history of colony and empire. Here, Wright’s novelistic sense of historical irony came into play. The missionaries, he says, helped to “detribalize” the Africans by destroying traditional religion and customs. This process then created fertile ground where nontraditional, modern ideas might flourish, including that of resistance to empire. The British remained so wedded to a notion of their own superiority that they failed to notice emergent nationalism. “The assumption of the inferiority of the African,” Wright argues, “which gave the British the courage to conquer them, was now the very assumption that stood in the way of their seeing what was actually taking place” (119). The logic here is the logic of progressivism, where each stage of historical development opens up, often in paradoxical or unexpected ways, further possibilities of change and modernization. As Wright laconically states (in a phrase similar to that of Dos Passos’s Brazil on the Move), “Africa was moving” (289). At his subtlest, Wright had a fine sense of historical change: an awareness that led him to pinpoint the crux where the permanence of a political formation is being melted down into its opposite.

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Marginal Man “To operate their mines, their timber concessions, and their mills, the British had regimented African tribal life around new social and economic poles, and the exhortation of the missionaries had slowly destroyed the African’s faith in his own religion and customs, thereby creating millions of psychologically detribalized Africans living uneasily and frustratedly in two worlds and really believing in neither of them” (65). This sentence sees an explicit delineation of the transitional, postcolonial subject: “detribalized,” but uncertain of the path toward modernity. Poised on the cusp of political change, Africans ask how the decisive movement into their own modernity will occur: “But could this liquid emotion be harnessed to modern techniques?” (65). Liquid, not fixed: Wright is working his way through the dilemmas and scenarios described by social scientists such as Lerner, Riesman, or Horowitz. Wright provides clear intertextual clues to the significance of that social and political science. As in his other works, there are moments when Black Power alludes to particular nonliterary texts that then form an immediate intellectual milieu for his ideas. In Black Power, the sociologist Everett Stonequist provides the context. Stonequist, who worked alongside Robert Park at the University of Chicago, wrote The Marginal Man (1937), a social-psychological study of race and “Culture Conflict,” which was vital to Wright; Robert Park had originally coined the term “marginal man” in a farsighted essay on migration, published in 1928.35 Wright cites Stonequist in an epigraph to part 2 of his book, “The Nervous Colony”: “Detribalization breaks down traditional ideas and introduces some of the Western; exploitation sharpens the ensuing restlessness into discontent; missionary education provides leaders and unwittingly furnishes much of the ideology and patterns of expression, for African revolts are frequently a mixture of religious fanaticism and anti-European sentiment.”36 The Marginal Man demonstrates that American intellectuals had begun to develop ideas before the Second World War about hybridism, cosmopolitanism, and globalization—topics often seen as the signatures of late twentieth-century postmodern and postcolonial theory.

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Stonequist’s chapter headings anticipate contemporary preoccupations: “The Racial Hybrid,” “The Cultural Hybrid,” “Assimilation and Passing.” The Marginal Man impressed Wright deeply. He wrote in his journal (February 13, 1945): “I AM the marginal man.”37 This might on first reading seem a curious claim, if we associate marginality with insignificance. But for Stonequist and the Chicago sociologist Robert Park (who wrote the introduction), the marginal man, in his transitions between and across cultures, developed a self-critical, highly alert personality. “The marginal person was likely to be more alert, critical, ‘intelligent,’ and often was a leader,” writes R. Fred Wacker in an extensive commentary on these concepts: “They were in effect in dialogue with themselves.”38 Park’s introduction to The Marginal Man fused insights from anthropology, sociology, and psychology into an account of identity and community in the age of globalization. He stressed the market’s significance, which he saw in benignly progressive terms; Wright shared with Park and Stonequist a fascination with international capitalism but tended to develop grimmer readings of its transformational power: “It is with the expansion of the market, as a matter of fact, that intellectual life has prospered and local tribal cultures have been progressively integrated into that wider and more rational social order we call civilization.”39 What a sentence! Park managed to incorporate so many touchstones that animated later twentieth-century U.S. globalism: the expanding market; the decline of local tribalism; the idealization of progress; the belief that civilization is inherently rational and marketdriven. This, in miniature, encapsulates a distinctively liberal, progressive model of geopolitical development. There is a pattern of argument that recurs in these midcentury analyses of cultural and psychological change within an interconnecting global environment. “The great world . . . has grown at the expense of the little world,” as Park insists; and the analysis now moves on to how the “great world” creates new psychological types. Park and Stonequist sought to map sociocultural shifts onto particular psychological types. They saw changes in the social and political order as triggers for change within the individual self. Thus Stonequist saw the West’s electrifying

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impact on the globe as the driver for revolutions within other societies and, most importantly, within the non-Western subject. He was fascinated by this Westernized newness as it manifested itself in other societies, other selves. His analysis’s foundation was an early model of globalization theory. Migration is now a “world-wide condition”; culture and identity are in “transition.” It will, however, be non-Western peoples who “make the adjustment between their own and western civilization.”40 The logic of progressive development is that the “nonWestern” self undergoes transition upwards and “adjustment” towards the West. The process is fluid but the transition’s overall direction is evident; the West does not “adjust” to the rest. Stonequist remains convinced of the West’s supremacy. He argued for a pragmatic recognition of the West’s own development and modernity. This is the culture to which others will then adjust. The West is a steady totem, the cynosure around which other civilizations recalibrate themselves. Park summarized his friend’s insights as follows: Europeans have invaded every part of the world, and no part of the earth has escaped the disturbing, even if vivifying, contacts of European commerce and culture. The movements and migrations incident to this expansion have brought about everywhere an interpenetration of peoples and a fusion of cultures. Incidentally it has produced, at certain times and under certain conditions, a personality type, a type which if not wholly new is at any rate peculiarly characteristic of the modern world. . . . The marginal man, as here conceived, is one whom fate has condemned to live in two societies and in two, not merely different but antagonistic, cultures.41

Stonequist suggested a model of worldwide transformation where a globalizing economy and its technologies would engineer rapid shifts in “lifeways”: “Bicycles, automobiles, airplanes, radios, motion pictures, and all the paraphernalia of western civilization, are penetrating and transforming the outer and inner life of the African.” In a causal linkage echoing throughout writing about cultural transition during the 1940s and 1950s, Stonequist established this “penetrating” globalization as the basis for the “detribalization” of African society: “No longer is he

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[i.e., the African] restricted to the traditional pathways of his ancestors: new opportunities and experiences in conflict with older compulsions function to detribalize and individualize his attitudes and behavior.”42 Stonequist’s text drove inexorably toward midcentury global progressivism. Democracy, the “evolution” of societies, technology, the steady transformation of the tribal self to enable continents such as Africa to break free from “tradition”: “In the last analysis the world adjustment of races and nationalities is a matter of slow evolution. It will be conditioned by progress in the diffusion of culture, by the stabilization of populations, by mastery over economic forces, and by the growth of democratic-humanitarian sentiments. Such changes may shift the focus of group conflicts in new directions so that racial and national sentiments will automatically weaken.”43 It’s out of the meeting between social theory and the traveler’s experiences that the distinctive contours of Pagan Spain, Black Power, and The Color Curtain emerge. Unlike Everett Stonequist or Robert Park, however, Wright often seemed unsure about how the “world adjustment of races and nationalities” would work out. His writing of transition is remarkably open-ended, for instance. Many of Black Power’s sentences end in question marks or in those discontinuities and ellipses that repeatedly punctuate Wright’s work (. . . .), as if syntax might embody historical process. At this point in decolonization, with the postcolonial order yet to become clear, Wright can only proffer queries, marking an awareness of where debates might develop. Question marks embody the writer’s perplexity, the confusion resulting when development theory encounters the texture of actual, not imagined, societies. Wright will use this mobile and discontinuous form of travel reportage to ask more questions than he can give answers to—as if to say that his job is to map the spaces where enquiry might take place. Black Power begins to emerge as a distant cousin to other, radically discontinuous and experimental works on Africa. In a recent influential account of writing and ethnography, James Clifford identifies the fruitful interaction of the European avant-garde and ethnographic investigation as a revolutionary moment for the representation of non-Western cultures. What he terms “ethnographic surrealism” witnessed the breaking-up of

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established ethnographic discourses. As writers brought collage and juxtaposition into their texts, the “reality” of places such as Africa would no longer be embodied with a seamless representational mastery: “Reality, after the surrealist twenties, could never again be seen as simple or continuous, describable empirically or through induction.”44 In a study of Michel Leiris’s L’Afrique Fantôme (1934), a text worth comparing with Black Power, Clifford notes the inauguration of a “writing process that will endlessly pose and recompose an identity. Its poetics is one of incompletion and process, with space for the extraneous.”45 The discontinuities, open-endedness, and incompletion of Black Power perhaps link Wright back to this revolutionary moment in the writing of Africa. Certainly he presents a discontinuous account, fissured by ellipses, shifts in perspectives, unanswered questions, contradictions, and riddles. So is Black Power an American version of Leiris’s ethnographic surrealism? Perhaps. But one might also see Black Power as an instance, a very American instance, of a different form: a “pragmatist ethnography.” In place of the discursive demarche into a new territory of writing, the pragmatist traveler enters a series of encounters where preconceptions are tested and reformulated. The writing of the encounter is open-ended and flexible (hence the interruptions and ellipses that mark Wright’s paragraphs), but also democratic and accessible (Wright’s imagined audience is a broad one). The pragmatist traveler constructs a series of occasions; the focus is on pivotal meetings where the progressive self is forced into encounters with foreign complexities. Travel becomes a pragmatic act where theory and experience combine and recombine to produce flexible, eminently practical ways of engagement with a foreign place. Black Power also ends in a thoroughly practical way, with Wright offering plans, propositions, and frameworks for Nkrumah to work with. His work had a declarative pragmatism, a direct bearing on the world in its address to Nkrumah. A faith in development through industrialization was the center of Wright’s pragmatism. He remains convinced that Africa must industrialize—fast. Wright’s own life-story, with its move from Southern poverty to industrial Chicago, underwrote his sense that “progress” equaled “industry.” Wright thinks of himself in terms of where he is on the scale of

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development; one hears in these declarations a man who escaped from Mississippi’s rural poverty: “I was literate, Western, disinherited, and industrialized and I felt each day the pain and anxiety of it” (147). He presents himself as the transitional self identified by Stonequist, “Western” and “industrialized” but also (because “detribalized” in his own idiosyncratic way) “disinherited.” Stonequist’s language of psychological transition and social evolution became the way for Wright to imagine his own life. From that experience he took the lesson that industrialization was the driver of economic and political development. This is one biographical explanation for Black Power’s almost fetishistic interest in seeking out signs of industry. Again one notes the firmly materialist cast of Wright’s analysis, as he describes the extractive base of the African economy: “From the soil of these people had come an untold fortune in gold, diamonds, timber, manganese, bauxite” (147). The way forward for West Africa is to move up from an extractive economy and to industrialize quickly; but a salutary disappointment occurs when Wright recognizes the Gold Coast’s intimidating climactic conditions—it will, quite simply, be impossible to transplant a progressive Western industrial model into this heat and stifling humidity: “I was sure that if the British had to industrialize the Gold Coast, they would have found a way of doing it. . . . Until some effort was made to preserve metal against corrosion, this place was under a sentence of death” (123). The attacks on Wright’s liberalism or his political apostasy often concentrate (as we saw in Sekyi-Otu’s critique) on somewhat invidious comparisons between one figure and another. Thus Wright might seem to lack the oppositionality or critical edge of Du Bois. To discriminate among intellectual positions is, of course, one of the scholar’s jobs; but discriminations might at times obscure or suppress the very real intellectual communality and shared argumentation within a nexus of writers. One of my contentions in this chapter is that there was a strongly genealogical linkage between figures such as Locke and Du Bois (at the start of the century) and Wright or Baldwin decades later. A common area of preoccupations and a shared idiom link disparate writers into a counternarrative: a compelling African American globalist discourse. These linkages are vital, because to miss them is to read these figures

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as isolatoes rather than to witness the power of shared narrative. As we know from work on literary genealogies or canon formation, it is the recognition of a writer within a lineage that signals the decisive conferral of intellectual authority.

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Malcolm X and James Baldwin as Tourists It is therefore telling that Malcolm X’s internationalism, as he developed it in the conversations with Alex Haley that formed The Autobiography of Malcolm X, should share many features with the globalism of Du Bois and Wright. While serving out his jail sentence in the Norfolk Prison Colony Malcolm forged his notorious geneticist theory of black racial superiority, but he also explored accounts of empire and anticolonial struggle (notably, Gandhi’s struggle against the British Empire). As I will show in a later analysis of Pagan Spain, African American writers could be acutely sensitive to European assumptions of religious superiority (and Wright wrote back to this notion by representing Catholic Spain as “pagan” in its primeval spiritualism). Malcolm also saw the association of “white” and “Christian” as an ideological maneuver, where people of another color were demarcated as being beyond the pale of true observance. The white colonist was “nothing but a piratical opportunist” who “religiously . . . branded ‘heathen’ and ‘pagan’ labels upon ancient non-white cultures and civilizations.”46 Malcolm’s excoriation of white power saw empire as a compound of sheer racism, materialist exploitation, and brutal internationalist Realpolitik. At such points Malcolm inflected and heightened argumentative positions established by Du Bois and Wright. He shared Wright’s sense that Bandung had radically altered the international scene. In one of his very last speeches (February 16, 1965) he claimed that a “change has come about” and called attention to the “spirit of Bandung” in Asia and Africa.47 Furthermore, Malcolm’s attentiveness to China’s significance echoes Du Bois’s interest in Asia; he sensed that white power’s relentless drive would focus on China, and that China would become the site of increasing dread within the Western imagination. The Chinese, in fact, were now the center of “the collective white man’s fear and tension.”48

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The richness of the African American counternarrative lay in its potential for rewriting from within. Each figure affirms the validity of Du Bois’s originating paradigm by inflecting the analysis, modifying it in the light of new developments. Malcolm X modified the narrative by incorporating cold war politics into readings of what he called “the skin game.” Adlai Stevenson, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, coined that term to express his frustration with what he saw as developing nations’ unreasonable demands. They were playing a game of grievance by using their color. Thus the international system was a “skin game.” In a characteristic deconstruction of white language, Malcolm argued that this was indeed the case, the world was a “skin game,” but the game originated in white supremacism: “Let us face reality. We can see in the United Nations a new world order being shaped, along color lines—an alliance among the non-white nations. America’s U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson complained not long ago that in the United Nations ‘a skin game’ was being played. He was right. He was facing reality. A ‘skin game’ is being played. But Ambassador Stevenson sounded like Jesse James accusing the marshal of carrying a gun. Because who in the world’s history ever has played a worse ‘skin game’ than the white man?”49 This is Malcolm speaking back, not writing back: the deconstructive snap of the allegation reverses and mocks the original point. Its power rests in the immediate, performative nature of the accusation, and in Malcolm’s ability to mobilize the genealogy of analysis. After his crucial trip to the Middle East, where he joined the annual Islamic pilgrimage or hajj in Mecca, Malcolm revised his earlier stance of unremitting hostility toward white people. Roughly, from early 1964 his practice of Islam led to an appreciation of his chosen faith’s “colorblindness.” The hajj was a communal experience for pilgrims of every skin color and ethnic origin. Malcolm had left the Nation of Islam and become an “orthodox” Sunni Moslem, but his late reflections on foreign affairs also sound at times like the reflections of a classic cultural internationalist. Though his diary account of the trips to Africa went missing after his death, it’s clear that Malcolm literally came back from overseas a changed man.50 Amiri Baraka argues that “the recognition of ‘white Muslims’ was, objectively, an expression of Malcolm’s recogni-

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The “Skin Game”  49

tion of internationalism and the worldwide anti-imperialist struggle.”51 True, but as is usually the case in the Autobiography, tone, voice, and self-characterization are also part of Malcolm’s ideology. Some of the Autobiography’s most excited sentences center on travel and its delights. There is an almost naïve pleasure in much of this account, as when Malcolm looks at a diverse crowd of pilgrims and notes that “it was like pages out of the National Geographic magazine.”52 Unable to communicate with his hosts, and desperately seeking out English speakers, Malcolm, comically but knowingly, becomes a parody of the tongue-tied American abroad. Malcolm X takes on the mantle of the quintessential American overseas, and then uses that stereotype to refashion himself as a liberal internationalist. For this, surely, is what he is becoming: pluralist, cosmopolitan, prepared to be surprised and remade by the experience of travel. As Malcolm’s mockery of Adlai Stevenson made clear, one African American argument against the international system was that it amounted to nothing more than globalized racism. It’s important not to underestimate the sheer longevity and foundational significance of the “skin game” as it has threaded its way across these writers. African American commentary offers a sustained meditation on the colony and its fate. Constructed from the high watermark of colonization (Du Bois in 1915) to its deconstruction in the postwar era, the critique of internationalized racism is the discourse’s metronomic heartbeat. So, in autobiographical essays written toward the end of his life, No Name in the Street (1972), James Baldwin looked back at Paris during the French-Algerian conflict (1954–62) and reflected on the fate of French colonialism, Vietnam, and the ongoing Civil Rights struggle. His peripatetic journeys were tied together by Malcolm’s “skin game.” Baldwin underwrote his scalding commentary, a loose-limbed interweaving of essays on common themes, with an awareness of linkages between various kinds of colony. Written in the latter stages of the Vietnam conflict, No Name in the Street attacks the domestic deformations created by the battle for Algiers and turns back to the position of African Americans in the United States. This is comparative, internationalist work. Baldwin’s expatriate life (repeatedly seen in the hotel rooms, speaking

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engagements, and plane trips that punctuate the book) enabled him to construct a recognizably global perspective. No Name in the Street is a catalog of colonies and postcolonies. Baldwin notes, for example, the crisis of the French Fourth Republic; the wars in Algeria and Indochina have come together. Violence on the streets is the domestic result of the loss of empire: “The French were still hopelessly slugging it out in Indo-China when I first arrived in France, and I was living in Paris when Dien Bien Phu fell.”53 That was 1954. The period during which Baldwin had deepened his readings of French culture coincided exactly with the shift from European empire to American globalism and its discontents, from Dien Bien Phu to the fall of Saigon in 1975; historical change granted Baldwin this unique perspective on the fates of colonies. Constant in his thoughts was the impact that large-scale historical processes have on the daily texture of existence, especially on interracial friction. On this street level (Baldwin as a participant-observer in the European field), he sensed that the French had internalized empire’s decay into forms of increasing rage: “The Algerian rug-sellers and peanut vendors on the streets of Paris then had obviously not the remotest connection with this most crucial of the French reverses; and yet the attitude of the police, which had always been menacing, began to be yet more snide and vindictive.” The reason: “This is the way people react to the loss of empire—for the loss of an empire also implies a radical revision of the individual identity— and I was to see this over and over again, not only in France” (367). As with Wright in West Africa, Baldwin seeks out a market scene. He is drawn to those on the postcolonial economy’s margin: the Algerians with their peanuts and rugs. History has moved on from Black Power: corrosive, bitter postimperial anger infects the police. While Wright explored the psychology of the colonized, Baldwin addresses the colons themselves, and in a maneuver that will become familiar in postcolonial theory, he argues that the imperial encounter has caused “a radical revision of the individual identity” in the metropolitan culture.54 No Name in the Street interweaves memoir, travelogue, political commentary, and prophecy into a compelling account of various “streets” in Europe and America. In Baldwin’s transatlantic account, the street is in-

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creasingly a place where police coercion, white supremacism, and postimperial angst collude to create a vicious racism. The title, derived from the book of Job, is melodramatic, but Baldwin sees midcentury transatlantic culture as one riddled by crises: the end of European empire, the Civil Rights struggle, the cold war. He fashions an ironic, refracted language of development to explore this crisis. He makes good use of the French term, “évolué” (“evolved” or “developed”): “Le noir Américain est très évolué, voyons!” he is told (368). Such satirical deployment of developmental rhetoric is a ploy Baldwin shared with Wright. For, as in Pagan Spain (a text I will explore in a later chapter), No Name in the Street undercuts the transatlantic language of development by exhibiting that language for ironic effect: “What has passed for dialogue has usually involved one of ‘our’ niggers, or, say, an évolué from Dakar. The ‘evolved,’ or civilized one is almost always somewhere educated by, and for, France” (381–82). But on the streets of Paris, or of Watts, the developmental index (of becoming “évolué”) matters less than simple difference: of being dark-skinned, the subject of suspicion, and worse. Baldwin also worked with Wright’s analysis of African American identity as a form of what we might term a Melvillean “inside narrative”: the black American is both “of ” the West and, because of the West’s ingrained racism, its fiercest critic. “Four hundred years in the West had certainly turned me into a Westerner—there was no way around that”; but “four hundred years in the West had also failed to bleach me” (378). When Baldwin travels to the American South, he travels as a “Westerner” who has not been “bleached.” Without having to state explicitly that this is the “internal colony,” he represents a parched and impoverished landscape that appears consciously “African” in its desolation. The land seems nearly to weep beneath the burden of this civilization’s unnameable excrescences. The people and the children wander blindly through their forest of billboards, antennae, Coca-Cola bottles, gas stations, drive-ins, motels, beer cans, music of a strident and invincible melancholy, stilted wooden porches, snapping fans, aggressively blue-jeaned buttocks, strutting crotches, pint bottles, condoms, in the weeds, rotting automobile corpses, brown as bee-

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tles, earrings flashing in the gloom of bus stops: over all there seems to hang a miasma of lust and longing and rage. Every Southern city seemed to me to have been but lately rescued from the swamps, which were patiently waiting to reclaim it. (395)

One way to think about passages such as this one is to reflect again on the importance of the street to the travel writer. In the work of Wright, Baldwin, and Malcolm we see a writing that updates the classic contact zone of the colonial era, as described in Mary Louise Pratt’s formulation: “The space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict.”55 For Wright, Malcolm, and Baldwin, the contact zone where one encounters and engages with cultural difference is, quite literally, the street: teeming market, agora, plaza, public building, or hajj. There one sees or meets the foreigner, but one also often sees the circulation of goods, the buying and selling that is central to the making of a global economy. In the United States, with its increasingly privatized or balkanized streets, the travel writer has to be inventive in creating a social landscape or scene that can carry these significances. Baldwin’s flickering, staccato images represent one way to create an American street where the markets traced by Wright and Baldwin himself have become a blurred, helterskelter consumerism seen from the windows of a car or train. Writing about Paris a decade earlier, Baldwin had located “contact” as the center of expatriate experience—and by extension, the central experience of traveling. If the American expatriates in Paris had failed, then they had done so because they failed “to make the longed-for, magical human contact.” He added that “it was on this connection with another human being that we had felt that our lives and our work depended.”56 Returning to America, Baldwin now finds himself in the situation of a traveler for whom “magical human contact” has become utterly remote, as the “street” that had always been the scene of his best writing transmutes into a phantasmagoric, nomadic consumerism. In Baldwin’s writing “contact” is the essence of travel, and at its best

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such contact seems to become amalgamated with a sense of erotic or romantic possibility as one moves across cultures. But the world is becoming less welcoming in those terms in No Name in the Street. Baldwin finds that in his hometown, New York, “human contact was endangered and dying” (373). He imagines travel as a process of risk and adjustment: “Every new environment, particularly if one knows that one must make the effort to accustom oneself to working in it, risks being more than a little traumatic.” This is a necessary trauma, if you like. The particular relevance of No Name in the Street, however, is that as we look back at this text, it seems a foretaste of later American writings that would see internationalism in terms of discontent or even terror, not contact. Baldwin explicitly links the American South to terror: “I doubt that I really knew much about terror before I went South” (388), he writes, and then tells a chilling anecdote about entering the wrong part of a segregated restaurant. In some ways, these particular configurations of unease (at best) or terror (at worst) are less important in Baldwin than the general, sobering curve of human expectation downwards: from human connection to fear and violence. Baldwin’s analysis is an evolutionary advance upon, or an adaptation of, Richard Wright’s critique of the colony. Baldwin preserves Wright’s materialism, his abiding sense that economics remain the driver of culture; but his time in France had given him access, too, to a form of postexistential analysis of colonialism’s impact on the self. Baldwin’s writing can be read in an archaeological way, as its discursive layers reveal the intellectual movement through a series of positions: the urban evangelist; the neo-Marxist; the liberal; the existential analyst of the individual response to oppression. The irony of Baldwin’s career is that French culture gave him a vocabulary to revoice that most traditional of U.S. literary preoccupations, the American self. But in deploying that vocabulary, Baldwin also transforms the received language, shifting its inflections and connotations. Du Bois, Wright, and Baldwin showed that the “international theme” in their analysis of the color line in America could also, in and of itself, be a powerful tool for an examination of state power, imperialism, colonialism, and racism.

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3

“You were in on the last days of Morocco”

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Paul Bowles and the End of Empire

The fascination and importance of Paul Bowles’s work lies in its catholic encompassing of a range of discourses that frame the encounter between the United States (as embodied in the American traveler in North Africa) and Islam. His life and work in Morocco as a novelist, translator, photographer, and ethnographer form one of the broadest and most complex representations of the Islamic world by an American artist.1 It would be a mistake, I think, to see these various discourses as having a single, foundational logic. Bowles’s career was instead a varied workin-progress, a heterogeneous “writing” of Morocco through a variety of discourses. If there is a center to his enterprise, then it is probably in the space where storytelling, translation, and ethnography meet and inform one another. In a 1982 preface to the 1955 novel, The Spider’s House, Bowles discussed the politics of writing and his reading of the postcolonial moment in Morocco. Long resident in North Africa, Bowles explicitly addressed the politics of decolonization and the end of the French protectorate: “For more than two decades I had been waiting to see the end of French rule in Morocco.”2 Bowles’s sense of expectation emerged not from sympathy for the liberation struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, but out of romantic yearning for a North Africa lost: “Ingenuously I

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had imagined that after Independence the old manner of life would be resumed and the country would return to being more or less what it had been before the French presence.” Bowles acknowledged that he had misunderstood the modernizing drive of anticolonial nationalism, a force he figured in an image of motorized energy. The French had abandoned the “governmental vehicle,” and the Moroccans had driven off “in the same direction, but with even greater speed.” The preface presents Bowles’s recognition of the modernity of the nationalist movement as an accident. Bowles’s intention had been to write about what he terms “the traditional life of Fez”; now he would have to address “its dissolution.” He then imagined his adopted homeland as a decaying body: “My subject was decomposing before my eyes, hour by hour; there was no alternative to recording the process of violent transformation” (all quotations from the preface, no page reference).3 The Spider’s House deploys a central protagonist seeming to embody the views of Bowles himself. Stenham, the expatriate American writer, is an aesthete and an avowedly apolitical observer of the North African scene. Simon Bischoff notes of The Spider’s House, while discussing a photograph Bowles took of his friend Ahmed Yacoubi in the late 1940s, that its “protagonist Amar is based on the young Yacoubi. Bowles himself takes on the role of Stenham.”4 Bischoff flagrantly neglects the usual interpretative injunction to keep author and character clearly separated. But the preface to The Spider’s House suggests that Bischoff is right: there is indeed a strong correspondence between author and character. Stenham’s meditations are often congruent with Bowles’s own statements on Morocco and the West. In a conversation with Millicent Dillon, Bowles acknowledged that Stenham’s loss of faith in Marxism paralleled his own political disillusionment. Indeed, Dillon insisted in their dialogue, in many ways Stenham’s life-story (including his religious feelings) echoed those of his creator.5 Like Bowles, Stenham will stress the quasi-anthropological seriousness of his engagement with Morocco. Like Stenham, Bowles displays little fondness for the West, or for modernity or progress. And like Stenham, Bowles seems at first to be a classic “Orientalist,” although one at pains to develop a highly idiosyncratic vision of what he as a Westerner makes of Maghrebi culture.

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I want to examine the ways in which Bowles found himself writing a recent political history of Morocco, in spite (as he claimed) of his intention not to write such a work. What kind of political novel results from this strange process, where the novelist abjures an engagement that will nonetheless draw him in? And how does this unduly neglected novel represent political change, transition, and development? The Spider’s House addressed a country in the throes of what anthropologist Ernest Gellner described as the “acute period of the crisis from ’53 to the end of ’55”; but the novelist claimed to have initiated his work with a sense of distance from political turmoil.6 He wistfully confesses at the end of the preface that “I found that I had written a ‘political’ book which deplored the attitudes of both the French and the Moroccans” (no page reference). The quotation marks are telling. This is and is not a “political” text—a novel the author himself handles at a distance, using punctuation marks like a set of handling forks. Above all, Stenham claims that his relationship with Morocco and its people is aesthetic and anthropological rather than political. The year is 1954; the French have just deposed the sultan; there is tension in the air. But for Stenham, “it was a political thing, and politics exist only on paper” (10). Stenham’s interests mainly focus on the look and feel of Fez, its brilliantly archaic architecture, and on the distinctiveness of the Moroccan people. Stenham’s habitual frame of mind is, indeed, that of the classic anthropologist. He is attentive to the quotidian behavior, rituals, and manners of the native people. He is fascinated by what he calls the “Moslem mind” (6). The larger dramas of the novel are played out as if they were parables about the meeting between the Western enquirer and the Oriental subject. In the prologue to the novel Bowles creates a symbolic overture to what will follow, as Stenham is led down the dark alleyways and passages of the medieval city, here positioned as spatial trope for the strangeness, mystery, and seductiveness of this “Moslem mind.”7 Stenham prides himself on knowing more about the locals than the other Westerners. He imagines himself as a form of insider, a man with the linguistic and cultural knowledge to get beneath the skin of this strange place.8 His musings often consist of rather self-consciously “insightful” reading of Morocco; Bowles represents the expatriate experi-

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58  “You were in on the last days”

ence as a form of competition where Westerners achieve different levels of insight into the foreign. While he is led through the city, Stenham primly reflects: “It delighted him that this anonymous, barefoot Berber should want to guide him through the darkest, least frequented tunnels of the city; the reason for the man’s desire for secrecy did not matter. These were feline, nocturnal people. It was no accident that Fez was a city without dogs. ‘I wonder if Moss has noticed that,’ he thought” (6). And so the encounter with Fez is an induction into mystery, and Stenham prides himself on understanding the mystery before his friends. He is more perceptive, more knowing, more understanding. The politics of Moroccan decolonization are replaced in the novel’s early stages by a form of epistemological competition between the novel’s characters as to who has understood more of this strange place. The end of the French protectorate gives way to a Euro-American debate about who really “knew” the indigenous world. Interestingly, these various dialogues then become political, because to try to understand what Moroccan culture was—or is—inevitably leads one to speculate on what Moroccan culture might become, and thus to think through a discussion of political change.9 Stenham says of Moss, his rich English friend: “Moss was really very pro-French, Stenham was thinking. Like them, he refused to consider the Moroccans’ present culture, however decadent, an established fact, an existing thing” (155). Moss is Bowles’s version of a typical figure in the literature of colonization: the Westerner who legitimizes the colony as necessary agent of modernization and progress. One of the earliest American texts about Morocco, Edith Wharton’s In Morocco (1920), had occupied just such an ideological position, offering in Frederick Wegener’s words “an unabashedly partisan testament to the virtues of the French protectorate.”10 For Moss, the culture is “accidentally left over from bygone centuries”; it is “now in a necessary state of transition” and “the people needed temporary guidance in order to progress to some better condition” (155). “Transition” thus became a central term in arguments about the state of colonial and postcolonial societies.11 Moss adopts the French interpretation, seeing European influence as a necessary agent to advance North Africa into modernity. Anticolonial nationalists would have their own version of transition and would position autonomous postcolonial

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governments are the motors for such change. Thus this argument about understanding a putatively “essential” national identity has become a subtle debate about politics. Bowles’s use of the term “transition” draws this background ideology into the text, allowing The Spider’s House to engage with the postcolonial moment in Morocco, even though the text is ostensibly foregrounding the more mundane detail of the everyday relationships among the expatriates. In his preface Bowles also obliquely touched on the idea of “transition.” His own favored future for Morocco was a form of antitransition or restorationism: the recovery of premodern, non-European Morocco. The postcolonial moment will liberate Morocco to find a way back to medieval ways of life. “Liberation” from colonial domination will engender cultural recapitulation, a welcome regression into an older (and supposedly more authentic) civilization: “I wanted to write a novel using as backdrop the traditional daily life of Fez, because it was a medieval city functioning in the twentieth century” (no page reference). This comment complements Bowles’s broader, Neo-Lawrentian ideology: a heady rhetoric that excoriated the West and found plenitude in peasant, preindustrial societies. Bowles was repeatedly contemptuous of the “advanced” or “civilized” world. In a combative interview with Abdelhak Elghandor, he answered questions about “Westernization” by ironically dismissing the achievements of the West. Elghandor felt that Bowles’s fictionalized North Africa was an Orientalist representation, and he asked the writer whether in fact Westernization (seen as secular and progressive modernization) might not be in Morocco’s best interests. Bowles’s reply deployed hybridism as a reason to reject the Westernization project: “The result would be that people would be neither Moroccan nor European—in between.” He continued, “That’s not a very good situation. They’re not sure which culture they really belong to. It’s better to stay where one is than try to be someone else, I think.” Then Bowles turned to his own identity and to America itself. “I’m a tourist,” he noted. “A tourist never becomes part of a society he’s visiting. So I know that I’m an American, but I don’t like America. I never go there. I haven’t been there in 26 years, and I hope never to go again. That’s enough. I mean I was born in New York and brought up there, and the city has gone completely to pieces. It would

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60  “You were in on the last days”

be better if it didn’t exist at all, and a nice atom bomb would finish it off. I would be pleased, except that my money is there in a bank (laughs).”12 This reply encapsulates a good number of typical Bowles tones and positions. There is the jaunty, brazen offensiveness; the somewhat self-regarding sense of outrage; the obsession with money. But the rueful admission that he is simply “a tourist” also reveals a fundamental Bowles dynamic: the desire to be more than a tourist, to get closer to an alien culture. During the interview, given toward the end of his life, Bowles is honest about the cultural gulf he still sensed, even though he had lived in Morocco for decades. His writing can thus be read as an extended exercise in refutation: as a struggle to transcend accusations that he is merely a “tourist,” a rich American in a seductive foreign land, although he was perfectly prepared to exploit the financial benefits of expatriatism.13 Stenham embodies this struggle, and The Spider’s House fields extended debates about how Westerners relate to and represent the nonWestern world. In Bowles’s fictions of North Africa the mystery, enigma, and strangeness of the Maghreb are exhaustively foregrounded, as if to offset the objection (clearly preying on Bowles’s mind) that wealth positions the expatriate writer as nothing more than a privileged tourist. Again we notice how Gellner’s “acute period of the crisis” in Morocco becomes for Bowles an individualized crisis about the American writerexpatriate’s authenticity. One of Stenham’s defensive strategies is to characterize himself as an ascetic; he is a man for whom travel’s usual lures (good food, wine, cheap living, and sex) have no attraction. Moss describes Stenham as a Puritan; the American acknowledges that “he could not feel at ease with gourmets and hedonists; they were a hostile species” (163). Stenham forges an aesthetic and cultural appreciation of Morocco to fend off the accusation that this is mere dilettantism—a rich man’s indulgence in strangeness. A “Political” Book But if you are, as Stenham claims, uninterested in the political aspects of contemporary Morocco, what imaginative space is left to construct an appreciation of a foreign culture? Stenham isn’t a gourmet or a “he-

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donist”; but neither is he positioned within the political spectrum created by the Moroccan crisis. It is telling that Stenham admires Berber peasants because they offer a life outside politics and a cultural purity untainted by ideology: “The only people with whom he could sympathize were those who remained outside the struggle: the Berber peasants, who merely wanted to continue with the life to which they were accustomed and whose opinion counted for nothing” (167). At such points Bowles distorts Moroccan history for the sake of Stenham’s politics of disengagement. In 1930 the French had issued the Dahir Berbère, a decree that regulated the pacified Berber territories; Ernest Gellner notes: “Its essence was to offer these areas the option of remaining separate from the national Moroccan Muslim legal system, and to continue to be ruled by tribal customary law under supervision of the new French administration.” French policy suggested that Europeans wanted to convert the Berbers from Islam; it also suggested approval for the Berbers’ heterodox practices, since they would now be placed outside the state’s Islamic law. Gellner crisply summarizes the Berber decree’s impact on anticolonial nationalism: “It equally offended emergent modern nationalist feeling by exemplifying a policy of divide and rule, and attempting to alienate the Berbers from the rest of Morocco.” Stenham’s comment, in other words, is historically inaccurate: the Berbers were bound up with the politics of French colonization, and in truth they symbolized the tensions between French rule and native religious law. What Gellner will elsewhere call the “ice box” surrounding the Berbers—the French political decree—produced the isolation Stenham so admired; but this was an engineered hermeticism, the product of politics and not the natural order of Moroccan culture.14 Clifford Geertz (another major American voice in the writing of Morocco, and an anthropologist I will return to later) sees the Berber decree as a major French mistake. It alienated religious and nationalist groups within Morocco and presented dissidents with a cause to unite around: “The small cliques of nationalist intellectuals in Fez and Rabat suddenly found themselves presented with the cause they had been waiting for, and, fusing under the leadership of the zealotic scripturalist, Allal Al-Fassi, launched, in the name of an insulted Islam, the

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62  “You were in on the last days”

first mass movement for independence—the aforementioned National Action Bloc.” Protests and demonstrations quickly spread through the country. Geertz characterizes the period as the “high tide of scripturalist nationalism.”15 That is, the Berber decree was the spur to early resistance to the French, and in particular to resistance based around fervent religiosity. Morocco eventually became independent under Sultan Mohammed V in 1956, but the 1930s would stand as a moment when a different Islamic resistance showed itself. It seems absolutely inconceivable that the character Stenham, a long-time resident in Morocco, a student of its culture, and a writer, could be ignorant of the 1930 Berber decree. So whose mistake is this—Stenham’s or Bowles’s? Has Bowles’s characterization let him down? Or has the author of what is at heart a work of fictionalized political history failed to do his homework? Again, it seems highly unlikely that Bowles himself was ignorant of his adopted country’s recent past. The 1982 preface reveals a quite detailed and highly personal connection to Moroccan politics: “Thus, whether I liked it or not, when I had finished, I found that I had written a ‘political’ book which deplored the attitudes of both the French and the Moroccans. Much later Allal el Fassi, ‘the father of Moroccan nationalism,’ read it and expressed his personal approval. Even coming so late, this was satisfying” (no page reference). Allel el Fassi was indeed “the father of Moroccan nationalism.” He was the leader of uprisings in Fez and Rabat (and is called Allal Al-Fassi in Geertz’s commentary, above, and in my ensuing discussion). So the novel presents an extraordinary interpretive conundrum, where the text gains approval from a major political figure who caused the actual events that appear to be elided or occluded in the text itself. Intriguingly, one might ask why Al-Fassi gave “personal approval” to a text so conspicuously ignorant of his own integral involvement in Moroccan politics. This is particularly pertinent because, as John P. Entelis argues, Al-Fassi was associated with a specific ideological position. He was one of the “traditionalists” who “called for a reaffirmation of national, cultural, and religious integrity in the face of Western colonial domination.” Hence this group of anticolonialists celebrated Islamic heritage and Arabism, and “defined the

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colonial situation in essentially spiritual and cultural terms.”16 His endorsement of The Spider’s House raises the central question of whether Bowles had created a text that could be read as an endorsement of this political project: the revival of Islamic and Arabic traditions as a means to establish a postcolonial nation. Is this the foundational ideology of Bowles’s narrative? Stenham’s dilemma is that Moroccan politics flow into his elaborately constructed readings of that culture. Even when he praises the Berbers for their distance from politics, he inadvertently returns to political terrain. In a sense, Morocco’s history and culture are entirely “colonized,” infected and transformed by the politics of colonization, and no nation in contact with the West can remain isolated or “pure.” Stenham’s magical, mystical place becomes contaminated by the bacillus of political change. Even nomadic tribesmen, with their heterodox forms of Islam, operate in a polis created by interaction with the French. Stenham might think he is able to locate a pure and authentic Morocco (a culture removed from expatriate “gourmets and hedonists”), but here, too, politics leaves its trace. The novel does develop a labyrinthine, highly complex, and layered response to Morocco’s recent past, and particularly to the independence struggle. The political subtext of The Spider’s House develops a reading of premodern Morocco’s “purity,” a reading founded on Bowles’s impatience with modernity. But such restorationism also appeals to the “scriptural nationalism” of Al-Fassi. For both Al-Fassi and Bowles, modernity (either as French colonialism or the monarchical nationalism of Mohammed V) is the enemy. In his discussions with the other Westerners about Islamic culture, Stenham reveals a fascination with the spaces of Islam. Stenham is obsessed with space, particularly with the intact and hermetic and inviolate interiors of Islamic culture. These places represent in the novel an ideal of the authentic as (quite literally) an enclosed environment demarcated from the outside world. In an extended discussion in chapter 18 Stenham and the novel’s female protagonist, Polly Burroughs, discuss Morocco’s “primitivism.” He develops a theory of Islamic environment by noting that Moroccans need a sense of refuge and prefer to sit within enclosed spaces. For Stenham, this is because they find “‘the

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64  “You were in on the last days”

whole world outside is hostile and dangerous’” (186). “‘They can’t be that primitive,’ she objected” (186). For Stenham, a man fond of the medina, of enclosed courtyards and of the separate legal-cultural space of Berber life, a yearning for enclosure and refuge reflects an admirable desire for sanctuary or purity. The other point about such places is that they incarnate physical, geographical resistance to the “hybridization” Bowles castigated in his 1994 interview. These spaces are resistant and nonpermeable. Polly laments that there isn’t even a window in the room: “‘Wouldn’t you think that with this fantastic view outside they’d have at least some sort of peep-hole, instead of shutting themselves into a cell this way?’” (186). It’s precisely this impermeability that fascinates Stenham, incarnating his ideals of the inviolate. It seems to me very telling that at this point, after reflecting on the windowless room, Stenham makes his most outspoken defense of the “pure country”: “‘When I first came here it was a pure country. There was music and dancing and magic every day in the streets. Now it’s finished, everything. Even the religion. In a few more years the whole country will be like all the other Moslem countries, just a huge European slum, full of poverty and hatred. What the French have made of Morocco may be depressing, yes, but what it was before, never!’” (187–88). Morocco is the ultimate “pure country” for Stenham—an anthropologist’s paradise, what with its “magic every day in the streets.” His comment is, for him, unusually passionate: a cri de coeur about cultural loss. Modernity taints the magical society. European influence is regrettable because it destroys the intact ancient society, a simple culture’s admirably regressive authenticity. The desire to be locked within an Islamic enclosed space is a hyperbolic caricature of that process of “dwelling” within an exotic culture that James Clifford sees as the animating principle of anthropological fieldwork.17 Stenham becomes the anthropologist in extremis, a Westerner who wants to dwell forever in a foreign closed space, the viewer transfixed (in Said’s phrase) by the Orient’s “paradigmatic fossilization.”18 Bowles’s North African fictions, with their quasi-anthropological discourse and recurrent fascination with the primitive and ritualistic, enter into dialogue with a group of anthropologists whose work

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emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. Ernest Gellner, Clifford Geertz, and Paul Rabinow created a central discourse in the United States about Islam and North Africa; their work counterpoints, illuminates, and critiques Bowles’s representations of the Islamic other. Anthropologists often characterized Morocco as a country notable for remoteness from modernity and industrialism (and so a country of a seductive premodern purity). Ernest Gellner found Morocco unusual because despite its proximity to Europe the country had remained cut off: “Morocco remained remarkably unaffected by the outside world and its development until the twentieth century, much less so than the Middle East.” Gellner even compared Morocco to that most introverted and unknown of nations, Yemen, and repeated that it was “remarkable” to find a country bordered by the French colony of Algeria that was an “insulated society.”19 Bowles’s 1975 comment on Tangier echoes Gellner’s sense of insulation. “It’s changed less than the rest of the world,” he told Daniel Halpern, “It’s a pocket outside the mainstream.” “After you’ve been over to Europe, for instance, for a few days or a few weeks, and you come back here, you immediately feel you’ve left the stream, that nothing is going to happen here.”20 A central dialectic in Bowles’s work is between this sense of Morocco as a country outside the mainstream (a country where “nothing” happens) and the almost unconscious admission that, on the contrary, Morocco is a place of great and traumatic change. This is the almost inadvertent engagement with the actualities and hard facts of Moroccan politics I explored earlier in the chapter. Traces of political engagement are there in the text and its apparatus, even though Bowles himself had set out to write an apolitical text. A reading across the grain of the text can piece these traces together, to construct a counterreading of the text. Such a reading suggests that the novel is enmeshed with history, and that, moreover, Bowles’s historical representation is complex and layered. One place to find these traces is in the inadvertent, scene-setting descriptions of Moroccan life that pepper the text. Bowles’s delineations of these shops and markets and cafes create the text’s political unconscious. Though Stenham argued for the purity of an earlier civilization, the street scenes develop images of a society in transition.

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Rather than monolithic representations of Morocco, glancing images of the street culture reveal pluralism and hybridity—a mosaic:

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He watched the people crowding onto the bus: a Berber in a saffroncolored turban who acted as though he had never seen a bus before, a very fat Jewish woman with two small girls, all of them speaking Spanish rather than Arabic (the more presumptuous dwellers of the Mellah conversed in this archaic tongue; it was frowned upon, considered almost seditious, by the Moslems), an Arab woman wearing a haik, in whom Amar thought he discerned a prostitute from the quartier réservé, and several French policemen, two of whom had to hang to the railing outside because there was no possible way for them to squeeze themselves further. (93)

The writing here is almost excessively “anthropological” in the sense that the author goes out of his way to demonstrate attentiveness to cultural, religious and linguistic difference. It’s a vivid scene, full of color and life; but more importantly, it is marked by variegation—Morocco as heterocosm. Fez is broken up into a patchwork of different peoples; North Africa is a cultural collision. The archaic (the Berber who “acted as though he had never seen a bus before”) rubs up against contemporary images of the colonizing French gendarmes. Perhaps most striking is the reference to the Jewish woman and her girls, all speaking Spanish (presumably descendants of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain). Morocco’s diverse religious identity asserts itself; even the simple binary linguistic culture of Morocco (French versus Arabic) is made complex by the insertion of Spanish into a now-polyglot scene. For this, surely, is the encoded import of this description. Stenham resents the influence of Europe on Morocco because it threatens to disrupt and corrupt the ancient, magic purity of Fez. But the felt textures of life on the streets of Fez suggest a very different cultural history: culture as mixture, an everyday cosmopolitanism. “Coca-Colonization” and Islamic Difference The Spider’s House develops two discourses to “read” Morocco. On the one hand, overt and relatively straightforward discussions between the

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Western expatriates about what the “meaning” of Morocco might be. Hence Stenham’s claims for the magic of the old Fez; thus Moss’s sympathy for the French and their colonialist model of progress. Through these dialogues and exchanges, the novel plays out the argument about whether the transition into modernity will inevitably entail cultural loss. On another discursive level, the novel has already created powerful representations of the state of contemporary Morocco. This is the discourse seen above: descriptions of street scenes that create encoded images of what a colonized society in transition actually looks and feels like. This discourse—what I want to call an “encoded annotation” of typical Fez scenes—is saturated with awareness of the diversity and density of a society in transition toward development. These encoded annotations demonstrate an author mordantly aware of larger historical ambiguities. For example, in one scene, while French soldiers pile up sandbags outside, Bowles describes a calendar hanging in a cafe: “A large calendar hung on the wall beside the window; its text written in Arabic characters, it showed an unmistakably American girl lifting a bottle of Coca-Cola to her lips” (262). This vignette was composed in the mid-1950s, and it might well be one of the first images of “Coca-Colonization” in American fiction. The iconography is precise: the background of a calendar that insistently reminds us that time marches on and things change. The calendar points forward with both directness and a latent irony to another form of Westernization—the economic imperialism of the United States. Sandbags surround the café, but direct French colonialism will be supplanted by a powerful if apparently less overt form of Western hegemony. At such moments The Spider’s House creates a highly symbolic historical discourse, and over the length of the novel these encoded annotations create a catalog of moments where we see a society in the midst of deep historical change. Bowles is good at giving us layered and resonant images, vignettes, and tableaux where historical complexity is rendered as visual metaphor. A further moment occurs when Polly Burroughs sees another image of globalization: “a travel poster that showed a nearly naked Berber with a pigtail holding up a huge black cobra toward the cobalt sky, through which rushed a quadri-motored plane. morocco, land of contrasts, ran the legend

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68  “You were in on the last days”

beneath” (303). Note the neatness of Bowles’s image, the design implicit in his reading of a globalized world. Stenham had idealized the Berbers for being outside the politics of Morocco; but this description positions a Berber at the center of a “touristic” world. The Berbers are brought into an economic relationship with a globalizing economy. There is a tightly compressed representation of consumerist Orientalism, with the girl’s bare flesh and “huge black cobra.” And so a country, with all its cultural complexity and strangeness, is distilled down into a slogan: “morocco, land of contrasts.” Rather as the Coca-Cola served in the earlier image as an emblem of change and modernization, so here Bowles deploys a symbol of the American technological high of the 1950s: a rushing plane, a “quadri-motored” aircraft. At such moments Bowles’s scene setting seems to confirm the acerbic diagnosis made by one of the nationalists. The recognition that the postcolonial moment is being superseded by a new international context where global American hegemony will be central: “‘America gives France a hundred billion more. France would like to leave Morocco, but America insists on her staying, because of the bases. Without America there would be no France’” (385).21 There is at this point a strange reverberation in the text, an echo that underlines the contrast I am making between what a character such as Stenham thinks and says about Morocco, and what the text’s myriad descriptions of the American scene seem to imply. Stenham earlier imagined his dealings with Moroccans by also using an image of a serpent. His awareness that they were duping him is represented using a very similar image of snake-like exoticism: “And this satisfaction they felt in life was to him the mystery, the dark, precious and unforgivable stain which blotted out comprehension of them, and touched everything they touched, making their simplest action as fascinating as a serpent’s eye” (217–18). There are two images of the serpent superimposed upon one another. Stenham’s thought, rendered in the free indirect discourse that is the novel’s major narrative discourse, unironically deploys the snake as image of dangerous seductiveness. Some eighty pages on the reader comes across a form of commercialization of that image, a narrative “rhyme” as the image is repeated at two stages in the text. The

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image is also transformed or inflected; it emerges as a trope whereby Stenham pinpoints the authentic exoticism of the Moroccans. It is also glimpsed in a setting that traduces and transforms that image into a mere cliché. Bowles has located a linguistic embodiment of a larger historical transition in Moroccan development. For Stenham, a fictionalized Orientalist, the country’s exoticism finds a verbal equivalent in an uninflected and unironic language of bewitching snakes. But these advertising icons imply a different world, a world of commercialization and globalization, where the Orientalist impulse is being marketed and disseminated to a world of travelers and international consumers. Bowles twists into his narrative of expatriate life a further character, Amar, whose encounters with the Euro-Americans provides much of the novel’s dynamism. Stenham might be the principal figure in The Spider’s House, but considerable portions of the narrative are dedicated to this young Islamic mystic. The daring representational dilemma at the novel’s center is this: how can I represent, and more specifically how can I translate, the different consciousness of a young Moslem into my own language?22 Not only did Bowles choose to represent the “Moslem mind,” but he elected to focus on a protagonist far removed from the Western order of things. Amar is, after all, a profoundly antimodern figure, unable to speak French, brought up in a religious family, and removed from politics. He is, to adapt the phraseology of Daniel Lerner or Everett Stonequist, far from being that transitional figure or marginal man who sits on the border between tradition and modernity. Instead he represents one of Bowles’s recurrent attempts to imagine what forms tradition—specifically religious tradition—might take in a world passing into modernity. He is the son of Si Driss; his family are “Chorfa, descendants of the prophet”; his domestic life is marked by “his father’s fierce insistence on teaching him the laws of their religion” (19). The family is apolitical, its concerns private and mystical rather than secular-political. Amar stands for that “magical” Morocco that Stenham saw as threatened by progress. Bowles then creates a character imbued with magical authority: “The secret was that he was not like anybody else; he had powers that no one else possessed. Being certain of that was like having a treasure hidden somewhere out of the world’s sight, and

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70  “You were in on the last days”

it meant much more than merely having the baraka. Many Chorfa had that. If someone were ill, or in a trance, or had been entered by some foreign spirit, even Amar often could set him right, by touching him with his hand and murmuring a prayer” (19). The “baraka” is the divine power of Islamic mysticism. Bowles here uses a modernist free indirect discourse to render the inner meditations of Amar. His drifting meditations turn on mysticism and on healing powers. But Bowles also deploys Amar to explore the politics of Moroccan decolonization. Amar, embodiment of mystical Islam, is a political naïf, a character through whose innocent eyes Bowles presents French colonial injustices. Amar “resented the indignity” of the French imposition of a “false monarch on the throne of his country,” but “he did so without giving the matter any thought” (47). At such moments this character emerges as a North African transposition of Huck Finn, a superficially simple character, a naïf through whose picaresque adventures the author reveals a society’s deep structures. Amar’s naivety enables Bowles to enact the journey from ignorance into knowledge and from innocence into experience— and to place that archetypal journey in the context of decolonization. When Amar thinks of politics he enters into an apocalyptic, visionary language: “He wanted to see the flames soaring into the sky and hear the screams, he longed to walk through the ruins while they were still glowing, and feel the joy that comes from knowing that evil is punished in this world as well as in the next, that justice and truth must prevail on earth as well as hereafter” (72). The novel is explicit about a division between a visionary formation of mystical Islam and the secular ambitions of Arab nationalists centered on Cairo and Nasserism. Bowles maps this distinction quite deliberately at one point. Amar reflects on the nationalist resistance that “they dreamed of Cairo with its autonomous government, its army, its newspapers and its cinema, while he, facing in the same direction, dreamed just a little beyond Cairo, across the Bhar el Hamar to Mecca” (104). Bowles’s very neat geographical formula encapsulates the novel’s division between political and religious ideologies within “Barbary Islam”—between secularism and mysticism. It was the mysticism that fascinated Bowles above all; he was less interested in ideologies that would help to move countries forward than

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in those “primitive” belief systems that denoted seductive otherness. Amar is a character structured and informed by Bowles’s fascination with early twentieth-century anthropological theory, especially ideas of “primitivism” and the workings of the “native” mind. As a fictional creation, he reveals a great deal about the intellectual context that informed Bowles’s thinking about Islam and North Africa. Millicent Dillon’s memoir, You Are Not I, records that Bowles had in 1945 accompanied his editorship of the surrealist magazine View with reading in anthropology, including Lévi-Strauss. The magazine was “to focus on tropical America,” and Bowles “delved into the myths of several South American native tribes.” In 1931 or 1932 he had also read the French anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. As Dillon writes, “Lévy-Bruhl’s work dealt primarily with the concepts and thought processes of various ‘primitive’ cultures.”23 The proven connection between Bowles and an anthropologist seems especially pertinent. One can conjecture that Bowles read Lévy-Bruhl’s classic early works, books he probably knew in the original French or in the English translations that appeared in the 1920s. Lévy-Bruhl’s Les Fonctions Mentales dans les Sociétés inférieures of 1910 had been translated into English as the brutally titled How Natives Think (1926). Bowles probably also knew La Mentalité primitive (1922; Primitive Mentality in the English translation of 1923). The foundation of Lévy-Bruhl’s work was that he believed that “primitive peoples” had fundamentally nonrational thought processes, which he described as mystical or prelogical.24 “Natives” thought in ways that were non-Cartesian, embracing and dissolving subject and object; the mystical mind also blurred antitheses between the animate and the inanimate worlds. Lévy-Bruhl’s sense of a primitive, mystical mind informs Bowles’s creation of Amar’s consciousness: “In other words, the reality surrounding the primitives is itself mystical. Not a single being or object of natural phenomenon in their collective representations is what it appears to be to our minds. Almost everything that we perceive therein either escapes their attention or is a matter of indifference to them. On the other hand, they see many things there of which we are unconscious.”25 At the end of his life, Lévy-Bruhl renounced his concept of the “pre-

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72  “You were in on the last days”

logical character” of the primitive mind; but Bowles seems to have maintained a steady interest in this anthropological-psychological model of mysticism.26 Millicent Dillon gives an account of how this way of thinking enabled the young Bowles to overcome his sense that his understanding of the world was inadequate for a fiction writer: “Suddenly he began to think of creating stories by adopting the point of view of the ‘primitive mind.’ And so it was that one rainy Sunday morning he woke up and found himself writing ‘The Scorpion,’ abandoning conscious control by emptying his mind and letting the words flow through his hand to the pen.”27 In his idiosyncratic response to Lévy-Bruhl, Bowles used the “prelogical mind” to explore the kind of unconscious or automatic writing suggested by the surrealists. To create a “primitive mind” was, de facto, to inaugurate an exploration of those radically “other,” preconscious states of mind being explored at modernism’s edges. But mysticism had a politicized significance within the context of Moroccan history. The “Saints” of Morocco were Islamic mystics who played a significant role in articulating resistance to the French. Clifford Geertz’s Islam Observed (1968) discussed these so-called marabouts in terms of their religious and political functions. In 1911, a year before the establishment of the French protectorate, “a series of such martial marabouts . . . rallied the population . . . for the last brave, desperate attempt to revive the old order.” Geertz defined Moroccan Islam, “Islam in Barbary,” as “basically the Islam of saint worship and moral severity, magical power and aggressive piety.”28 Geertz’s definition of the marabout sheds a good deal of light on Bowles’s characterization of his young protagonist, Amar. “‘Marabout’ is a French rendering of the Arabic murâbit, which in turn derives from a root meaning to tie, bind, fasten, attach, hitch, moor. A ‘murâbit’ is thus a man tied, bound, fastened to God, like a camel to a post, a ship to a pier, a prisoner to a wall . . . In its various formations the word runs through the warp of Moroccan history.”29 Geertz’s reading of Maghrebi Islam places these marabouts at the center of the culture: “These men are metaphors.”30 Geertz’s emphasis on the marabout was developed by later American anthropologists, notably Dale Eickelman in his Moroccan Islam: Tradition and Society in a Pilgrimage Center (1976). His definition of

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the marabout supplies an insightful glossary to The Spider’s House: “The most striking feature of North African Islam is the presence of marabouts. . . . They are persons, living or dead, to whom is attributed a special relation toward God which makes them particularly well placed to serve as intermediaries with the supernatural and to communicate God’s grace (baraka) to their clients.” And furthermore, “on the basis of this conception, marabouts in the past have played key religious, political, and economic roles in North African society, particularly in Morocco.”31 It is worth dwelling on these accounts because they provide a paradigm for reading The Spider’s House. Anthropological characterizations of Morocco as an intensely religious realm, where mystical marabouts fostered a politics of resistance, find an echo in Bowles’s fiction. Geertz, like most of the great tradition of Moroccan anthropologists, sees religion as the foundational structure of the society. His account of the protectorate during the colonial period, for instance, is strikingly focused on the nonmaterialistic, mystical continuities of the culture, and argues for indigenous spirituality’s resistance of European power. Geertz eventually claimed that the colonial imperative never breached the Moroccan self, safely cocooned in spiritual otherness. If the “colonial confrontation was spiritual: a clash of selves,” then “the colonized, not without cost and not without exception, triumphed.” The Moroccans “remained, somewhat made over, themselves.”32 Geertz has a strong sense of the agency of indigenous society: an abiding awareness that the colonized can maintain autonomy of selfhood, if not of governance or economy. The telling phrase, “they remained, somewhat made over, themselves,” might serve as an epigraph to The Spider’s House. Bowles deploys Amar as a vehicle to explore what it might be to remain “oneself ” within the colony. Economically and politically, Amar remains marginal: poor, disenfranchised, adrift. He is drawn to Stenham out of dependency. And yet in concrete exemplification of Geertz’s paradox, economic powerlessness sits alongside a vibrantly distinctive spiritual individuality. At this point a further paradox arises—and again the writings of anthropologists and the expatriate novelist’s work reflect back on one another, providing mutual illumination. It is extremely difficult to dis-

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entangle the representation of the “authentic” world of the marabout from the projections and distortions and idealizations brought to that world by the Western writer/ethnographer. In a sense, the marabout represents an ultimate emblem of what the mystical or primitive world might be: a frozen, resistant culture impervious to secularism and the West. This reading would suggest that “Maraboutism” as decoded by Bowles is less the dispassionate anthropological description of a historical phenomenon, and more an antiprogressive fiction about magic and mysticism. Certainly, Stenham’s interest in Amar emerges from this dynamic. Stenham is attracted to Amar because the young boy incarnates that purity the American once found in communism and now hopes to preserve in hypostatized Fez. As he says: “‘This boy sees an untainted world’” (326). The point about Amar, Stenham realizes, is that he represents an extraordinarily pure and unadulterated Islam: “He believed it possible to practice literally what the Koran enjoined him to profess. He kept the precepts constantly in his hand, and applied them on every occasion, at every moment” (336). Thus Stenham is fascinated with Amar because he yearns to locate the place of purity. Purity, in Bowles’s work, is usually bound together with an apocalyptic sense of destruction. In The Spider’s House Amar’s daydreams of resistance are less motivated by ideology than by blind, violent fury and fantasies of retribution. In an interview, Bowles also claimed that a great deal of his work was motivated by a yearning for destruction: “In that sense much of my writing is an exhortation to destroy.”33 This “exhortation to destroy” (also found in the waspish and now rather unsettling comment that he would like to see New York wiped out), is the twinned obverse of Bowles’s nostalgic desire to restore an earlier stage of Moroccan culture. If one cannot preserve, if one cannot prevent North Africa from becoming the “European slum” of those who would push for the transition into modernity, then it is better for the culture to be destroyed. The Spider’s House thus offers a contorted representational logic, where destruction is the other side of the coin to Stenham’s nostalgic restorationism. In this sense, the figure of Amar, however “other” he might seem at first, is in fact ultimately part and parcel of Bowles’s Orientalism.

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Bowles’s problem in this novel is that his characters are bound together by a yearning for the pure and the ideal, even though (as the novel’s encoded annotations demonstrate), the text also recognizes that historical actualities are far from “pure.” The result is an uneasy encounter between idealisms (Amar’s mysticism; Stenham’s aesthetic nostalgia) and the messiness of history. Unable to bend the world to their wills, Stenham and Amar end the text in ambiguous retreat. Bowles presents, rather bizarrely, a sudden romance between Stenham and Polly as the (unconvincing) resolution to Stenham’s disengagement. By the end of the novel, Amar has had an angry meeting with the nationalist resistance (who suspect him of being a spy since he carried the French money that Stenham gave him); but he remains (like the American) an observer of activist politics rather than a participant. In the novel’s final and unsatisfactory chapter, Amar goes in search of Stenham and Polly, only to watch them depart the increasingly dangerous town. Amar is then pictured as Stenham’s secret sharer, a willing subaltern of the American: “Whatever the man asked him to do, he would feel the same happiness in obeying; of that he was sure” (403). At such moments in the text Bowles prefigures the model of Islamic cooperation or submission that would move to the center of his work in the next decade. From 1963 onward Bowles taped the memoirs and reminiscences of his Maghrebi friends, including Driss ben Hamed Charhardi and Mohammed Mrabet. These oral narratives formed the basis of Bowles’s idiosyncratic narratives/translations: A Life Full of Holes (1964) and For Bread Alone (1973).34 The potential for a searching exploration of the meeting between the traveler and North African cultures tends to be marginalized in these works. As Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan point out, these are “narratives of native improvement and advancement”; through a friendship—often sexual—with a European or American, the young Maghrebi youth finds material and social advancement.35 The conclusion of The Spider’s House also focuses on the significance of the friendship between a Westerner and the Islamic subject. Here, two idealists are brought together; neither is attracted to the new politics of transition and modernity. Each is a nostalgic: Amar harks

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back to the mysticism of the maraboutic heyday; Stenham is the disciple of medieval Fez. The Western aesthete can offer protection (money, employment—forms of paternalism) to a Moroccan who incarnates traditional, apolitical mysticism. What Bowles is doing here, wittingly or not, is reinscribing one of the key ideological principles of the French protectorate. Just as the French considered themselves the “protectors” of the indigenous culture, so Stenham’s relationship with Amar is finally cast as a symbiosis between the protector and the one who wills his own protection. Although Bowles’s protagonist is an American who prides himself on maintaining a certain distance from French policy in North Africa, the foundational ideology of this novel is in keeping with French theories of the colon. The early, “classic” anthropology (as in the work of Lévy-Bruhl) might now be seen, in Saidian terms, as Orientalist: disinterested anthropology had an ideological function, helping to enforce ideas of a culture in need of Western protection.

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Le Maroc disparu Bowles’s representation of Morocco parallels anthropological work on the Maghreb—a body of work equally concerned with Islamic mysticism, the persistence of traditional patterns of belief, and the impact of the French. For the Chicago school of anthropologists who clustered around Clifford Geertz in the 1960s, it was now possible to become aware of how Western representations of Morocco were themselves historically constructed. In particular, the new generation of American anthropologists distanced themselves from the early French colonial ethnographers. One of Geertz’s students, Dale Eickelman, identified the French ethnographic project that argued Moroccan society had become “frozen” at an early stage of historical development. This nation of marabouts and excessively idiosyncratic piety, it was argued, was both unique and in need of protection to preserve its distinctiveness. The so-called Maraboutic crisis (from the fifteenth century to the seventeenth) had prevented Morocco from moving on. The subsequent arresting of cultural development legitimated the actions of the colons, who now envisaged themselves as protectors of an archaic world

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rooted in the past: “The French felt that . . . they had ascertained the essential features of le Maroc disparu. . . . The French then formally maintained that their task as ‘protectors’ was to preserve and to enhance what they considered to be the positive features of preprotectorate Morocco.” French colonial theory sometimes presented North Africa as “static from the exit of the Romans to the establishment of French control.”36 And just as Bowles had alighted on Lévy-Bruhl as his chosen theorist to articulate ideas of primitivism and mysticism, so the architects of French colonial policy also deployed his work to justify their own commitment to an unchanging Morocco. Eickelman suggests that Lévy-Bruhl’s “primitive mentality” was “avidly picked up by colonial specialists on Morocco as a way of theoretically justifying their assumption that Islam had such a grip on society that the minds of Moroccans were collectively stocked with a fixed set of images impermeable to modification or change.”37 Eickelman’s point enables us to see that Bowles’s immersion in LévyBruhl’s work, which Bowles envisaged as an escape from notions of literary realism, in fact recapitulated French colonial theory. He wanted to position Lévy-Bruhl alongside the surrealists, to articulate a new theory of “primitive mind”; but for French scholars and administrators LévyBruhl provided academic legitimacy for their colonial work. Thus, in The Spider’s House we see an author (almost in spite of himself, as he admits in the novel’s preface) looping back to such “primary” meanings of colonial theory: the anthropology of maraboutism, le Maroc disparu, the need to “protect” a premodern culture. Wole Soyinka, in an acerbic analysis of European characterizations of Africa, coined the term “Tarzanism.” “Tarzanism” is that fetishizing of the premodern, that idealizing of antiquities and primitive rituals—even as modernity marches on and colonial economies stagnate. For Soyinka, “Tarzanism” is the “pseudo-tradition.”38 Reading Soyinka’s critique back into Bowles’s texts suggests that Soyinka’s “neo-Tarzanism” had analogues in North Africa and the midcentury American imagining of Maghrebi Islam. More or less at the time that Daniel Lerner looked forward to the “passing” of traditional societies in the Middle East and North Africa, Bowles redeployed a form of modified French Oriental-

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ism. Such a redeployment was not entirely successful. The novel ends with an impasse, and the Westerners have to leave the country they love as it descends into chaos. But what strikes the twenty-first century reader is the confidence and assertive brio with which Bowles inserted his models of primitivism into American expatriate fictions. LévyBruhl’s title, How Natives Think, conveys a similar tone of mastery that now seems theoretically misguided, if not naïve. Bowles emerged from an intellectual context (from which we have barely moved on) where one might build a career on readings of “how natives think.” The next generation of American anthropologists began to decode and deconstruct the ideological subtext of the French colonial project in North Africa. Two decades after The Spider’s House a new discourse emerged in the American writing of the Maghreb, notably in Paul Rabinow’s Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (1977). Rabinow’s tentative, relativist, and ironic anthropology replaces classic ethnography’s force majeure with self-aware hesitancy. His highly personal and deliberately informal account (“reflections,” not the formal fieldwork itself) is a journey into nescience—not knowing, or recognizing the limits of one’s knowledge. Clearly grounded in earlier modes of ethnography (he begins with references to Lévi-Strauss and Geertz), Rabinow also deploys that language of social change I explored in my first chapter. Early on we meet Ibrahim, “a person who had blended what social scientists refer to as tradition and modernity.”39 As the phrasing suggests, Rabinow’s foregrounds a heightened self-reflexiveness where one’s own intellectual methodology is continually questioned. Like the Richard Wright of The Color Curtain or Black Power, Rabinow is drawn to figures engaged in complex negotiations between inherited culture and new forms of Western identity: “Moroccans could not ignore the West. This attitude required borrowing, integrating, and eliminating certain archaic and oppressive practices, but it did not mean merely imitating the West; and most important of all, it did not require the abandonment of Islam” (145). The West cannot be ignored, but its success ought not to become the cause for self-congratulation. For Rabinow, the encounter between the West and Islam then opens a further zone of self-questioning: “that

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feeling of barely grasped meanings which had been my constant companion in Morocco” (148). In conclusion, he called for a very particularized, historicized sense of cultural difference: “Our Otherness was not an ineffable essence, but rather the sum of difference historical experiences . . . a dialogue was only possible when we recognized our differences, when we remained critically loyal to the symbols which our traditions had given us” (162). Bowles’s work encounters at times those “barely grasped meanings,” as when his descriptions of the North African street inadvertently but precisely register the impact of globalization and the rise of America. But the final impression left by The Spider’s House is less one of a writer “critically loyal” to his symbols than “unwittingly loyal” to symbols generated by those anthropologists Rabinow moved beyond in the 1970s. Bowles’s fictions were produced at a moment of transition, a moment when the established practices of anthropology were being challenged, and when a new, more theorized ethnography was emergent. Simultaneously, the colonial order that had provided the context, the impetus, and (not least) the funding for classic anthropology was on the wane. It is often easy to dismiss a novel or a poem with the faint-hearted praise that it is “of its time.” This novel is greatly “of its time,” but there lie its fascinations: in Bowles’s registering of the competing and often contradictory cultural vectors within a moment of intellectual transition. The Spider’s House is a novel rooted in classic, neocolonialist anthropology that nevertheless admits the eclipse of that ethnography. It is a novel of Europe and Africa where the most ominous presences describe American consumerism. Little wonder, then, that when Bowles looked back on his novel it seemed that his subject “was decomposing.” He meant not only the medieval traditions of Fez but also a much larger political-intellectual formation: that enmeshed structure of colonialism and ethnography of which Stenham is, perhaps, one of the last fictional representations.

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4

Sinophilia China and the Writers

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I am appalled and oppressed by the discovery that American people are almost totally ignorant of China, nor have they any great desire to learn more about this ancient and mighty nation who will and must affect our own nation and people in the future more than any other. —Pearl S. Buck, China Past and Present (1972) What had China been? Yearning, one needful commingled entity looking towards the West, its great democratic President, Chiang Kai-shek, who had led the Chinese people through the years of war, now into the years of peace, into the Decade of Rebuilding. But for China it was not a rebuilding, for that almost supernaturally vast flat land had never been built, lay still slumbering in the ancient dream. Arousing; yes, the entity, the giant, had to partake at last of full consciousness, had to waken into the modern world with its jet airplanes and atomic power, its autobahns and factories, and medicines. And from whence would come the crack of thunder which would rouse the giant? Chiang had known that, even during the struggle to defeat Japan. It would come from the United States. And, by 1950, American technicians and engineers, teachers, doctors, agronomists, swarming like some new life form into each province.1

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In Philip Dick’s alternate postwar history, The Man in the High Castle (1962), the Germans and Japanese have triumphed. The United States has been divided into three parts, between the victors and a remaining rump state in the Midwest. An underground novelist writes a counterhistory of the period, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, from which the above quotation is taken, where he imagines the triumph of the Allies over the Nazis and, in a further twist, the Chinese nationalists’ victory under Chiang Kai-shek rather than Mao’s triumph and the “loss of China.” Dick’s imagined China is one typical U.S. vision of that country: China as a huge market, modernized under American commercial tutelage. The imagined nationalist victory, and the resulting flood of American technicians, is a good example of Dick’s ability to identify the culture’s subliminal preoccupations. Elsewhere, Dick’s fiction features representations of another China, an avenging militaristic state that will eventually become a nemesis.2 But it is this image, a counterfantasy where Chinese patriots have Americanized their entire nation, that typifies one major twentieth-century representation of the Asian Other: the dream of China as a vast project for Western modernization. These two Chinas—the market and the nemesis—circulate through postwar culture, engendering a constellation of representations in fiction, memoir, and political journalism.3 To this day, as even a cursory survey of foreign policy writing amply demonstrates, the dialectic has a central significance to commentary on the United States’s place in the globe. Joseph Nye Jr. argues that China’s “high annual growth rate of 8 to 9 percent led to a remarkable tripling of its gnp in the last two decades of the twentieth century.”4 Here is China as market. However, “it is hardly inevitable that China will be a threat to American interests, but the United States is much more likely to go to war with China than it is with any other major power.”5 China might, then, become a nemesis. There are deep historical roots to these representations. Frank Ninkovich sees the relationship with China as a distinctive blend of an American form of empire (so-called “treaty port imperialism”) with an urge toward the modernization of preindustrial cultures: “China was a prime site for testing the American yearning to modernize preindustrial societies while promoting great power cooperation.”6 China be-

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came a focus for the American ideology of development. “With God’s help,” stated Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska in 1940, “we will lift Shanghai up and up, ever up, until it is just like Kansas City.”7 A century of missionary activity in China by America evangelists had left its trace on Nebraska. As James Thomson and his fellow Sinologists demonstrate in their essential history of American engagement with East Asia, the long-term trajectory of thinking about China compounded missionary fervor and an expansionist version of Manifest Destiny. This “sentimental imperialism” arose from a sense that American civilization’s historical significance would be marked by Westward expansion across the American continent, into the Pacific, and then Asia: “In a variety of ways, then, Americans both secular and religious found China not simply a market but a profound cultural challenge against which to test their assumptions and their faith about themselves. . . . Americans regarded China and America not as separate, rival species of civilization but as the two extreme ends of a single historical continuum.”8 When the great diplomat and analyst George Kennan looked back from the early 1980s upon his country’s relations with Asia, he saw “a curious but deeply rooted sentimentality on our part towards China, arising evidently from the pleasure it gave us to view ourselves as high-minded patrons, benefactors, and teachers of a people seen as less fortunate, and less advanced, than ourselves.”9 Within this sentimental nexus the missionary was central. Evangelism formed the main axis of American engagement in China, and as the authors of Sentimental Imperialists point out, missionaries “were . . . conscious agents of change, of radical transformation. They came to Asia to do something to Asia and Asians, to reshape foreign societies.”10 So they were, like so many of the real-life and imagined expatriates in this study, “apostles of modernity” who brought with them the development creed. For Jonathan Spence, this sense of “superiority” has been the hallmark of centuries of Western involvement in China during “the cycle from 1620 to 1960”: “This superiority sprang from two elements: the possession of advanced technical skills and a sense of moral rightness.”11 But Westerners failed to understand that the re-

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lationship, when looked at from the Chinese side, was essentially contractual—thus the repeated misunderstandings within the turns of the engagement between America and China.12 The American encounter with China entered a new phase during the Second World War. One of the strangest moments in the history of U.S. internationalism occurred in 1942, when the Army Air Force flew aircraft over Chinese cities to drop a leaflet written by the philosopher and educationalist John Dewey. Dewey had lived and lectured in China during a prolonged stay (1919–21); now, with his words translated into Mandarin, he became part of the Pacific campaign against the Japanese. Dewey’s address, written at the beginning of the “American Century” that had recently been announced in Henry Luce’s Life magazine essay (February 1941), claimed a shared destiny for China and America: “Your country and my country, China and the United States, are alike in being countries that love peace and have no designs on other nations. We are alike in having been attacked without reason and without warning by a rapacious and treacherous enemy.” For both countries, war was fought “in order to preserve our independence and freedom.” China had won the respect “of all nations that care for freedom”; eventual victory “will restore to China her old and proper leadership in all that makes for the development of the human spirit.” Dewey’s “Message” locked together three distinctive arguments that would become established at the heart of the postwar language of globalism. First, the overriding emphasis on “freedom”: here, freedom from Japanese aggression, and elsewhere freedom from European fascism; and after the war, Communist totalitarianism. Second, the underpinning logic of development: China embodies the “development of the human spirit.” Third, there is the embedding of “freedom” and “development” within a context of embattlement, conflict, and threat. While Dewey preserves a “classic” liberal internationalism that would have appealed to Woodrow Wilson, it’s important to add that this idealism is now fused with a “realist” notion of international politics that stresses conflict and aggression. “Freedom” and “development” achieve totemic centrality not in the aftermath of conflict (as Wilson’s plans for the League of Nations had done after the Great War), but in the middle, if not the beginning, of

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conflict, the start of a war. And that conflict has, also, a very specific cast and complexion, since it is the United States and China that have been attacked and are the victims of aggression, “attacked without reason and without warning by a rapacious and treacherous enemy.”13 A good place to begin the archaeology of American representations of China might, indeed, be with Luce’s account of “The American Century.” Luce’s essay turned this attention into a broader account of how Asia would be a central feature of the postwar system. Luce was born in China in 1898, the son of a Presbyterian missionary, and during his career this origin played a formative role. The original “American Century” essay appeared in the February 1941 issue of Life magazine. It was then republished as a book with analyses by prominent journalists and commentators including Quincy Howe and John Chamberlain. Luce touched on many of the preoccupations that have emerged—and will emerge—in the current study. An early passage name-checks Clarence Streit and the “Union Now” movement I discuss in my first chapter. Later chapters explicitly echo the argument made by Horace Kallen about America’s cultural-technological centrality: “America is already the intellectual, scientific and artistic capital of the world.” As an alert journalist and clever editor, Luce created an essay that adroitly synthesized argumentative positions that had circulated since the 1920s but now had an immediate, compelling power. The “immense American internationalism” of jazz, the movies, and U.S. industry created the center of global civilization. The Axis threat now demanded that the nation rise to the challenge. Even as a world of two billion people had become “for the first time in history one world” (Luce adopted the federalists’ globalist rhetoric), the age had become “to a significant degree an American Century.” Even as he turned his attentions to the current conflict and Europe, it was the Asian market that emerged—in one telling passage—as the American future: “Actually, in the decades to come Asia will be worth to us exactly zero—or else it will be worth to us four, five, ten billions of dollars a year. And the latter are the terms we must think in, or else confess a pitiful impotence.” As America entered the war to deny Japan and Germany economic expansion through the development of an Asian empire or through European lebensraum, a ma-

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jor pundit such as Luce could imagine economic growth in the Asian market. Luce would play a major role in inserting China into the lexicon of American internationalism.14 A decade or so later, in the wake of the “loss of China” the State Department was purged of its China specialists as part of the McCarthyite campaigns of the early 1950s. Now Japan was the friend, China the enemy, whereas a decade before the very opposite had been true. The swing, the bouleversement, in relations with China was dramatic. John King Fairbank, whose standard survey The United States and China was regularly reissued in the postwar period, provided a gauge of the change when he revised the 1948 text for the 1958 edition. The 1958 text now began with “Our China Problem”—again one notes the deep personalizing of relations with China. Fairbank observed that even in 1948 “the American people already faced a tragic but inevitable disaster in their relations with China.” He then created a classic jeremiad directed at Washington’s foreign policy errors, while constructing a thumbnail sketch of China’s alterity. That otherness rested on the country’s incredible demographic size (“we and our allies of the West are already in a numerical minority among mankind”) and cultural strangeness (“the new world of revolutionary Asia, whether Communist or non-Communist, cannot share entirely our Western cultural values”). Now, “the Chinese state under the Communists has mushroomed into a totalitarian monster.”15 But what of the writers left behind by this radical reorientation of U.S. policy? In this chapter I want to examine the literary representation of China after the Long March and the Maoist Revolution—to see how authors (largely, “Sinophiles”) continued to commemorate, to explore, and to celebrate a country whose representation within the wider political discourse was now shaped by cold war Manicheanism.16 What is the literary counterpart to Senator Wherry’s desire to “lift Shanghai up and up”? For the American journalist, China was rich terrain. Edgar Snow (who was, ironically enough given Senator Wherry’s comment about Shanghai and Kansas City, born in Kansas City in 1905), was probably the foremost foreign correspondent to write about China during the 1930s. Red Star over China (1938) inaugurated that chain of journalistic reportage that encompassed Agnes Smedley’s works (notably,

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the 1943 text, Battle Hymn of China) and William Hinton’s account of Maoist land reform, Fanshen (1967).17 This is a telling and idiosyncratic literary subgenre: memoirs, fictions, and autobiographies that detail the American presence in China. The very heterogeneity and strange disparity of writers who were interested in China is telling: there is something compelling, quixotic, and fascinating in the conjunction of Philip K. Dick, Pearl S. Buck, and Henry Luce within this Chinese genealogy. One might argue that China in all its guises—as mission, dream, market, and ultimately nemesis—has created for the United States a representational “special relationship.” What other nation has appealed to figures as disparate as W. E. B. Du Bois and the contemporary composer John Adams, whose opera Nixon in China (1987) is one of the recent contributions to American representations of that country?18 Du Bois, for instance, worked on his “Black Flame” trilogy of novels toward the end of his life, creating an epic-historical, century-long account of black struggle from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights era. The third volume, Worlds of Color (1961), has a title that fits neatly into the development era’s sense of an expanding globe; and this is the trilogy’s most global novel, as Du Bois’s protagonist, Manuel Mansart, moves from American politics toward a series of international encounters. Du Bois deployed in a barely fictionalized or mediated form many of his favorite ideas, including the fundamental role of racism within colonial ideology; but he also explored the coming role of China in a transformed global politics. In one chapter, “The Color of Asia,” Mansart writes, “Perhaps the riddle of the universe will be settled in China, and if not, in no part of the world which ignores China.”19 This comment on China’s geopolitical significance illustrates the very immediate network coupling American writers and international politics in the cold war era. Du Bois published Worlds of Color shortly before his death in 1963, and after a decade of struggle with the State Department over his foreign travels. He had first visited China and Japan during a long prewar tour (1936–37). In 1952 the State Department refused to grant him a passport on the basis that his foreign travel was not in the national interest; he could not accept a 1956 invitation to lecture in the People’s Republic. Finally, in 1959 he lectured in China,

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and then made a further journey in 1962. He had become embroiled in a classic cold war struggle over free speech and travel (the writer’s claim) and the necessities of national security (the state’s logic). The State Department had decoded his fascination with China within the matrix of cold war ideological conflict; but there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Du Bois was simply pursuing a lifelong interest in Asia—an interest that clearly predated the Maoist revolution and the “loss” of China. When China emerges in his work, it is in fact typically framed by considerations about race and the declining significance of white supremacy. In his 1920 globalist essay, “The Souls of White Folk” (published in the collection Darkwater) Du Bois made a similar point to that made by Wright at the start of The Color Curtain: the world, in simple terms of population, is “dark” not “white”: “But what of the darker world that watches? Most men belong to this world. With Negro and Negroid, East Indian, Chinese, and Japanese they form two-thirds of the population of the world. A belief in humanity is a belief in colored men. If the uplift of mankind must be done by men, then the destinies of this world will rest ultimately in the hands of darker nations.”20 The world is changing, and will continue to change, due to the simple global “drivers” of demographics and race: most of the people in the world are not white. If we are to believe in the force of humanistic progress (Du Bois transposes the term “uplift” from its usual African American context to the setting of “mankind”), then the “destinies of this world” will sooner or later be with the “darker nations.” The sheer weight and size of China will become overpowering because in terms of population most of the human race is Asian or African; and a large portion of those people live within the Middle Kingdom. It seems reasonable to suggest that some of Du Bois’s readers and watchers (and there would always be plenty of watchers, surveying his moves)—the “white folk” addressed in the essay—might well have found what one might call the “majoritarian” global logic of this essay somewhat disquieting, especially because Du Bois annexes the progressive language of the American creed: “uplift,” “belief in humanity,” the “destinies of this world.” What Du Bois does in “The Souls of White Folk” is to ask his white readers whether they really believe in these ideals, since the cornerstone of this creed

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is a professed belief in democracy. That is, if we believe in the global formation of democracy, then we must also believe in the “darker nations,” since “two-thirds of the population” lies outside the West. The numerical detail is totemic in a U.S. context, as Du Bois appeals to the idea of democratic majority. There is a relentless “American” logic to Du Bois’s argument, with its attentiveness to democratic idealism and human progress, but such logic turns to embrace the non-Western nations that constitute a global majority. Although Du Bois lost the local battles of the cold war, in the long run his interpretation of global politics has proved prescient. Paradigms founded on global demographic change have become part of the texture of international relations analysis. In a recent National Intelligence Council report, Mapping the Global Future (2004), the forecasting of the world in 2020 carries more than a tang of the kind of demographic materialism promoted by Du Bois in 1920 or Wright in the 1950s: “Most of the increase in world population and consumer demand through 2020 will take place in today’s developing nations—especially China, India, and Indonesia—and multinational companies from today’s advanced nations will adapt their ‘profiles’ and business practices to the demands of these cultures.” And: “In the same way that commentators refer to the 1900s as the ‘American Century,’ the early 21st century may be seen as the time when some in the developing world, led by China and India, come into their own.” Like Du Bois and Wright, the nic authors are fond of statistics and figures. Compressing the forecasted world population (2020) into a representative 100 persons, they tell us that 56 will come from Asia, 16 from Africa, just 5 from Western Europe and a mere 4 from the United States.21 The nic now concurs with Du Bois’s flat and once revolutionary statement that, indeed, “the destinies of this world will rest ultimately in the hands of darker nations.” Pearl Buck’s “Several Worlds” A good place to focus our enquiry is on the work of Pearl S. Buck, daughter of missionaries; increasingly her postwar work (particularly My Several Worlds and China Past and Present) traced the transition

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from the missionary encounter with China to the hard facts of cold war geopolitics. Has any twentieth-century writer—particularly any American woman writer—achieved a more emphatic blend of fame and marginality than Pearl S. Buck? Only Ayn Rand comes to mind as a rival for such a riddling position within the literary canon. Buck is one of twentieth-century America’s Nobel laureates for literature; but for many commentators the award represented the flight of good sense from one of its traditional homes, Sweden. In recent years Buck has been neglected, or damned with the faint praise of being a “popular writer.”22 However, Peter Conn’s recent, excellent biography, establishes a moment to reappraise her work in the context of literary internationalism.23 Her sprawling body of work represents one of the most significant internationalist engagements by a contemporary author. As the daughter of missionaries who worked in China for many years, Buck gained a privileged view of the exchange between the two cultures. Buck had grown up in China, was educated there, spoke the language, and lived there until 1934. She was a thoroughly “missionary” figure in her blending of insider knowledge of another culture, language skills, participant-observer sympathy, and recurrent defensiveness about where, in the final reckoning, she was at home. One way to read Buck is to see her career as a continual attempt to reckon with, to judge, the overall impact of missionary activity in China—an impact that by family origin and marriage she was well placed to evaluate. From the beginnings of her writing career she directly engaged with debate over the missions’ significance. In the 1920s magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and Current History published critical accounts of the missionaries.24 Then Buck had her say in the 1933 Harper’s essay, “Is There a Case for Foreign Missions?” As Paul Varg wryly noted in his 1958 survey, Missionaries, Chinese, and Diplomats, “Miss Buck concluded that there was a case, but her readers were probably more dubious after reading her account.”25 Buck’s career also demonstrates the perils of literary internationalism in a very direct sense: she was repeatedly the focus of surveillance by the fbi. During the Second World War Buck had encouraged the American Civil Liberties Union (aclu) to set up a national Committee against Racial Discrimination (card), which she chaired (1942). Her

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civil rights activities, typically focusing on racial discrimination within the United States, attracted the attention of the authorities. Peter Conn notes the “Book Review Section” that Hoover’s fbi had set up. Its files included materials on Carl Sandburg, William Carlos Williams, John Dos Passos, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, Richard Wright, and F. Scott Fitzgerald (paranoia leads to catholic tastes); Buck also figured in the collection. Conn adds that in the 1940s the fbi “now became more aggressive in its surveillance”; the Buck dossier eventually reached three hundred pages, one of the largest files: “As a prominent writer and an outspoken advocate for civil rights, Pearl met two of the main criteria [J. Edgar] Hoover used to identify suspicious persons. Most of the documents that agents filed on her activities in the early 1940s were connected to her attacks on racial discrimination.”26 Although the fbi spent more time indexing materials than actually registering her civil rights activities, the organization’s intentions remain chilling. Buck’s postwar work is framed by two memoirs. In the early 1950s My Several Worlds worked through memories of the early twentieth-century, late imperial Asian world of her childhood; the book was shadowed by the Korean conflict and the onset of the cold war. Buck’s analysis of the American mission was always candid. She fully and straightforwardly acknowledged that her family had wanted to “save” the world: “I can only believe that my parents reflected the spirit of their generation, which was of an America bright with the glory of a new nation, rising united from the ashes of war, and confident of power enough to ‘save’ the world.”27 The war here is the Civil War; the American mission is figured as national healing projected on a global scale. This progressive mission carried Buck’s family through the late nineteenth century (when for the Bucks, the missions offered a benign alternative to European imperialism), the Boxer Rebellion and then on into the twentieth century. But perhaps the most telling insight in Buck’s work on China was not only this sensitivity to missionary cultures (and their ideologies), but her realization that the mission would in turn have an impact on Chinese modernity by creating ripples and eventually revolutions in that most ancient of nations: “Meantime they [the missionaries] had

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no conception of the fact that they were in reality helping to light a revolutionary fire, the height of which we still have not seen, nor can foresee” (4). Studies of the encounters between Americans and China have confirmed Buck’s sense that the U.S. missionaries were important agents in bringing change to the Middle Kingdom. Buck’s work pivots continually around this issue of agency and the dilemmas it gives rise to. As the daughter of missionaries, she was complicit with the drive to act upon Asia and Asians; equally, as a native speaker and long-term resident she finds herself less of a “sojourner” and more of a hybrid figure with roots in both cultures. The authors of Sentimental Imperialists observe that the sophistication and sheer longevity of Chinese culture could precipitate or heighten this ambivalence: “Chinese culture, ethics and even religions had a powerful attractiveness to those who were intelligent and sensitive.”28 So Buck’s work recapitulates a major motif of encounter narratives, as the incomer or settler or missionary finds herself entranced, even seduced, by an exotic culture whose “conversion” was her ostensible mission. Buck’s work is continually sensitized to encounters between cultures; but she also saw that the encounters’ reverberations echo down many decades, if not centuries. At this point in her writing the “Chinese” Buck, armed with an epochal sense of China’s historical continuum, steps forward.29 Out of her sense of the “longue durée” of Chinese history Buck fashions a critique of current U.S. diplomacy where policy faults lie in an inability to read off and decode the current situation’s deep historical roots. Her historical imagination is at once highly miniaturized and rather grandiose. She sees the disruptions in Western-Chinese relations as acts of cruelty against her childhood idyll. But she is capable of a historical analysis that in its broad configuration is a powerful precursor to the later, professional historian’s account. Buck argued that the Boxer Rebellion and anti-Western protests sparked off a succession of events, culminating in Mao’s Long March. At the same time, she consistently argued for the deep historical rootedness and continuity of China. She sensed the country’s doubleness: ancient but recurrently racked with political convulsions. And Buck also sensed that Western engagement with China would ultimately create further cataclysmic change.

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Buck’s memoir, shadowed as most of her postwar work is by her nation’s increasingly complex embroilment in Asian affairs, offers historical perspective on the American mission. Sometimes artlessly, sometimes acutely, she develops one of the most complete images of this movement’s culture and ideology. As a girl, she saw herself as an American presence interceding between the “good” Asia and the wicked, interfering European powers: “Our version of the universal game of cops and robbers in those days was the endless war of the Chinese and all good Asian allies against the imperial powers of the West, and as the sole American in the game, it was my duty to come forward at the height of battle and provide food and succour for the ever-victorious Chinese” (6). These childhood games establish a leitmotif in her work: a trenchantly anticolonialist attack on “the whole disgraceful story of the Western powers” who were “robbing the great peaceful countries of Asia” (104). Buck was an instinctively humanistic anti-imperialist; her dislike of Western hegemony rested less on sophisticated ideology or readings of political economy (as in Du Bois’s commentaries on Africa) than on a reflexive hatred of discrimination. There is an affinity with Richard Wright here, in that both writers foreground what they sometimes identify as an innately “American” dislike of oppression and racial discrimination. Both figures can sound like civil rights activists with a sense of internationalism. “What I wanted to be rid of,” Buck flatly states, “was the declared discrimination between the dominant white and the rebellious Chinese” (116). Buck was born in 1892; the Boxer Rebellion created the “fall” of her particular childhood world, as the Americans found themselves caught up in the revolt against the Western presence. She then presents the breaking-up of her childhood Chinese “world” as a form of fall from an Edenic state. She experienced these crises as conflicts, first between a largely European elite and the Chinese resistance, and then between the Americans and the emergent Communist leadership. She clearly felt, however, that Americans in Asia could establish a presence while avoiding the usual Western mistakes. My Several Worlds holds to this line, and some of Buck’s sentences took on a prophetic tone as she reflected in the early 1950s on how the United States might engage globally while

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avoiding earlier European mistakes. It’s important that Buck sees the meeting between Asia and the West as both a cultural encounter and a racial flashpoint. She could see (as Du Bois and Wright had seen) that in the globalization of American power the United States might not be seen as Europe’s anticolonial revolutionary successor, but as simply the latest avatar of white power. She warned: “We shall have enough to do to prove to Asia that we are not as other white men have been” (49). Buck attempted to distinguish American intercessions from overt European imperialism; but as her phrase “other white men” suggests, Buck’s hope that America might be “exceptional” in its dealings with China encountered a disquieting realization that the nation would inevitably replicate the mistakes of “white men.”

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China as “Best Friend” In 1972, at the end of her career and in her eightieth year, Buck published China Past and Present, which summarized a lifetime’s involvement in Chinese affairs. This text is historically shadowed by the Cultural Revolution of the mid-1960s (an ideological turmoil that had made it more difficult for Buck to remain in touch with old friends), but also by Nixon’s rapprochement with China in February that year. Handsomely illustrated with photographs by Magnum figures such as Cartier-Bresson, China Past and Present is one of those hybrid and composite works of travel reportage that blend text and image in telling ways. Buck fashions an authorial self-image of equable biculturalism. As she sits in her Vermont study, she remarks on the American qualities of the domestic and natural scenes around her; but her memories of a childhood in China are underwritten by an “inwardness” with that foreign culture that was beyond many Americans. Her flattened, laconic commentary in China Past and Present has a subdued authority based on a lifetime’s engagements with the country. At times Buck can even claim that she has herself “become,” in certain ways, Chinese—that she thinks now in a Chinese way or that she is part of China: “I belong to China, as a child, as a young girl, as a woman, until I die.”30 One reason that Buck’s work might now seem somewhat gauche or lacking in theoreti-

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cal resonance is that she tends to present these movements between and across cultural space in an unproblematic way; the overall impression is of seamless transitions. At a special dinner Buck notes that she was “the only Westerner present,” but decodes this situation with her “Chinese-trained mind”: “This instantly conveyed to my Chinese-trained mind that the dinner had a purpose beyond mere honor” (74). There is imperiousness—and a lack of self-division—at such moments: if Buck’s movements between China and America had been more fraught, her writing might have become richer. She would have had to mine new areas of social psychology and existential complexity. Instead, Buck sometimes sounds like an overconfident American equivalent to those bluff British colonial officials who claimed a cultural force majeure in their understanding of Asia or Africa. Missionary legacy leads to a strident lecture on Mao’s military strategy: When the Communist revolution rose in China, I observed that the Communists were following the exact guerrilla tactics that the robbers of Shui Hu Chuan had used five centuries and more before, and so I began my work. I spent four years on this translation under the illusion that if and when my American people were engaged in an Asian war—which even then seemed inevitable to me—they would know how to deal with Chinese Communist guerrilla military strategy and tactics. Mao Tse-tung always carries a copy of Shui Hu Chuan with him, I am told, and certainly the warfare in Vietnam has been based on this book. Alas, I doubt that any American military man has read my translation of this great novel. (80)

There’s more than a trace of self-regard in Buck’s belief that she could have warned U.S. military planners about failures in Vietnam. Nevertheless, her linguistic and cultural acclimatization to China was probably far in advance of many in Washington. The question in China Past and Present is whether Buck can find a voice and a politicized analysis that will marshal this intimacy with China while restraining her (understandable) tone of “I told you so.” At moments in China Past and Present she indeed develops idiosyncratic and telling—and rather unique—critiques of American presence in Asia. She notes the disrupt-

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ing effects of American troops throughout Asia as new families (halfAmerican) have arisen. In such paragraphs Buck’s conservatism and mild traditionalism reveal themselves (although one might add that her concern is really for the integrity of Chinese family values). “But the presence of so many young American men,” she writes, “in seven countries of Asia, for so many years and in rotation, has shaken Asian society to its very foundations. No one knows the future of these half-Americans, since our own government has no policy regarding them” (89– 92). This is one point where her writing trembles on the edge of a much richer and more daring understanding of relations between America and Asia but then fails to pursue the deeper critique. Buck herself was, in a way, one of “these half-Americans” (culturally, if not by birth); but her memoir fails to pursue the ramifications of “half-ness” or to open up the parallel (surely intriguing) between missionaries who became absorbed into China and American servicemen who also produced a hybrid Asian American legacy. Buck, that is, is alert to issues of intercultural and cross-cultural encounter, but she can just as easily back away from the resonances of her analysis. Her prose can thus become an infuriating blend of the insightful and the self-aware, on one hand, and the sentimental or insensitive on the other. For, even though she reiterates her respect for the Chinese peasantry, Buck also sees them as just so much writerly stuff for her artistic consumption. She tells her publishers “that there was a whole new area of wonderful life material among our own Chinese peasants. I found my suggestions coolly received” (156). One wonders how the peasants themselves would have received these “suggestions” about their being “life material.” Buck’s “Sinophilia” has a particular complexion and cast; she shows little understanding of or sympathy for Maoism, for example. Her writing can be mordant and laconic, attentive to shifting relations between America and Asia; but at heart her Chinese studies are nostalgic for the old world of the missions. She fiercely denounced postwar disengagement from China as a betrayal of the missionary legacy: “Not to speak to China, when we had been, or so her people thought, her best friend for a century!” (93). The sense of China as “best friend” is less rooted in a contemporary sense of ideology or power politics than in the long

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traditions—and in Buck’s case, her family history—of the missionaries. The friendship began with the missionaries but then, in Buck’s reading of Chinese-U.S. relations, extends to form a more general, American bond with that country. In the wake of Korea and Vietnam, missionary nostalgia has become attenuated and even desperate; Buck can only testify that things would have turned out differently had the United States and China simply remained in contact. Buck’s conservatism is also tinged by that mild deference in the face of China’s ancient civilization seeming to have marked the missionary experience. She remains convinced of China’s cultural superiority—and as a writer acculturated to Chinese ways, Buck can partake in this sense of superiority. It is such “cleverness” (coming close to an exotic sense of Asian wisdom or sly intelligence) that Buck vaunts as the center of Chinese identity (not Maoism). As she exasperatedly notes at one point, “they are so damnably clever that I have to love them in spite of their politics” (97). In a telling conjunction of midcentury writers, Buck’s work sometimes resembles that of Paul Bowles: both found themselves resistant to the polarities of postwar engagement in the “developing world.” Both were nostalgic for a threatened exoticism; both looked back wistfully to a time when the American—as missionary or as Bohemian expatriate—defined relationships with non-Westerners in either religious or aesthetic terms. In each one catches the ironic sense that the “American Century” had paradoxically led to an Americanizing of the globe (and a politicizing of the world) that undercut the established, seductive patterns of expatriate experience. Instead of being a missionary or a writer-aesthete, the expatriate now has an identity that is first and foremost American; and such an identity increasingly carries a decisive ideological charge.31 As with some of Bowles’s comments on European colonialism’s depredations, Buck’s nostalgia for the old ways of China incorporated telling critiques of the West. She remained skeptical about Maoism but interpreted the history of Formosa/Taiwan as a narrative about Western imperialism. “The Chinese,” she wrote in China Past and Present, “had taken it for granted centuries earlier that it [Taiwan] belonged to them, but this meant nothing to young Western nations who, if they arrived at a place they had never seen before, announced

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that they had ‘discovered’ it and therefore could and did lay claim to it” (100). At this crux Buck accepts the conventional American self-image as a young, vigorous, proto-imperialist nation (an image that had animated the first U.S. advocates of imperial outreach), but she reverses the thrust of these arguments, so that youth now equates to immaturity, while China’s ancient civilization is mature in its wisdom: “Other nations now know that we are impulsive, dramatic, and that we are still very young and immature. We think of ourselves and act without considering what the results will be in other parts of the world” (104). China Past and Present remains an important text in postwar literary internationalism because it contained Buck’s attempts to decode and judge the Cultural Revolution. Alongside familiar Buck motifs—the value of the missions, the long reach of China’s history—sat a reading of the most recent revolutionary moment. In line with earlier attempts to tack between cold war polarities, Buck used this late memoir to argue that Western acts of discovery were neocolonial acts, while excusing China’s annexation of Tibet as a symptom of an obsession with territorial integrity. But at the same time she introduced a new note by focusing on 1960s revolutionary politics. Appalled by the “shocking and tragic course” of the Cultural Revolution (128) in her historicist way, Buck regarded this political upheaval as a disaster depriving young Chinese “of their glorious heritage, the magnificent civilization of their own country” (129). What she disliked about the Cultural Revolution was the insularity it engendered. It is significant that despite her acute sensitivity to Chinese cultural distinctiveness, she rejected the Cultural Revolution’s fervent isolationism: “Time is what they need, time and isolation. But there is no time and there can be no isolation any more, not for China or for any country” (188). As a traveler and linguist, Buck opposed cultural and nationalist ideologies of separatism or isolationism. That particular phase of Asian revolutionary Communism when ideological purity was paramount aroused her contempt since it seemed to go against a cosmopolitan common sense of a life lived in different places. What is also significant about this last comment is that Buck had registered the growing interconnectedness of countries, and the sheer speed of historical change in the postwar world. No longer is

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there “time,” and isolation is a dream: the fantasy of an isolated China, evolving slowly within its own chronology, is just that—a dream. I will argue in the next chapter that authors such as Buck and Wright had begun to reflect on these dimensions of an increasingly frenetic and interwoven world society. Steady, autonomous self-development of the individual nation was no longer a prospect. In fact, when we turn back to this unduly neglected figure we discover extended analysis of one of our current critical preoccupations— cosmopolitanism. In her own quirky way, Buck rewrote her missionary upbringing and her place in “several worlds” into a form of cosmopolitan reflection. She remained in her broad sensitivity to the interconnections and dialogues between cultures recognizably a writer shaped by the progressivism, internationalism, and universalism that marked midcentury travel and political writing. But we can also now see that this midcentury ideology contained the seeds of a distinctive American cosmopolitanism: an inflected liberal sense of mission, receptive to foreign cultures but founded in progressive idealism. Nonetheless, this cosmopolitanism also caused Buck difficulties; the polarities and oppositions that had echoed throughout her work finally threatened to fragment her prose into irresolvable dichotomies. China Past and Present veers, erratically at times, between “Chinese” condemnations of Western arrogance and “missionary” pleas for understanding of what the American evangelists were up to. The writing becomes (understandably) breathless and jagged, as Buck swerves between the two cultural poles that dominated her life. Buck’s centrist and historicist arguments pleased nobody. To the Chinese administration of the Cultural Revolution she was insufficiently congratulatory in her appreciation of their advances. But Buck had little time for the “West,” either. Her willingness to take the long view (often linked to her “Chinese” understanding of the deep roots and longevity of important civilizations), combined with her framing of nations within epochal time frames, led her to pointed criticisms of Western pretensions. It was, perhaps, her unwillingness to join the chorus line of self-celebration that irritated the American intelligence services. Buck had her own theory of Western decline; it might well have been misguided, but it did lead her to humility in the face of non-

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Western cultures. She adopted a neo-Spenglerian reading of the West’s eclipse. She had seen that “the power of the West would decline and the power of the East would rise.” However, “I had scarcely expected to see the end of the colonial era and the rise of new and independent Asian nations” (133). (Buck shared with Du Bois a sense that “the colonial era” was stronger than in fact it was.) Toward the end of China Past and Present Buck’s prose becomes increasingly plaintive and pleading, as she formulates an emotional entreaty to be allowed to go to her parents’ homeland (her father was buried there). The memoir’s agonizing reappraisal suggests that American global difference has been eroded; after Korea and more particularly Vietnam the United States is “as other white men have been” in its dealings with Asian cultures. Buck was investigated by the fbi for her political activities; but China Past and Present ends with Buck being shot by the other side for her opposition to Chinese government policies, especially policies in Tibet. “Above all, our government is based on the freedom of the individual. In complete freedom I have lived where I pleased, as I pleased, and I have written as I pleased. I am not degraded or punished because I am an intellectual by heritage or choice. I am free to develop myself. I am proud to be an American. This is not to say that ours is the best country in the world. It is to say that for me it is the best country” (170). And then Buck reproduces a letter from the Chinese Embassy in Canada, dated May 17, 1972: “In view of the fact that for a long time you have in your works taken an attitude of distortion, smear and vilification towards the people of the new China and their leaders, I am authorized to inform you that we can not accept your request for a visit to China” (171). Buck’s allegiance was to the “old” China, not to the “new” China of the Communists. Her defense of her patriotic allegiance remains, I think, one of the cold war’s most pointed, poignant (and overlooked) testimonies. Buck had often been out of favor with her own nation; her need was to refashion an American patriotism that would take account of her own worldliness and sense of cultural relativism. Hence the scrupulous redeployment of an American nationalism on her own liberal terms. Buck is an “intellectual”—a steadfast enough declaration—happy to exist in a culture where intellectuals are

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not “punished” (though one wonders what she would really have made of the fbi’s file had she been able to see it). She is “free to develop myself.” This is an individualism framed by a distinctive cold war rhetoric. Development is all; self-development a cherished ideal. The China of the Cultural Revolution cannot offer such possibilities to “develop”; it is out of this humanistic sense of individual developmental possibility and agency that Buck reforges a sense of her American identity. What form might an American cosmopolitanism take? Pearl S. Buck’s career presents a cosmopolitanism rooted in the American mission overseas; but the missionary who emerges from this background is self-aware, self-critical, a cultural relativist rather than a proselytizing evangelical. This missionary achieves a rare form of biculturalism as she shifts between countries; she is self-aware rather than a declaimer of the “self-evident” truths of her culture. Buck’s writings remained (even at the very end of her life) imbued with a sense of the dignity and purposefulness that her missionary family had brought to their efforts in Asia. But she also created, within the space of missionary ideology, a place where comparative evaluations of American and Asian cultures might be allowed to grow. Missionary cultures provide space for self-criticism and a form of political critique that can approach oppositionality, as we have known since Bartolomé de Las Casas launched his attacks on Spanish exploitation of the Indies. In her own unlikely way, Buck became an heir to this tradition of the missionary dissent. She attacked contemporary ignorance about China; she could see the Western “discovery” of new worlds as acts of power; she venerated Chinese history, culture, and language. But Buck emerged from a missionary culture that had also been marginalized by the later, decisive shift in Chinese politics—the revolution. This left her in a profoundly ambiguous position, as most of the cultures to which she declares allegiance in China Past and Present were relentlessly swept away by historical change: the China of her missionary childhood, the old world of Asian customs, and pre–cold war America. What we see in her commentary is a late form of that pro-Chinese, missionary liberalism that had been so important in the middle years of the century, before the cold war had decisively polarized the world and the abrupt counterattack during the Korean War

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positioned China as a clear and present danger to American interests. Buck then took her place alongside Richard Wright as an author whose nuanced liberal readings of foreign cultures seemed to lack the necessary and overt signals of political allegiance in a cold war context. And as with Wright’s case, hers was to become a career where liberalism took her from the culture’s “vital center” to a position on its edge.

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5

Nonalignment and Writing

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Rich Lands and Poor

He was anti-Western, all right. And I wondered why Western nations insisted upon bringing these boys to their universities. . . . The young man I looked at was neither Eastern nor Western; he had been torn from his warm, communal Eastern environment and had been educated in a tight-laced, puritanical Teutonic environment which he could not love or accept. Where would he fit in now, being a stranger to both worlds . . . ? It is not difficult to imagine Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists, and Shintoists launching vast crusades, armed with modern weapons, to make the world safe for their mystical notions. —Richard Wright, The Color Curtain (1956)

Walter LaFeber notes in an essay on postwar American foreign policy the “ironic legacy” of decolonization: “Americans, to paraphrase St. Augustine’s famous prayer, have often demanded decolonization, but then added they do not want it quite yet.”1 Roosevelt had been famously dismissive of Empire, and was shocked by what he saw in West Africa in 1943. The onset of the cold war changed everything. Colonialism seemed the least bad option in the face of international Communism.2 The United States issued a Declaration on “National Independence” (March 9, 1943),

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but the evolution of a fuller African policy was interrupted by cold war realities that changed the tone of “liberation.” Richard Wright’s journey to the Bandung conference took place in this context. It took until 1950, and a State Department reorganization that established regional bureaus, for a policy statement on Africa to appear. John Kent shows in a discussion of State Department records that analysts had begun to write about colonialism’s benign effects: “It was claimed that no part of Africa had ever developed into a civilization; the continent had been invaded by Western civilization and ‘there was no point in wringing one’s hands about it.’” In John Foster Dulles’s mind, Kent suggests, an even more explicit acceptance of colonialism took place: “Thus Dulles allegedly told [future British Prime Minister] Macmillan at the Geneva conference in the summer of 1955 that he had suddenly realized all the U.S. views about colonialism had been wrong and that the period of British hegemony had been the happiest period Africa had ever had.”3 Gradual decolonization now seemed to fit the bill; a careful transition to independence would enable the United States’s long-term commitment to decolonization to reach fruition, while incorporating cold war realities into a new geopolitics. Bandung, as Cary Fraser has shown, focused the complexities and paradoxes of American foreign policy. Secretary of State Dulles wanted to promote “freedom” in the context of the global struggle against Communism. But the African and Asian nations at Bandung defined freedom in terms of decolonization. Tacit American support for European colonialism, coupled with domestic racism, “combined to limit the credibility of espousals of ‘freedom.’ . . . Could the United States come to terms with a world of color in which whites were both a minority and a target of opprobrium?”4 Wright’s 1950s travels to Indonesia, Spain, and West Africa took place in this context: he journeyed against a background of European decolonization, while the State Department was feeling its way toward a reconfigured role in Asia and Africa. The result was the three travel books that have usually been seen as minor parts of Wright’s oeuvre, but whose long-term importance now becomes clear. Weaving these texts into a broader account of progress, modernity, and decolonization, we see that they are anything but minor; that they represent a thinking-

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through of some of the emergent political and cultural problems of the postwar era. If anything, they were ahead of their time. But Wright’s split from the left has tended to dominate the reception of his work; reflexive spats about his allegiance to the Communist Party deflect the reader’s attention from the texts themselves and their innovations. In the broadest sense, Wright tried to preserve the ideal of the writer as a politically engaged but nonaligned commentator. Unfortunately, the cold war system of alliances, blocs, and alignments would make “nonalignment” seem a quixotic project; the polarizing and Manichean drive of cold war ideology overrode the nuances and complexities of a figure such as Wright. But by a further historical irony, Wright had become interested in the deep structures of the societies he visited—cultural formations that would outlast the cold war but seemed relatively marginal in the 1950s. In particular, Wright realized that race and religion were still animating, vital forces across the globe, even as cold war imperatives boiled geopolitics down to the military-ideological struggle against Communism. Within this setting, Wright’s fascination with topics such as tribalism, progress, and the enduring significance of Islam would seem irrelevant for a generation; but his focus then reemerged as highly relevant to an understanding of cultural internationalism. It is possible to identify a discourse we might call the “writing of nonalignment.” The Color Curtain suggests that after Bandung Wright had begun to articulate discursive structures, themes, and spatial settings that marked out the terrain for a writing of nonaligned internationalist engagement.5 Nonalignment produced writing where development theory’s impress is evident, but where there is an envisioning of progress engineered by the nonwhite world. There is recognition that the underlying foundations of world politics might have as much to do with race as with a conflict of ideologies, and a (somewhat horrified) realization that religion remains a dominant motif in many cultures. The underpinning dialectic of Wright’s argument is the broad opposition between progress and a state of backwardness that we will see in Pagan Spain. Nonalignment has little time for romantic primitivism; it is a form of modernity, rooted in local cultures, keen on economic development. There is a profound and thrilling sense of emergence—of

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the sheer size of the “Third World.” As Wright said, this is now the “geopolitical center.” Nonalignment then produces a pragmatic, openended, questioning form of reportage; and its encompassing of travel writing, political analysis, and polemic creates a certain fragmentation in the text. It’s worth recognizing, too, a recurrent fascination with being “inside” or “outside.” With its attentiveness to those “outside of the Western world,” its insistent tropes of boundaries and borders, Wright’s prose carries the rhetorical impress of the cold war but shifts that sense of division away from classic cold war ideology and toward religion and race: from the iron curtain to the color curtain. Wright’s work from the 1950s had as its abiding subtext a sense of urgency. The pressure was on; the decolonized masses demanded action. In both The Color Curtain and Black Power Wright finished his meditations with reflections on political time and a programmatic agenda for immediate change. How can these Asian and African societies quickly move themselves up the ladder of progress? Political time, he argued, worked differently in the Western and the Eastern worlds. For the West, urgency rested in the ability of Asians and Africans to master the technology of modernity—“how long will it take these people to master mechanical processes, etc.”6 But in what Wright would call the “Orient” this urgent desire for change emerged from postcolonial political aspiration: “Can Asian and African leaders keep pace with the dynamics of a billion or more people loosed from their colonial shackles, but loosed in terms of defensive, irrational feelings?” (206). In Wright’s mapping of the temporality of progress the technocratic West positions the decolonized world as a pupil, a student learning modernity; but for Africans and Asians more immediate, “irrational” desires for political advancement are paramount. The last pages of Color Curtain are dominated by increasingly frenetic meditations on political transition, modernity, and time. Thus, Wright is amazed when he meets a “reformed American of the Old South” who tells him that the best way forward is for the U.S. to train Indonesians for “‘fifty or a hundred years’” (212), since America has no right to “‘interfere’” in the affairs of another nation. For Wright, the pivotal, perilous state of the decolonized nation demands just such interference—or, in the model he advanced in Black Power, a contrary

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model of decisive self-advancement through militarization. But he then left the terms, conditions, and timescale of American “interference” unmapped. Wright’s unmapping is the topography of our daily lives. He understood decolonization as a world-historical event, a moment when the long-term currents of international politics reshaped themselves—“worlds were being born and worlds were dying” (20). Global deep structures changed; the tectonic plates of geopolitics were on the move. His thinking was beginning to converge with that of other intellectuals who were addressing decolonization at that time, notably Fanon. But whereas Fanon saw the “decolonization of the mind” in psychoanalytical and therapeutic terms, Wright saw “de-Occidentalization” within the paradigm of international political economy. As we saw in chapter 2, the long reach of African American internationalist analysis was genealogically founded in a focus on the material conditions of the developing world economy. “De-Occidentalization” then marked the breaking of Western economic supremacy. As elsewhere in Wright’s 1950s texts, the impress of a Marxist progressivism is evident. Wright had realized that, in the immediate aftermath of European empire, the absorption of Africa and Asia into the world economy would mean that the very cheapness of their labor costs would put the West under pressure: “When the day comes that Asian and African raw materials are processed in Asia and Africa by labor whose needs are not as inflated as those of Western laborers, the supremacy of the Western world, economic, cultural, and political, will have been broken once and for all on this earth and a de-Occidentalization of mankind will have definitely set in. (Thus, in time, the whole world will be de-Occidentalized, for there will be no East or West!)” (203). The account of “de-Occidentalization” was primarily founded on a materialist reading of the colony; but it led Wright into territory associated with Fanon. For Wright, the main impact of colonialism had been to destroy tradition, which in turn left Asia and Africa exposed to the shock and awe produced by Western capitalism. Now, the “customary Asian and African cultures” lay “at the mercy of financial and commercial relations which compounded the confusion in Asian and African minds” (73). In Jakarta in April 1955 he saw this commercial confusion

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all around him. In a scene redolent of the West African markets of Black Power, he entered the Asian street, which “presents to Western eyes a commercial aspect, naked and immediate, that seems to swallow up the entire population in petty trade—men, women, and children.” (93–94). The result: “depersonalization” (75). Wright, then, remained rooted in a materialist-economic analysis of the colony, but at its furthest argumentative extension his paradigm enabled him to touch on that area of analysis—of personality and psychological trauma—that became Fanon’s province. Another important distinction: Wright felt that history would in time validate the West in terms of progress and modernity. In exchanges with an Indonesian publisher, Wright was told by his companion that, “‘one of the deepest traits of the West is its anti-Western attitude’” (49). Wright agreed when his companion suggested that, “in the long run, the impact of the West upon the East would undoubtedly be entered upon the credit side of the historical ledger” (53). The West had broken through to a developmental level of scientific knowledge, industrialism, rationality, and self-critique, which taken together embodied “progress.” Nevertheless, even if history was ultimately on the side of the West, resistance to Westernization always caught Wright’s attention. As with his praise for Nkrumah in Black Power, Wright’s reflections in Color Curtain led him toward figures who might embody or promote progress while marking out non-Western formations of modernity. Again, open encounters and conversations with a range of Asian commentators made it possible for Wright to identify deep roots to the challenge against the West. One Indonesian Moslem tells Wright that the defeat of Russia by Japan in the 1905 war marked the “‘beginning of the liberation of the Asian mind’” (60), a comment foreshadowing more recent observations by writers such as John Gray about that conflict’s historical significance: “By the first decade of the twentieth century [Japan] had a modern navy, which destroyed the Russian Imperial Fleet at the Battle of Tsushima—the first time a modern European power was defeated in war by an Asian people.”7 Such interpretative echoes (rereadings of Western supremacism; ironic recasting of global encounters) signal the idiosyncratic prescience of The Color Curtain. Wright also

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records his repeated meetings with Islam and Islamic agency: perhaps for the first time he encountered non-Westerners whose identity had not been shaped in colonialism’s crucible. The fascination of Indonesia and Southeast Asian Islam lay for Wright in their cultural and psychological imperviousness to the Western missionaries. The Moslem personality, he suggested, was “intact” because Indonesians “had not been tampered with too much by missionaries as had all too many Africans” (120). The sentences that deal with this Islamic resistance are fascinating for their unsettling identification of a “totalitarian outlook”:

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No missionary had tampered with his Moslem beliefs and he was, therefore, outside of the Western world, objective about it in a way that no Jew, Gypsy, or refugee could ever be; he could hate, that is, he could reason passionately toward the aim of destroying a loathsome enemy. He was totalitarian-minded, but without the buttress of modern Communist or Fascist ideology; he did not need any, for his totalitarian outlook was born of his religious convictions. Allah was his dictator. (61–62)

In his Moslem interlocutor Wright discovers someone outside of the West. He is precise in locating the interdependency of missionary activity and the West’s global impact: the Islamic self has not been subject to the missionaries and is therefore in a very straightforward way, “outside of the Western world.” To be outside is to be “objective” about the West—presumably, that is, to recognize its ideology and power. But the admiration that we sense in these lines—for Islam as a postcolonial form of resistance—then mutates into something different. Wright, as we will see in a later discussion of Pagan Spain, was alarmed by religious idealism (he saw it as a form of extremism); he had also moved toward a liberalism that was profoundly mistrustful of totalitarian ideologies. And like many literary intellectuals of the period, he had established “totalitarian” as a central term in his lexicon. “Totalitarian,” as deployed by writers such as Hannah Arendt and Lionel Trilling, would provide the vital coupling between liberalism and conservatism. Both liberals and conservatives could agree on one thing, namely that their common

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enemy was totalitarianism (first in the guise of Fascism; increasingly as international Communism). Wright slides the term over to apply it to Islam—the language of the classic midcentury liberal, but with a religious rather than political focus. For Wright, one reading of Islam was that this was a neototalitarian ideology in which, for the believer, “Allah was his dictator.” Wright in 1956 moves into the argumentative terrain that would preoccupy Western commentators on Islam in the wake of 9/11: a terrain marked by debates about religious idealism, violence and the “clash between Islam and modernity.”8 The particular contribution that revisionist literary history can make to these debates is to show that rhetoric, figurative language and the broader discursive patterns of political writing are very much at the center of how we write about Islam. Furthermore, these discursive patterns have longevity, a half-life, that enables them to persist even when their original intellectual and political context has disintegrated. Even if the liberal consensus of the 1950s is long gone, and Arthur Schlesinger’s “vital center” has vanished, that political-cultural formation established a rhetoric for articulating ideological conflicts that remains with us. The encounter with Islam could with surprising ease be locked into this language of dictators and totalitarianism as early as the mid-1950s. American representations of Islam had already begun to center on figures “outside of the Western world,” decoded as implacably antimodern. Bowles had presented in The Spider’s House the encounter between the Westerner who wants to preserve an aesthete’s Islamic culture and the Moslem radical who dreams of apocalypse. Wright was fascinated by what he saw as the religious totalitarianism of his interlocutor and by the consciousness of those who stood outside the missionary’s reach. It’s important to dwell on these moments and these characterizations. First, because they help to restore historical context to the current “clash of civilizations,” in Samuel Huntington’s well-traveled phrase. Even as they moved out from their traditional expatriate centers in Paris, London, and Italy, U.S. writers had begun to respond to cultural difference in ways that now seem premonitory. Second, the particular complexion of this representation of the Islamic world is significant. Both Bowles and Wright were fascinated by the interplay

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between resistance, religious alterity, decolonization, and historical culture: the defining elements of “Islam” in these 1950s representations.9 They probably had a keener sense of colonialism and its pervasive effects than many commentators; and in The Color Curtain and The Spider’s House they explicitly addressed decolonization. Yet each writer tends to project an unchanging and dehistoricized Islamic self, forged out of ancient religious practice, sheer cultural difference, and violent disengagement from modernity. Even for a trenchant advocate of decolonization such as Richard Wright, the potential of Islamic cultures as sites for historical change and progress seems to have been more or less impossible to envisage.

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American Time, Swedish Time Wright’s encounter with the developing world was framed by extended intellectual dialogues with other writers, particularly figures in the political and social sciences.10 In chapter 2, “The ‘Skin Game,’” I explored Wright’s adaptation of Everett Stonequist’s notion of the “marginal man.” The Color Curtain opens up analogous dialogues with figures in Wright’s intellectual milieu. Wright knew a good number of academics, moved in their circles, and along with his self-education through writers’ groups and politics, became well informed through these contacts. At various points we can see him adapting and extending ideas drawn from other thinkers in the circle, while elsewhere he seems to move decisively on from these established or current modes of analysis. Contrast, for example, The Color Curtain’s open-ended, exploratory form of reportage with other analyses of empire and its fall within Wright’s circle. George Padmore’s Africa: Britain’s Third Empire (1949) is a case in point. Padmore was part of the intellectual constellation described in many parts of this book: the “Western,” that is the Anglo-Franco-American literary internationalism whose shifting coordinates (in ethnography, literature and reportage) constituted a shaping paradigm in the 1950s and 1960s. Padmore also dedicated this attack on imperial hegemony to Du Bois. He was receptive to pan-Africanism and an advocate of international Socialism, but his study is in fact

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a more formal and conventional study of empire’s ideology than those fashioned by Wright. The chapter “Nationalism in British West Africa,” for instance, catalogs the movements and conventions that have shaped the region: “Yoruba Nationalism,” “National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons,” and so on.11 This writing is informative and utterly grounded in a still-recognizable discourse of political sociology and institutional analysis. In contrast, Wright’s texts are splintered and hybrid; they shift restlessly between a highly subjective personal response and an “objective” account clearly indebted to figures such as Padmore. The Color Curtain and Black Power now seem the more forward-looking in their piecing together of disparate discourses, even if these texts’ status as “travel writing” has led to occlusion within the postwar U.S. canon. Wright had learned one technique in particular from the sociology he read: the “life history” approach that placed an individual autobiography at the foundation of social analysis. Wright’s recent biographer, Hazel Rowley, notes: “He was struck by the emphasis Chicago Sociology placed on the ‘life history’ approach to subjects like race. These social scientists valued autobiographical narratives told in the individual’s own words as a means of analyzing the way attitudes were formed and shaped.”12 Robert Park, whom Wright was to get to know, had pioneered the method in a seminal study of immigrants’ social psychology, Old World Traits Transplanted (1921). The emphasis of the method was on a direct and revealing encounter with the interviewee, during which the individual would reveal—inadvertently, perhaps—attitudes and preconceptions. Park was particularly interested in the interplay between race, social change, and attitudinal recomposition; here was personality as dynamic process.13 All of Wright’s travel books show the impact of the method of the life history, but The Color Curtain is dominated by this technique, as Wright moves restlessly through a series of encounters with the biographies of strangers. Wright blended a social sciences’ methodology of the life history with the anthropological stance of the participant-observer.14 Whereas a social scientist such as Daniel Lerner used the life history as the grounding for an argumentative system (the individual history is eventually absorbed into a bigger, collective story, and sociological abstraction emerges from the individual story),

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Wright’s use of this method is resolutely atomistic. He wants to hear the voices of Asian and African individuals, to take their personal testimonies. Wright had concluded his account of his break with Communism with a humanist plea, as he called for writers “to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.”15 The Color Curtain forges an analytic account of decolonization from an infusion of the “inexpressibly human” into a subject area mapped by such social scientists as Park, Myrdal, and Stonequist. The questionnaire, a device pioneered by life history that then became the clichéd staple of marketing and attitudinal surveys, enabled Wright to create responsive, open encounters with a wide range of the personality types thrown up by decolonization, migration and the postwar diasporas. Even within the Europe of the 1950s, where the opening pages of The Color Curtain take place, Wright met numbers of Western-educated Asians, young people grappling with a bicultural, biracial heritage: “the Eurasian . . . an Asian, but strangely, a Westernized one” (45). The life story method validated and deepened Wright’s humanistic appetite for encounter and conversation; but these questionnaires had also led to the identification of a multiplicity of personality types caught between modernity and tradition, the East and the West. As we saw in the first chapter, Daniel Lerner synthesized his cache of Middle Eastern life-stories to produced that composite figure, the “transitional.” However, Wright adapted the same form of pragmatic Chicago school investigation, while refusing to homogenize the various figures he encountered into a monolithic “type” or “character” of cultural transition. Instead, he found variety and difference in personality formation: shadings, amalgams, contradictions. Wright, that is, had pursued more complex representations of Islamic identity where hybridity and a degree of internal self-division were beginning to make for a layered or splintered sense of self; accounts of a “totalitarian” self sit alongside nascent readings of plurality and hybridity within the Islamic diaspora. It is this interpretative dualism in The Color Curtain—Islam as “essentially” totalitarian; Islamic multiplicity—that gives this text its timeliness some fifty years later.16 What Wright had done was to take the emergent methods of social research, and then refashion them to create a writing of what Ross Pos-

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nock has called the “open margin.” “The emergence of black literary intellectuals,” writes Posnock, “depended on their devising an aesthetic of deferral, vagueness, and open margin, modes of literary representation that simultaneously became political strategies of denaturalization in a society where racist stereotypes reigned serenely as ‘Nature.’” “Open margin” is a useful term to bring to the interpretation of Wright’s travel works. The repeated discontinuities and ellipses, noted earlier in discussion of Black Power, are equally significant in Color Curtain: the text pauses, tails off, moves abruptly in different directions. But there is openness in Wright’s insertion of conversation and encounter into the center of his text; he simply cannot move the argument forward through a premeditated discursive line. Even the encounter with the “totalitarian-minded” Islamic youth has this quality of “openness”—since it is framed by meetings with other Indonesians whose cultural-political formation has turned, in Wright’s analysis, toward a less “totalitarian” disposition. What is perhaps most important about the series of interviews at the start of The Color Curtain is that Wright refuses to grant any one of his interviewees the privilege of becoming the preeminent, totalizing presence; each is given space, a voice, but these multiple life histories are then kept in play rather than becoming the singular “life history” of the color curtain. It is Wright’s friend, the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal whose work establishes powerful intertextual analogues with The Color Curtain. Myrdal—the central interlocutor in Wright’s dialogue about race and globalism—also turned toward an internationalist reading of political economy during the 1950s. He was working on his own global studies at exactly the moment when Wright, too, was moving out into the streets and markets of West Africa and Asia. In 1955 he gave a series of lectures in Cairo called Development and Underdevelopment; the lectures were revised and published as Rich Lands and Poor in 1957. This study formed part of a series, “World Perspectives,” that included books by Konrad Adenauer, Erich Fromm and Paul Tillich; the project’s liberal universalism was underlined in a preface where Ruth Nanda Anshen claimed that a “World Age” was “now taking shape.”17 The conceptual fit between this text and Wright’s 1950s writings,

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Black Power and The Color Curtain is compelling. The two men had mounted critiques of American racism in the 1930s and 1940s; both had studied the institutional, social, and cultural formations of American racism; and in the 1950s they pursued post-Keynesian readings of political economy in the developing world. How would societies develop in a world moving from anticolonial struggle into decolonization and then postcolonialism? Myrdal shares Wright’s sense that decolonization is a world-historical event; he even uses the term “Great Awakening” to describe the movement from colony to post-colony. Rich Lands and Poor then develops a very distinctive reading of the colony’s political economy. Myrdal is highly attentive to what he presents as an embedded market, where culture and institutions continually interact with the classic processes of supply and demand. And as a sociologist, he privileges culture, customs, and institutions as part of a national economy. He is also impatient with the established polarities of developmental thought and their mathematical predictions of economic take-off and development (whether posited by classical economists or Marxists). Instead he creates a pragmatics of development, attentive to local conditions, progressive but rooted in regional social textures. Rich Lands and Poor suggests that the natural tendency of the market is to create inequalities. In advanced societies, what he terms “spread effects” help to mitigate the process; the metropolitan center serves to “spread” economic and social advances, sometimes through explicit policies of internal development. For the new countries, undergoing their “Great Awakening” into modernity, the aim is now to mimic these kinds of effect in countries where development mechanisms had not existed before.18 Myrdal’s foundational paradigm is, as one might expect, that of a northern European social democrat. Development theory’s attractiveness to policymakers is evident: create the conditions for growth (capital and technology), light the touch paper, and stand clear as the sudden take-off of economic development lifts formerly backward cultures into progress. Our faith in “take-off ” has now been tempered by the clear inability of many cultures to make that developmental leap in the ways suggested by postwar economic

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theory. Economists such as John Kay increasingly dispute the theoretical foundations of “take-off.” “Little attention was paid to economic history,” he points out. “All innovations and scientific knowledge since the Industrial Revolution were available immediately to poor countries in the modern world, and their growth path could be accelerated through this contact with already developed economies. Technology would be imported, but not institutions.” Kay points out that the “growth models . . . contain no institutions—firms, industries or governments.”19 One might add that Myrdal’s model, unlike most development theory, did have an institutional base and an appreciation of social organization. It was this more nuanced and sociological model of development that Wright learned from; but as Kay implies, much of the theory advanced by development economists had little time for history or government, and the Myrdal model remained an idiosyncratic exception in an age dominated by the ideal of “take-off.”20 Dwelling on the intricacies of these arguments helps us to see that the “microclimate” of postwar American thought had created a range of models for thinking about decolonization—a variety that the academy’s understandable but overstated concentration on Fanon tends to obscure. A theorist such as Myrdal was a theorist of society and economy, not a social psychologist per se, but his ideas were forged in response to what he called in an echo of Churchill the “liquidation” of the “colonial system.”21 While Fanon would famously call for the “decolonization” of the mind, Myrdal constructed templates for an economic change that he saw as the lever for broader social change. He emphasized social solidarity, civil rights, and evolutionary political change: a progressivism founded on government intervention and steady political agitation. This rather European—to be more precise, Scandinavian—model of progress and uplift represents a distinctive model of internationalist social democracy. Figures such as Myrdal and Wright, however, operated in a political culture where the tactful and nuanced middle way was easily crowded out by louder cold war voices. Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt have written of the “consensus narratives” of Gunnar Myrdal, and one can easily see how his blend of Keynesian economics and government action was explicitly designed to forge socioeconomic

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“consensus.”22 Myrdal’s was a conspicuously consensual form of development; but cold war imperatives made the middle ground of neutrality look quixotic, indulgent, or even dangerous. His careful mapping of development is subtle, but it suffers—perhaps irredeemably—by his omission of these cold war realities: Myrdal gives the game away when he flatly admits that his study will not take account of the Soviet sphere. He had attempted to reconstruct the “World Age” in terms of Scandinavian social democracy; but geopolitics would move in to break up this carefully calibrated utopia. The world is not Sweden.23

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John Dos Passos’s Internationalism Literary representations of development and decolonization created a quirky literary terrain. One might expect to find Richard Wright thinking about race and economics in Africa; but John Dos Passos’s entry into the development debate necessitates an extended enquiry. Biographers characterize the last years of his life in terms of his shift rightward: a decade spent “Speaking His Mind as a Conservative” in Virginia Spencer Carr’s phrase.24 To rehabilitate—perhaps even to reconsider— Dos Passos as an author notable for his cultural internationalism might seem to take literary revisionism too far. There is a gulf between the judgment of Dos Passos’s new friends on the Right, notably William F. Buckley Jr., editor of the National Review, and the response of the old, midcentury left, exemplified by the figure of Edmund Wilson. Buckley admired Dos Passos’s trenchant anti-Communism, as well as his outspoken attacks on labor unions and the growth of federal government; but in Wilson’s eyes Dos Passos had become a silly, mouthy pundit. He had forsaken modernist experiment and the craft of fiction for the easy platitudes of platform oratory. At a Republican convention in March 1962 Barry Goldwater presented Dos Passos with the “Second Annual Award of the Young Americans for Freedom”—Wilson noted that his old colleague now shared a platform with characters of “strange political persuasion,” including the segregationist Strom Thurmond.25 Dos Passos had supported the Communist ticket in 1932, and at that point regarded FDR as too right wing.

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Certainly, Dos Passos’s public performance illustrates the perils for a writer of allowing one’s language to be shaped by a preestablished political rhetoric: a trap for the left and the right. But his more considered and reflective writings (writings rather than the speeches) remain thoughtfully idiosyncratic. One can also make the straightforward point that a history of U.S. literary internationalism will be a de facto account of a broad move to the right between the 1930s and the late twentieth century. Sometimes the critic’s desire not to engage with literary transformations such as the reinvention of Dos Passos can become a form of liberal willed ignorance: if we don’t look, literary conservatism will somehow disappear. I would argue that a literary criticism informed by history, and a sense of the particularities of political change, has to take account of a thesis common in political science: the “death of the New Deal order” in the 1960s through to the 1980s. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle have described their analysis of this New Deal order as a form of “historical autopsy,” and one might add that to read Dos Passos alongside Wright is to conduct a literary-historical autopsy on the recent past.26 Accepting that Dos Passos remained a major figure in the culture right through into the 1960s, we might gain a clearer understanding of the specific configurations of his late thought. He was in many ways an early example of the “neo-Conservative”: a disenchanted ex-leftist, imbued with a Manichean sense of America’s missionary role in the world.27 Nevertheless, Dos Passos remained a major internationalist, even as he turned to the right, and never became a conservative isolationist. His later writing largely remained a writing of travel and transnational political commentary, notably in Brazil on the Move (1963). Dos Passos charted in this text a number of postwar journeys to Latin America, and folded into his travelogue an extended meditation on the developing world. He published his study shortly before a military coup d’état (tacitly supported by the United States) removed President Goulart in March 1964.28 As the title suggests, this is an account of a country in transformation, “on the move”; the phrase is the colloquial equivalent to the language of “transition” or “passing” that became the shaping rhetoric of development studies. Brazil on the Move emerged alongside

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Wright’s 1950s travel narratives and Pearl S. Buck’s writings; it was one of the most idiosyncratic studies of the “Decade of Development.” In common with Richard Wright, Dos Passos had shifted his political ground, but he also remained fascinated by economic development and “backward” countries. This is a text filled with construction projects, road building, the founding of new cities (Brasília), industrialization, sanitation schemes, and so on. Dos Passos idealizes energy and enterprise. One clue to his movement toward conservative terrain lay in his continual fascination with modernity’s social and economic energy, as seen in Manhattan Transfer. At the end of his life he transposed those interests in energy and modernity onto the figure of the heroic entrepreneur. Dos Passos’s Brazil is a place of steadfast settlers, engineers, and businessmen who work to carve cities out of the wilderness. Their entrepreneurial agency is the very stuff of development. From the start Dos Passos presents Brazil as a cosmopolitan and progressive place, the most European (and therefore “Western”) of Latin American states, and a country whose tolerant multiculturalism suggests a Southern hemisphere counterpart to American pluralism: “Under all the differences there are similarities between the Brazilian and the North American forms of democracy.”29 The task now will be to build on these foundations in order to “progress” further up the ladder of development. And the main impulses behind “Brazilian progress,” Dos Passos is told at one point, are “new roads, new cities, new buildings” (81). A large part of the book then focuses on Brasília, the planned city founded by the new Brazilian president, Dr. Kubitschek—himself tellingly described as “a new man, a progressive technician” (63). And another star of the book is Oscar Niemeyer, the modernist architect who planned the new capital. In his enthusiasm for development and progress Dos Passos also becomes an open advocate of “internal colonization” as a means to push a country into progress. Brazil is “on the move” politically but also geographically; settlement is spreading west, into the Amazon basin and the remote border terrains. One of the major figures at the start of the text is Doctor Sayão, an enthusiast for this model of development, who informs Dos Passos “about the colônia”:

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Four years ago there was nothing. This was part of the federal government’s colonization plan. Colonization was not his specialty. He’s spent his life building roads. His pleasure has been in the fabrication of highways. It is the kind of outdoor life he likes. “How many families have moved in already?” asks one of my companions. “Around three thousand. . . . This is cellular colonization, a lot of people crowding around a center.” (53)

Further on, Sayão lists the “four things he needs to get a colony going”: an all-weather road, division of the land into private parcels, hospitals, and schools. Brazil on the Move is filled with this kind of pragmatic lesson—tips for the development of Latin America. His most enthusiastic passages deal with Brazil’s new places—settlements in the jungle, cities that mark the “move” towards modernity. He remains resolutely urban in outlook, but his urban modernity, while brought into being by heroic individualism, has a strongly populist flavor. There is a grassroots form of development at work, harnessed by enterprising businessmen. In his emergent conservative essays of the 1950s, pieces such as “The Changing Shape of Society” (1950) and “The American Cause” (1955), Dos Passos had attacked bureaucratic structures (whether forged by a communist state or corporate capitalism), and then called for a resurgence of what he termed “Selfgovernment.” In his lauding of Brazilian entrepreneurialism one sees an application of ideas developed in these postwar essays: a revolutionary, anticorporate capitalism, fizzing with energy, and centered on the individual and “Selfgovernment.”30 This highly individualistic ideology is one part of Brazil on the Move. At the same time, the book fits neatly into a context created by JFK’s Latin American development policy, the Alliance for Progress. In response to Castro’s regime, Kennedy’s New Frontier administration had sought to develop a Latin American counterrevolution. This initiative, the Alliance for Progress (March 13, 1961), provided development aid in return for land reforms. The policy ultimately ran into difficulties because development based on land reform would undermine those very elites and oligarchies that the United States depended upon. Dos Passos’s text,

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written early in the decade and before the Alliance’s failures became obvious (by 1970 military rule had supplanted civilian administration in thirteen Latin American countries), was an idealistic vision of development ironically shadowed by failures the text could not imagine.31 Dos Passos gives us the private-public partnerships, the modernity, the entrepreneurialism, and the pioneering energy; but he wrote before the juntas became the face of many a Latin country. Dos Passos’s Amazon is in many ways the polar opposite of the terrain Peter Matthiessen represents (a terrain I will turn to in the next chapter). Whereas Matthiessen enthusiastically seeks out the last “Stone Age” cultures, Dos Passos is just as enthusiastic in his search for the men—and they are always men—who can turn the “Stone Age” toward modernity. Dos Passos, in other words, is an ardent apostle of development—and probably the least nostalgic of the writers in this study. There is no sense in Brazil on the Move that the Amazonian rainforest, for example, might be worth preserving. His focus is on change, modernity, and innovation. Ideologically, the anti-Communism that Dos Passos now advocated remains on the margins of the text (and his main objection to Communism seems to be that it creates cadres of bureaucrats). At the center is a progressivism that, enmeshed with his increasingly anticommunist beliefs, creates a form of neoconservative modernism. Gunnar Myrdal had created a template for highly localized economic and social development adjusted to the historical textures of particular countries. The lauding of infrastructural projects, the digressions about road building, and the analysis of how Western Brazil can be brought up to the same level of development as the Atlantic coast: these are practical instances of Myrdal’s arguments about economic “spread” from center to margin. Dos Passos then articulates a quintessential, Vietnam-era political model where this developmental ideal is meshed with anti-Communism.32 The “Unfinished Revolution”: The United States and the Developing World The travel writings and policy analyses discussed in this chapter, written between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s, share a preoccupation

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with historical transition. Wright, Myrdal, and Dos Passos were all fascinated by the rhythm of progress, by the time that it would take for supposedly primitive societies to accelerate toward modernity. I have already suggested that Wright’s arguments had begun to focus on the urgency of the transition into development; and in Rich Lands and Poor Gunnar Myrdal had explored a slower, social democratic evolution toward a developed polity. One might pursue this argument further by suggesting the advent of the United States onto the world stage had caused these commentators to reflect on a shift in historical evolution. Operating in “American time,” the speed and energy of the global movement into modernity had become paramount. Dos Passos’s Brazil on the Move represents one such application of U.S. historical time to the non-Western world. Having created one of the first fictionalizations of the hectic energy of urban modernity in Manhattan Transfer, Dos Passos now sought out vignettes that would embody an analogous energy and sense of historical tempo within the context of the undeveloped world. One also sees in some of the foreign correspondence and internationalist commentary of the late 1950s and early 1960s a sense of urgency that echoes the sense of a world “on the move” explored by Dos Passos and Wright. In 1965 C. L. Sulzberger, chief foreign correspondent for the New York Times (and the author of a major cold war jeremiad, the 1959 volume What’s Wrong with U.S. Foreign Policy?), published Unfinished Revolution: America and the Third World.33 Sulzberger sought to reanimate Woodrow Wilson’s belief in American internationalism as a revolutionary force for democracy and political transformation. The “Unfinished Revolution” was the liberal project for global democracy; Sulzberger focused on “the Revolution of Self-Determination whose prophet was Woodrow Wilson.”34 One notes the similarities between Sulzberger’s “Self-Determination” and Dos Passos’s “Selfgovernment.” The development argument had become very largely focused on temporality—on how long these processes of transition and change, this “Revolution” might take. For Myrdal, the patient social democrat, the process was evolutionary and gradual; Wright also made the simple but powerful point that the West itself had had the privilege of a long,

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accretive, gradual process of transition. But when an analyst such as Sulzberger looked at the non-Western world through the prism of development and modernity, a sweeping impatience, a yearning for the completion of the “unfinished revolution,” was apparent in his tropes and images of historical progress. Much of Sulzberger’s messianic text now reads like a premonitory taste of what would become the neo-Conservative agenda of the mid-1990s. Works such as Unfinished Revolution or Brazil on the Move suggested that “revolution” or “progress” were mobile terms, able to be recast as parts of a remodeling of early twentieth-century liberalism; the Wilsonian language of transformation, global democracy, and worldwide liberal revolution had begun its shift across the political spectrum. Wilson’s “Revolution of Self-Determination,” redux, began to offer a specifically American politics of renewal and transformation that could be exported. Social and political progress, identified across the ideological spectrum as the dynamo of civilization, would drive cultures forward. The shared lexicon of this political language of transformation was that vocabulary of “transition,” “passing,” being “on the move”: at heart this was a language of “revolution,” as Sulzberger made absolutely clear, and moreover, a revolution that would now have to be completed in way or another—and quickly. The historian Akira Iriye has written about the “cultural internationalism” of post–First World War societies; but he has also noted that this emergent “world community” was highly Americanized. For Iriye, it was American social science that was a central force in establishing paradigms of modernity, progress, and development—paradigms that usually privileged the United States as the exemplar of long-term historical currents. Horace Kallen’s Culture and Democracy in the United States (1924), he points out, had placed the United States at the center of a global, technologically driven progressivism. The sociologist Robert Park, too, was deeply embedded in an intellectual project that positioned the United States at the center of an emergent global culture. Iriye notes that Park had recognized the “emergence of a new world community” with, increasingly, “a common culture.” And, “because the United States was the center of the developing popular culture,

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the perceived new internationalism was virtually interchangeable with cultural Americanization.”35 A crude summary of U.S. cultural internationalism suggests that this early twentieth-century unicultural universalism evolved and reshaped over the following decades. It was a powerful notion, and suggested a way of engaging with the globe that was progressive, missionary, and postimperial. During the cold war, unicultural universalism took on a harder, embattled edge, because an alternate universalism pitched itself against the American model. The progressive vision of the United States as a paradigmatic world culture became crossbred with the cold warrior’s sense of ideological struggle and national security. Nonetheless, Kallen’s or Park’s arguments about the exemplary “world” nature of U.S. society and its modernity remained persuasive, as Daniel Lerner’s technocratic Passing of Traditional Society amply demonstrates. It’s also notable, as we meditate on this equation of “modernity” and “America,” that in the eyes of some international relations theorists, modernity (as ideal and guiding principle) became the foundation for cold war conflict. Frank Ninkovich has argued that the cold war eventually became “a contest of competing systems of modernization.” It was “the politics of modernization that took over,” and all along “cold-war policy incorporated a modernist sensibility.”36 This is another context in which to place Myrdal, Wright, and Dos Passos. Wright, reflecting on the long-term historical significance of the West, felt that eventually the West’s impact would be justified. His fascination with modernity, progress, and industrialism led him to accept the necessity of the Western catalyst in terms of the historical longue durée. Yet he was, like Myrdal, profoundly suspicious of what he saw as the West’s inherent, fundamental racism; both writers would have agreed with Malcolm X that a great deal of what goes on in the world is the “skin game.” He also saw the West’s short-term economic impact on Asia and Africa as catastrophic. The imposition of a Western political economy had led to a vertiginous detraditionalization that led to psychological trauma, communal upheaval, and the widespread disruption of non-Western societies. The Color Curtain argued that this compounding of racism and economic shock had led to what was in ef-

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fect an assault on the traditions and cultural inheritance of the non-European world. The development conundrum, crystallized in The Color Curtain and Rich Lands and Poor, was how to reconcile the long-term global significance of Western modernity with its shattering short-term impact upon traditional societies: a conundrum of ongoing relevance.

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6

Stone Ages Peter Matthiessen and Susan Sontag in Latin America and Asia

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Thami shook his head. “What a wonderful thing to be an American!” he said impetuously. “Yes,” said Dyar automatically, never having given much thought to what it would be like not to be an American. It seemed somehow the natural thing to be. —Paul Bowles, Let It Come Down (1952)

In a recent study of 1950s literary culture, Morris Dickstein argues for the complexity of an often-caricatured period. “American culture in the fifties was staid and repressive at the center,” he writes, “in its treatment of women, for example, or its range of political debate, but there was also a liberal idealism that survived from the New Deal and the War.” Dickstein notes the “highly self-critical” edge of a culture where “pop sociology and psychology were virtual cottage industries.”1 One might add that a further “self-critical” arena of debate, suddenly emergent at the turn into the 1960s, was the new field of an actively political writing rooted in environmentalism and the nascent ecology movement. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) signaled a shift in the culture, as the human degradation of the natural world became the site for an acerbic assault on modern life. Carson’s polemic was matched by other telling interventions in the field of environmental writing—books that bound

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.

together accounts of a vanishing natural world with laments for the civilizations (“primitive” or tribal) rooted in these fragile ecosystems. Peter Matthiessen’s work from this time (1961–15) focused on a microscopic attentiveness to specific, threatened ecologies. His work also marked an important moment in the steady globalization of American writing’s imaginative outreach. Like Richard Wright and Paul Bowles, Matthiessen was a peripatetic figure and a traveler-explorer who immersed himself in cultures far from the apparent centers of cultural gravity in the Eisenhower era, the crabgrass frontier and the flannel suits. And like those figures, Matthiessen was a figure whose responses to world cultures anticipated themes that entered the cultural mainstream a good number of years later. The generation of writers who created travel narratives, expatriate fiction, and journalism at this time (roughly the mid-1950s to the mid1960s) created some of our first accounts of phenomena that are now clichés: globalization, Americanization, transnationalism. They lacked a vocabulary to articulate in theoretical terms the implications of a world moving toward increasing interdependency; but their texts grow from and represent such interdependency. There is a decisive cultural shift in the literal “place” of writing, as a small but significant number of authors pushed out from the Eurocentric metropolis of Anglo-American modernism toward what Wright had described in The Color Curtain as a new geopolitical center. In the travels of Bowles, Matthiessen, Wright, Dos Passos, and Buck a new internationalism takes shape. These writers emerged from Euro-American modernism, but their interests were becoming more cosmopolitan in this interim period between modernism’s waning and postmodernism’s advent. Having graduated in 1950, Matthiessen went on to found The Paris Review with his friend George Plimpton. Given his Ivy League background and an early immersion in European culture, he seemed set for a career with familiar contours. But he then veered away from an established pathway in the most intriguing ways; he turned from Europe toward what was for an American author the margins of the written world: Asia and South America. In a number of books at the end of the 1950s and the start of the 1960s, Matthiessen quickly drew a diverse

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terrain for the American traveler-writer. The Cloud Forest: A Chronicle of the South American Wilderness (1961), Under the Mountain Wall: A Chronicle of Two Seasons in the Stone Age (1962), and his novel At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965) set out a fresh global cartography. All three texts, written against the background of America’s deepening involvement in Vietnam, embed themselves in a world of primordial jungles, embattled indigenous peoples, earnest (but troubled) missionary endeavors and repeated conflict between “advanced” and “backward” cultures. Matthiessen tends to be ghettoized as a naturalist writer, but his work resonates in ways that repeatedly break down such narrow definitions.2 For Matthiessen, explorations of the natural open up into reflections, too, on human ecologies. He then constructs a series of important representations and analyses of non-Western cultures jeopardized by progress. Under the Mountain Wall followed an expedition into Papua New Guinea in search of the remote Neolithic tribe, the Dani; The Cloud Forest recorded a journey into the South American interior; and his novel, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, was set in Peru’s remote fastnesses. This body of work sits on the intersecting borders between anthropology, travel writing, memoir, and political commentary. From the end of the 1950s through the early 1960s he worked in two areas that had growing significance in the changing map of American internationalism: South America and Southeast Asia. These two works, The Cloud Forest and Under the Mountain Wall, are significant contributions to the writing of cultural difference. Each traces a distinctive route into that tangled terrain where politics, travel writing, and ecopoetics interact. Readers have been reminded of Conrad, Rider Haggard, and Edgar Rice Burroughs; but Matthiessen radically updates the earlier, typically British literature of adventure and exploration to encompass a new postwar terrain.3 He is an elegist for “vanishings”—cultures (human, animal, and natural) on the verge of extinction. His journeys into the Amazon or the islands of the Western Pacific are acts of witness to cultures passing into oblivion. In The Cloud Forest he writes that the Amazon basin “might be compared to western North America of the early nineteenth century.”4 These are also works rooted in the classic

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literature of exploration and encounter. Matthiessen makes the intertextual linkages plain in frequent references to figures such as Colonel P. H. Fawcett or the naturalist W. H. Hudson. Such figures occupy that space of Anglo-American exploration whose apogee was the late Victorian or Edwardian imperialist tale; and Matthiessen sometimes sounds like an heir to this tradition, marooned in a very different age of air travel. He is self-aware of the project’s anachronism: it is surely absurd at the end of the twentieth century to imagine oneself as a Victorian explorer: “I dearly wish that there were another word for ‘expedition,’ since I could hardly apply that term to any trip sponsored by myself: one ‘mounts’ a reputable jungle expedition and equips oneself with pith helmets, lean white hunters, inscrutable Indian scouts, and superstitious bearers who will go no farther” (153–54). Typically, he notes, the expedition is backed by millionaires or foundations; or the explorer sets off alone, doomed on his quest—though Matthiessen will of course return. Ultimately, then, “I am not an explorer” and “none of these basic conditions can be said to apply to the outing I have in mind” (154). If the age of exploration is over, what does it mean to go on an “outing” into the wilderness? In Matthiessen’s South America natural history, and not political history, is important. The book is dismissive of the hectic and turbulent scene of Latin American politics. After a visit to a mission church, and a minor diversion into the history of the Spanish conquests, he notes that “this is a journal of the mountains, and these random notes are out of place here.” He then refers the reader to the “many fine books on the Inca civilization and Spanish seizure” (63–64). Whether it is possible in the Americas to turn away so absolutely from the history of encounters and conquests is a question that then arises. The declared focus on the “journal of the mountains” is admirably direct, but a focused work can become an exclusionary work: “mountains” crowd out the “Spanish seizure.” It’s telling that the one chapter about the continent’s cities is italicized and presented as an interlude amid an overriding emphasis on the wild places of the Andes and the Amazon. “Notes on the Cities” tells us that “they are probably the least interesting aspect of this continent” (114; Matthiessen’s italics: a slight misjudgment, one feels,

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when considering Rio, Buenos Aires, and Lima). The narrative centers unremittingly on mountain, forest, river, and savannah. This is a terrain outside historical change, unshaped by industrialism or urbanism; the travelogue concentrates on spaces resistant to progress. Political and social change appear distant from Matthiessen’s methodical record of encounters with pristine wilderness. As a naturalist and amateur anthropologist, Matthiessen focuses on a preindustrial, tribal arcadia, although real and present danger is also part of Matthiessen’s paradise and he has no time for images of peaceful noble savages. Yet the South America of the 1960s was a place of revolutions; it is instructive that these delineations of birdlife, local topography, and tribal custom emerged at the very moment when the continent’s politics were becoming intensely revolutionary. “In the late 1950s Latin America began passing through its most important change since it had obtained independence from Spain 140 years earlier,” notes Walter LaFeber.5 Furthermore, Latin America was increasingly the target of American military and diplomatic maneuvers. Fears of Communist insurgency had already led to interventions such as the cia operation in Guatemala in 1954.6 In his inaugural address Kennedy had outlined an “Alliance for Progress” in the Western hemisphere, a project that would extend American involvement in the societies of South America.7 For the most part, Matthiessen’s prose carefully skirts these tumults and developments, and indeed The Cloud Forest’s one (intensely Conradian) vision of Latin American revolutionary politics is couched in a tone that judiciously blends the jaundiced, ironic, and surreal. Matthiessen describes a scene that could come from Nostromo: “Sooner or later the traveler in South America may happen upon a revolution, and especially should he choose to spend much time in Bolivia, where the government is chronically so fractured and unstable that it can scarcely be called a government at all” (77). He shares Conrad’s suspicions of revolution, taking the Burkean line that it is better to accept present imperfections than risk chaos for a utopian dream: “An unpromising situation was made worse by the revolution and agricultural reforms of a few years ago, which, while commendable in principle, included the nationalization of the valuable tin and silver mines, and gutted the poor

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national economy by placing the country’s exploitation in the hands of amateurs” (77). Matthiessen’s work provokes reflections on what I want to call the representational contract of travel writing. Typically, readers praise travel writers for the accuracy and insight of their chronicles and accounts—their capacious engagements with the foreign and the unknown. We often praise travel writers for the privileged access they give us to people and terrains outside our everyday sense of the world. But the logical extension of this claim is that travel writing can also fail—or at the very least, find itself compromised or undermined—due to moments of omission and ignorance, misrepresentation and imprecision. In Matthiessen’s work this sense of privilege focuses on the natural world and on his drive to experience vanishing ecologies before they finally disappear. How does a naturalist whose main fascination lies in wilderness and the preindustrial places of the globe represent cultural transition and social change? Of all the writers featured in this study, Matthiessen is the least interested in a progressive modernity focused on industry or the city; his travel writing is the mirror image of Richard Wright’s exploration of urban modernity. While Wright found the persistence of tribalism deeply perturbing, Matthiessen was continually excited by such primitivism. One way to read Matthiessen (following the example of Bowles) is to follow the infiltration of politics into prose that at first discounts such actualities. By the latter part of his career, Matthiessen had become an overtly engaged and polemical writer, particularly in his campaigns alongside Plains Indians communities.8 But the seeds of political engagement were present in the early work; and so one critical task is to explicate how early representations of the natural world and the later fascination with such commitment intersect and cross-fertilize. Even in texts written at the start of his career Matthiessen found his eye occasionally drawn away from the near-pastiche exploration discourse I have been analyzing and toward an angrier language of denunciation. The earlier work is largely about exploration and extinction, the later work about destruction and the politics of survival. But in The Cloud Forest there are a number of important moments when these two

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languages come together in intriguing and compelling ways. “Someone has estimated,” he writes, “that the number of Indians butchered in the few decades of the rubber boom exceeded all the lives lost in World War I—this figure entirely apart from the thousands who died in slavery” (235). Recognitions of brutality in South America lead to an ironic meditation on how North Americans destroyed a great cultural and environmental heritage: “To this day the wild peoples of the interior rivers are considered by most South Americans as subhuman creatures, to be shot at sight—not, it should be said, that North Americans are in a very good position to bewail this matter” (235). These sentences, with their tough, ironic edge, mark one moment where Matthiessen moves from the elegiac record of vanishings to a more political attack on extinctions.

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Peter Matthiessen’s Entropology While Matthiessen’s work at first appears hesitant in encounters with history’s processes, these texts take on deeper resonances and implications when placed in context. Matthiessen, American explorer of jungle and rain forest, worked his way into unknown places at the moment when the nation’s own 1960s journey into the “primitive,” the “Stone Age” was beginning. The interstices, junctions, and cruces where his work takes on suggestive juxtapositions with this broader U.S. engagement are many. Whether a text such as Under the Mountain Wall is in some ways a national allegory is a question that demands attention. There are certainly intriguing parallels between Matthiessen’s journey into New Guinea and the broader journey of national self-discovery occasioned by Vietnam, not least the circumstances surrounding the trip. He traveled with a Harvard Peabody anthropological team; the group included a member of the Rockefeller family, Michael Clark Rockefeller, who disappeared on a later trip. It’s worth remembering that the Rockefeller Foundation had been central to the establishment and growth of anthropology as a discipline in the interwar period. This party of Ivy League and East Coast young luminaries was symbolically a grouping of the “best and the brightest,” in David Halberstam’s famous phrase.

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Halberstam’s study looked at the evolution of Vietnam strategy and charted the ways that America’s intellectual-political elite had created policy for Southeast Asia; Matthiessen made a parallel journey in the company of a similar fraternity of the young American elite.9 The trip seems to have had it all: patrician young men moving through the primordial jungle; tribespeople in an antediluvian setting; reports of cannibalism that surfaced after Rockefeller’s mysterious disappearance. Rockefeller himself joined the expedition as a photographer, returned to the United States, and then decided to do further work in New Guinea, which is when he vanished, possibly killed by the very tribe the team had come to study. As cited in Milt Machlin’s gaudy account, The Search for Michael Rockefeller (1972), Rockefeller saw the expedition in highly romantic terms: “‘It’s the desire to do something adventurous,’ he explained once, ‘at a time when frontiers, in the real sense of the word, are disappearing.’”10 Matthiessen’s commemoration of the southeastern Asian Stone Age formed part of the fascinating, interlocking project that grew out of this fieldwork. Matthiessen was part of a team that included the anthropologist Karl G. Heider and the anthropologist/documentary filmmaker, Robert Gardner. The trip produced Under the Mountain Wall, but also Heider’s The Dugum Dani: A Papuan Culture in the Highlands of West New Guinea (1970) and Gardner’s film Dead Birds (1964). Gardner and Heider also collaborated on Gardens of War: Life and Death in the New Guinea Stone Age (1969)—an extensive photographic record drawn from the trip.11 Heider suggested in The Dugum Dani that the expedition aimed to create a kind of modernist anthropology where the classic forms of fieldwork would be blended with contemporary technology: “The expedition was organized and led by Robert G. Gardner, Director of the Film Study Center of the Peabody Museum, Harvard University. Gardner conceived of the expedition as the broad study of a small group, combining the traditional anthropological approach with the literary layman’s impressions and the fullest possible use of modern recording instruments, still and movie cameras, and the tape recorder.” In thoroughly progressive fashion, the Harvard team wanted to bring to their encounter with a primitive culture both the panoply of new

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technologies and the innovative interdisciplinary methods of modern academe: “The Harvard Peabody Expedition was an attempt to focus all these different approaches at once on the same small tribal group of people.”12 Heider described Matthiessen as the “literary layman” of the team, and in the various projects produced by the team his “literary” approach is woven into the anthropological account. The Dugum Dani, for instance, cites Under the Mountain Wall as a source. In later anthropological works on the Dani, such as Hampton’s Culture of Stone (1999), Matthiessen is routinely cited alongside Heider and Gardner as if he had become part of the received anthropological disciplinary narrative.13 Gardner and Heider themselves, in Gardens of War, positioned Matthiessen as the team’s ecologist: “Peter had come to write a readable account of the whole natural fabric of Dani life, a task which he quickly and skillfully accomplished.”14 What, though, is the relationship between this contextual material and the text itself ? Matthiessen composed Under the Mountain Wall as a report—a version of the naturalist’s or the anthropologist’s account of a field trip. His prose has the flat, laconic tone of such writing; the emphasis is relentlessly on precision, detachment, “objectivity.” Under the Mountain Wall begins to work as a written counterpart to the visual records of the journey created by Rockefeller and Gardner; parallels with documentary film are immediately apparent. The book itself incorporates visual elements: a whole slew of photographs from Matthiessen and other members of the expedition (including the unfortunate Rockefeller), together with diagrams of the Dani settlements. On one level, such documentation and putative objectivity reinforces the neoscientific claims of anthropological writing (Matthiessen had been drawn into a neoscientific rationale by being categorized as the expedition’s “ecologist”). On another, documentary style is said to achieve a paradoxical humanism by bringing us into a direct and supposedly “unmediated” relationship with cultures and peoples far from us. Through these dry, restrained, and objective records, as William Rothman suggests, the viewer engages empathetically with cultures that on the face of it are very distant from her own experiences.15

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What particularly interests me about Under the Mountain Wall, though, are the prose’s discursive flickers. Matthiessen sometimes steps outside documentary code to create a more fictional effect, notably when he imagines the consciousness of his native peoples or suggests interiority behind the behaviorism that occupies the text’s foreground. In his anthropological record, Matthiessen concentrates on the typical behavioral patterns of classic ethnography: rituals, mysticism, conflict, death, and maturation. But he frequently breaks the code of this ethnographic discourse by giving an imagined shape to the interiority of his tribespeople. In the following passage about one tribesman, Walimo, Matthiessen places this figure in a rather conventional matrix of feelings: sympathy, fear, rivalry: His alternative is to muster such assistance as he can and either attempt to retrieve his pigs or seize eight others. But this is not an ordinary theft, and, since Amoli is very much more powerful than Walimo, reprisal might well end in the latter’s death. Walimo’s father, Yoli, is the village kain of Hulibara, but he is not a steadfast man, nor is he likely to stand up strongly for his son: Yoli’s first act, when he heard of his son’s peril, was to retire to his new village in the mountains, out of harm’s way. And while the men of the southern Kurelu are fond of Walimo and give him sympathy, they are afraid of Maitmo, and they know too that their own war kain, Wereklowe, shares Maitmo’s conviction that Walimo should be killed. For these reasons, in addition to the fact that Walimo’s guilt is recognized, the chances are that he will find no friends to help him.16

Matthiessen’s typically laconic discourse shifts into this more speculative, inward-looking analysis of “Stone Age” character. Having begun his account with a carefully understated invocation of the anthropologist’s or naturalist’s method, Matthiessen then stretches documentary record toward a more speculative account of the motivations and aspirations of the indigenes. With its mixture of analysis, judgment, and omniscience, this is in many ways a passage that could come from a classic realist novel. It’s also worth pausing at this crux, as we did in reflecting on Bowles’s creation of Amar, or Wright’s meeting with the

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Islamic radical in Color Curtain. For all three writers, there is a kind of wrinkle in their writing, as the discourses of the journalistic report or the historical novel or the ethnographic record are broken by a language of puzzlement and speculation: what really is the interior self of the “primitive” character or the Islamic subject? Even while addressing a self-limiting problem (Matthiessen, the “literary layman,” who will account for the natural history of New Guinea) the writer is clearly drawn toward seductive riddles of Otherness. Under the Mountain Wall is more forthcoming in its transcription of the “primitive mentality” (to use Lévy-Bruhl’s phrase) than it is in delineating interior Western consciousness. Concentration on the rituals and ceremonies of the Dani is unremitting, and the account finishes with little sense of the journey’s impact on the expedition’s members: it might be easier to map the other than to map ourselves. The text could have taken a different turn, if Matthiessen had attempted to write self-reflexively about how Westerners found their journey of discovery—and found their selves. But there is nothing in the text of such responsiveness, either intellectual or emotional. The denial of self-representation is clearly linked to the demands of the documentary method; but it does raise further methodological and philosophical questions about the text’s broader representations of difference. For a start, Matthiessen has steadfastly disengaged his writing from a consideration of how cultures interact. The expedition sought out one of the few remaining “lost” tribes; but even in this case there had been interactions between the tribes and modernity (in the shape of the Dutch colonial authorities). And the expedition itself represented a further encounter with the modern. But there are absolutely no Western presences in Under the Mountain Wall. Given what happened—or did not happen—to Michael Rockefeller, these silences and absences are all the more telling. One problem Matthiessen faced is that his account has somehow to register historical change, even if the text’s overwhelming drive is directed toward a depiction of a hypostatized culture seemingly beyond process. In order to fulfill the documentary quest for realism such historical change needs to be accounted for; but in order to register change, the edifice of documentary style becomes fissured. Matthiessen’s so-

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lution is to create a remarkably oblique account of historical change. It is in minute changes to the natural ecology that he presents, in the very last paragraph, intimations of the deeper shift. Cultural change will break into the sealed naturalist’s paradise. The last paragraph contains a tangential but powerful representation of social and ecological transformation—a change heralded by the sudden appearance of the humble bee. In the encounters between Western invaders and native ecologies, bees often marked out the first incursions of the Europeans (the honeycomb being a major source of food for the settlers). As Alfred Crosby points out, the honeybee was originally native to the Middle East and the Mediterranean; its arrival in the Americas or Australia was a moment of “ecological imperialism.”17 Matthiessen works toward an analogous sense of miniaturized cultural and ecological revolution in this passage: While he kept watch, Weaklekek’s hands moved rhythmically in the sun, for once again he had started a long shell belt. He was proud of the old ways, proud that his own people went on as they always had since the time of Nopu. But from the Waro changes in the land had come, brought by the wind: a strange blue flower had rooted in the fields, and in an old oak by Homuak there was a yellow stinging bee. This bee gathered in large swarms, howling in the hollow wood like a bad wind in the rocks of the Turaba; in the past moons it had come across the swamps and gardens from the Waro village on the Baliem. The blue flower and the yellow bee did not belong in the akuni world and had no name. (256)

A portent of change, certainly; but the writing is elusive and elliptical, and the agents of change remain unnamed. Matthiessen registers this change as an epistemological turning point for the Akuni: “The blue flower and the yellow bee did not belong in the akuni world and had no name.” That which has no name is the new; and a new creature heralds a new era. Given that so much of this text has been about rituals of recognition and naming, Matthiessen makes the understated point that cultural change will occur when new things and creatures—so far unnamed—enter the enclosed primitive world. The writing here, in its

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indirection and its acute responsiveness to political/ecological change, is a notable instance of Matthiessen’s fusion of anthropological insights with an elliptical, poetic responsiveness to the natural world. This is where the strength of Matthiessen’s best writing lies, in recognition of dynamic interplay between the ecological and the political. Matthiessen is an elegist, a writer committed to the commemoration of worlds and ways of living on the verge of extinction. So does he occupy that antitransitional position explored by Paul Bowles in The Spider’s House? One critique of Matthiessen might run as follows: that mourning for a threatened ecology becomes a reactive environmentalism resistant to modernity and cultural change. The environmentalist writer, faced with a world where natural habitats and wildlife face extinction, is more than likely to conclude that artificial change should be resisted at all costs. There is in Matthiessen’s work a vein of this elegiac environmentalism; and he mourns the passing away of human cultures with the same keening elegy he accords the death of animal species. But the power of Under the Mountain Wall lies in the glancing but powerful acknowledgement of historical inevitability. This recognition deflects the text from its origins as documentary testament for a vanishing tribe, toward a nuanced account of how this culture, like all cultures, undergoes transition. The parallels with Bowles are intriguing. The Spider’s House contained what I called “encoded annotations,” where the shifting pluralism of the Maghreb seeped into the text (even as its protagonist, Stenham, clung nostalgically to images of unchanging Fez). And in Under the Mountain Wall the final discursive resting point is a writing that reinscribes Matthiessen’s attentive ecology while incorporating tribalism’s inevitable transformation. Another, intertextual reading of Matthiessen’s quasi-anthropological travel writing is possible. Matthiessen’s representations of the Dani in The Cloud Forest—saturated in minute attentiveness to custom and ritual, and tinged with elegy—are rooted in classic anthropology. Matthiessen’s books often carry extensive bibliographies; both The Cloud Forest and Under the Mountain Wall display an extensive grounding in the works of such ethnographers as Bronislaw Malinowski and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Matthiessen’s texts enter into dialogue with these writ-

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ers. He invokes and inflects classic anthropology by his minute attentiveness to custom and ritual, and by his recurrently elegiac tone. The impress of Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques (1955) and its exploration of “entropology” (the destruction of native cultures and the rise of the global “monoculture”) resonate through his work.18 The Cloud Forest also concretizes and foregrounds the elegiac undercurrent implicit in one of Matthiessen’s intertexts, Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922)—that inaugural fieldwork study of New Guinea’s tribal cultures. Malinowski bracketed his work with rueful observations of cultural loss. As he writes in the foreword: “Ethnology is in the sadly ludicrous, not to say tragic, position, that at the very moment when it begins to put its workshop in order, to forge its proper tools, to start ready for work on its appointed task, the material of its study melts away with hopeless rapidity.”19 He had identified a poignant epistemological moment, balanced between the new discipline’s expansion and its subject’s vanishing: the “new vision of savage humanity . . . opens out like a mirage, vanishing almost as soon as perceived. . . . Alas! the time is short for Ethnology, and will this truth of its real meaning and importance dawn before it is too late?”20 Malinowski concluded Argonauts of the Western Pacific with an elevated plea for anthropological humanism and a recognition that ultimately the discipline was self-reflective: “Though it may be given to us for a moment to enter into the soul of a savage and through his eyes to look at the outer world and feel ourselves what it must feel to him to be himself—yet our final goal is to enrich and deepen our own world’s vision, to understand our own nature and to make it finer, intellectually and artistically.”21 The sheer humanistic progressivism of this sentence (Malinowski—like Lévy-Bruhl—confidently enters “the soul of a savage”) speaks to us from a lost era. Or does it? Matthiessen inserted himself into Malinowski’s ironic space (a discipline ordering itself at the moment that its subject faced oblivion) and then blended classic anthropology with natural history and the Conradian novel of adventure and exploration. His early 1960s texts, like those of Bowles, can be read as reverberations produced by the impact of early twentieth-century ethnography on the midcentury writer’s imagination. For Bowles, Lévy-Bruhl’s’ “primitive mind” in-

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formed representations of the North African marabouts; and for Matthiessen, Malinowski’s elegiac vanishings provoked a travel writing shadowed by imminent loss. As he wrote at the start of The Cloud Forest, listing places in South America, “the very names evoke so much, and are their own justification for this journey, for one must hurry if one is still to glimpse the earth’s last wild terrains” (2). What is significant about this (inter)textual crux is that by placing his work in conversation with an earlier phase of anthropological writing, Matthiessen also looped his work back into a contemporary setting. Malinowski’s “savage humanity” became Matthiessen’s preoccupation, just as LévyBruhl’s “primitive mind” became the subject for Bowles’s fiction. But fictions of “savage humanity” also gained a grimmer, more ironic resonance when read off against the 1960s historical context. Although Matthiessen developed his writing in counterpoint to classic anthropology, a more immediate, contrapuntal intertextuality grew out of historical circumstances. After all, America discovered in Vietnam a “Stone Age” that would transform the nation’s politics. Matthiessen had described a journey into the primitive that took place at the moment when other Americans also began to formulate a decisive vision of what the conflict between an advanced civilization and a preindustrial society would look like. Matthiessen had begun the decade by spending his two seasons in the stone age; but Curtis LeMay, the Air Force Chief of Staff, added a rather different image of the stone age—of countries that could literally be moved backwards in historical time. In his 1965 autobiography he notoriously outlined his strategy to defeat North Vietnam: “My solution to the problem would be to tell them frankly that they’ve got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age with Air power or Naval power—not with ground forces.”22 America’s wars, in the “American Century” of the late 1900s, would be “Stadialist” wars where the Republic, development’s acme, met cultures many rungs down the developmental ladder. Now, the moment of attack would, with compelling conceptual logic (given the paradigms explored in this book), be the moment to offer the prospect of ascent up the ladder to the vanquished. Inversely, as LeMay brutally but cor-

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rectly pointed out (by reading out developmental logic), the ultimate threat was defeat coupled with descent down the ladder of civilizations: the “Stone Age.” This is military threat framed as progressivism: compliant nations will be moved ahead, up the ladder of progress; defeated enemies will be moved backward in historical time. LeMay’s sense of military efficacy is thoroughly embedded in the development theory explored in this book: development—or rather, the removal of the promise of development—becomes the inevitable militaristic extension of enlightened Stadialism. Within this 1960s setting, Matthiessen’s commemoration of the “Stone Age” was less an elegy than a retort.

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Small Wars Alongside these two works of travel writing Matthiessen produced his best-known novel, At Play in the Fields of the Lord. On wild Peruvian terrain, the action pivots on various missions in the South American wilderness. The setting is the archetypal space described by Neil Whitehead in his survey of representations of Amazonia, “a place inimical to the development of human culture, despite its appearances as ecologically productive. Accordingly, indigenous human cultures are viewed as basically small-scale, necessarily mobile and therefore unable to produce the higher forms of cultural endeavor such as cities, temples, roadways, and so forth.”23 Although At Play in the Fields of the Lord has been read in the light of the “imperialist idea,” it would be truer to say that it takes the exploration narratives familiar from the British imperial heyday, then revises those narratives for an era of American hegemony.24 Matthiessen pushed the Conradian novel of colonialism and exploration toward a postwar Americanized world where the jungle harbors zealous missionaries, would-be terrorists, and broken-down local despots. He created a catalog of the typical figures of the Latin American missions: the earnest evangelicals, deracinated hybrids, and converted natives. Matthiessen is careful to delineate a new typology of Americans abroad, as in his cruelly satirical portrait of the missionary, Martin Quarrier: “It was a gringo; in the remote corners of the world the short-

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sleeved flowered tourist shirt, the steel-rimmed glasses, khaki pants and bulldog shoes had become the uniform of earnest American enterprise.”25 The meeting between Quarrier and Lewis Moon is a comic but insightful scenario where the upright wasp missionary meets, and is mocked by this Native American jester figure. Another character in Matthiessen’s triptych is the converted native. Again, the narrative voice is careful, precise, reined-in, and quietly ironic. Matthiessen shows us the Indian who is “identical to his counterpart in every frontier river town from Puerto Maldonado in Peru to Porto Velho in Brazil, from Riberalto in Bolivia to Bahia Negra down in Paraguay.” This is “the native with the bright smile and the Christian humility, the sharp eye and the crucifix” (37). The mission is producing neocolonial standardization. Into this zone, with its resistance to the “development of human culture,” Matthiessen inserts contemporary American agents of development: the missionary and the military-technological pragmatist. Quarrier is the evangelizing missionary who aims to convert the Niaruna Indians; and Moon is a part-Indian mercenary who has moved from his birthplace on the Great Plains to the South American rain forest. Matthiessen presents caustic images of what advanced cultures are up to in such premodern places: The tail of the fighter was inscribed: fuerzas aéreas And on the pocked fuselage of the light plane was scrawled: Wolfie & Moon, Inc Small Wars and Demolition (8)

The creator of the “small wars and destruction” is Lewis Moon. His business as architect of “small wars” echoes the title of one of America’s first guides to guerilla combat, the renowned Marine Corps Small Wars Manual of 1940.26 Moon, moreover, is Matthiessen’s version of the transitional man caught between cultures. Raised on a Native reservation, he travels in South America as an ironic hybrid figure, both “American” and Indian, forged by transmigration from North to South America, and from Native to Anglo and then to Hispanic Americas. Lewis Moon

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is a character whose represented roots are in a biracial American family; he is the liminal protagonist with a foot in two cultures. Half-Cheyenne, with a “mongrel white” father (48), Moon is the very model of deracination and conflicted origin; and with its protagonist torn by racial division the novel begins to take shape as a version of the “mulatto tragedy” of such authors as Nella Larsen. Matthiessen sets the story in the South American jungles, but his racialized narrative turns back to the encounter between white Americans and the original natives. The missionary, Martin Quarrier, worked at first on the Far Tribes Mission in North Dakota; it is also from this classic Plains territory that Moon has emerged. The novel transplants this foundational encounter to the setting of another first encounter, in Latin America, broadening the narrative into a mythic confrontation between savage and civilized. As the local prefect, the Comandante, brutally notes: “‘The Indians, in my heart I love them, they are my brothers, but this great land must be made safe for progress’” (40; italics in the text). The white missionaries attempt to convert the Indians; At Play takes its place in a long tradition of texts about the American mission (reaching right back to Bartolomé de Las Casas). The subtlety of Matthiessen’s imaginative project lies in a refashioning of this familiar model to anticipate more recent thinking about cross-civilization conflict and the colonization of the Americas. Illness, particularly influenza, plays its part in the novel’s plot, a detail that anticipates later historical work on the extinction of traditional societies.27 The recurrent discussions of miscegenation and hybridity anticipate contemporary debates about racial identity. Moon sees himself as a new man, for instance when he points to the color of his own skin: “‘The color of modern man! In a few centuries everybody is going to look like Lewis Moon’” (42). Contrast the white missionaries, starkly caricatured for their narrow racial identity. Quarrier has the “flat ugly voice of Western white America” (48). Moon is a variant of the post–Huck Finn primitive who flowers in fictions of the 1950s and 1960s. In the domestic scene, the Beats had populated America with wandering, yearning mystics—young men energized by the anticonformist idealism epitomized in Kerouac’s work. Expatriate writers had their own versions of this figure: Bowles’s young

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North Africans, with their drug-induced hallucinations and marginality, and Matthiessen’s native peoples, cut off from modernity, are distant cousins of the domestic “Outsider” figures: the rebels, outsiders, and nonconformists of the 1950s and 1960s. These representations foreground a specific interpretative conundrum. From one angle, they are exoticized versions of the Beatnik, neoexistential primitive. Thus the visions, idealism, and antiestablishment violence of Bowles’s Amar or Matthiessen’s Lewis Moon. But do such representations simply reinscribe a clichéd primitivism? Woven into the domestic culture, Mailer’s hipster figure gained unsettling, oppositional force; but put back within a non-Western context, these representations might merely become familiar instances of the primitive and the irrational. There is a central ambiguity in the fictions of Matthiessen and Bowles: that the primitive, mystical outsider (these Orientalist Huck Finns) forges a critique of the West, but only through the discourse of primitivist apocalypse that is itself marked by exoticism. In looking at the foreign or the strange, and creating a representation of violent primitivism, the writer returned us to familiar images of a Caliban. Such a process seems to be working its way out in a number of my texts. Certainly, Paul Bowles created anti-Western protagonists imbued with the very same nihilistic and apocalyptic fantasies found in his own conversational asides. But Matthiessen’s romantic primitivism creates a counterweight to these narratives of self-division. He positions Moon as an idealist who yearns to merge back into the native world. Similarly, Moon is (and again the parallel is almost parodically plain) a self-representation in that his yearning to fuse with an ironically primitive world of pristine jungle and threatened tribes embodies the author’s antidevelopmental idealism. Matthiessen develops Moon into a form of missionary-avenger figure, a character increasingly convinced that he can become a kind of savior for the native peoples. Moon simulates his own death in a plane crash, then parachutes into the jungle as if he were a god come to earth. Driven both by a yearning for apocalyptic vengeance and by a perverted idealism, Moon sees himself as a redemptive leader of the indigenous peoples. For Matthiessen, the idea of the “mission” has a capacious signifi-

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cance that denotes not just the literal missions in At Play in the Fields of the Lord, but the more general mission of the Western traveler who penetrates and explores a foreign terrain or culture. And as a (historical) latecomer to this missionary activity, he senses the irony and selfdeception of the Western position. As he writes in The Cloud Forest: “I have the impression that we make these people nervous, arriving armed as we do, on a mission so senseless as to make them suspect that it is actually something nefarious; they get our hopes up with their optimistic tales simply to get rid of us” (180). How does Matthiessen’s work fit into an intellectual milieu framed by a concern for development and a progressive sense of social evolution? Matthiessen seems, on first consideration of this question, to be one of those 1950s recusants, rather like Paul Bowles. Neither is interested in the quintessential terrain of U.S. progress, the suburbs, or the affluent society coming into focus in the work of Updike or Cheever. Each is fascinated by cultural and natural extinction. Two tendencies work through 1950s and 1960s fictions and travel reportage. First, the sense of transition and transformation Richard Wright sensed in his travels in West Africa: decolonization, the advent of the Americanized market, progress in all its forms. But other writers were fascinated by cultures and representative figures standing outside such transition. “Traditional society,” in Daniel Lerner’s phrase, was “passing,” but this was not to the good for some creative writers: in Moroccan courtyards or South American forests Paul Bowles and Peter Matthiessen found an exoticism resistant to cultural change and fascinating in its antimodernity. Matthiessen’s studies of Amazonia and Southeast Asia are also an Americanization of those zones of primitive plenitude described by Lévi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques. Like Lévi-Strauss, Matthiessen explores the melancholic passing of ancient and indigenous cultures, and mourns the onset of depleted modernity. Two imaginative outcomes were probably possible at this point: a minutely exact “anthropological” immersion in the tribal world, or immolation, an act of destruction, the apocalyptic consuming of ancient and modern (the ending of At Play in the Fields of the Lord). Later, in his Native American studies,

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Matthiessen found a way through the impasse by breaking into a politics of resistance where the writer would become an ally and amanuensis for beleaguered communities faced with extinction.

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Susan Sontag: The Empire of Vietnamese Signs One of my arguments in this book has been that the writings of the cold war were engaged in a prolonged intellectual dialogue with French cultural internationalism. The intellectual conversation with French thinkers, especially the anthropologists and cultural theorists who emerged in the latter days of the Empire (that is, Lévy-Bruhl, Lévi-Strauss, Fanon), was widespread and deep; their pervasive influence will require further excavation as the mapping of American literary internationalism is carried forward. This Franco-American cultural dialogue shaped texts written in the first glow of Luce’s “American Century,” narratives including The Spider’s House or Under the Mountain Wall. By the late 1960s Fanon’s work had resonated within the United States; but the movement of Fanon into the emergent discipline of postcolonial theory had been predated by other migrations of French thought into the postwar intellectual milieu. One can trace the impress of certain key structural ideas upon American literary globalism. Bowles had adopted Lévy-Bruhl’s “primitive mentality” into his representations of American expatriates abroad in North Africa; Matthiessen’s intensely “entropological” accounts of Southeast Asia and Amazonia emerged from an inflected reading of Lévi-Strauss. But it was Susan Sontag, in essays on anthropology and the Vietnam War, who created the most sustained engagement with the French—an engagement that can be seen as a complex contestation, rewriting and ambiguous endorsement of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Sontag’s essays “The Anthropologist as Hero” (1963) and “Trip to Hanoi” (1968) create complex intertextual maps between the American experience of the 1960s and French readings of the primitive, especially that fashioned by Lévi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques (1955). Although Sontag’s Against Interpretation (1966) is nowadays remembered for the classic essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’” her collection was

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also a significant addition to the discourse of American internationalism. “The Anthropologist as Hero” (1963) was an early attempt to chart the Franco-American intellectual network I have been stressing, and in particular to commemorate the significance of French anthropology to American writers. She admired the theoretical esprit, creativity, and independence of Claude Lévi-Strauss (who had also, as he pointed out, been influenced in turn by Anglo-American anthropology). Lévi-Strauss had “invented the profession of the anthropologist as a total occupation, one involving a spiritual commitment like that of the creative artist or the adventurer or the psychoanalyst.”28 Sontag constructed a panegyric on Tristes Tropiques, the account of his fieldwork in the Brazilian interior before the Second World War: “But the greatness of Tristes Tropiques lies not simply in this sensitive reportage, but in the way Lévi-Strauss uses his experience—to reflect on the nature of landscape, on the meaning of physical hardship, on the city in the Old World and the New, on the idea of travel, on sunsets, on modernity, on the connection between literacy and power” (72). One sees in this argument a case for the benign influence of Tristes Tropiques upon Lévi-Strauss’s American followers. This work established a paradigm of personal engagement and discursive variety (“landscape . . . the idea of travel . . . sunsets . . . modernity”) whose influence can be seen in Matthiessen’s work or in Sontag’s own travel writings, including “Trip to Hanoi.” Yet as Tristes Tropiques fed into the intellectual bloodstream of American writing, it also carried forward a pessimistic reading of the destinies of indigenous civilizations. Sontag sensed that the optimistic leftist progressivism of France’s midcentury intellectuals had mutated into a gloomy rendering of cultural collapse: “It is strange to think of these ex-Marxists—philosophical optimists if ever such have existed— submitting to the melancholy spectacle of the crumbling prehistoric past. They have moved not only from optimism to pessimism, but from certainty to systematic doubt” (73). The sense of an ending, Sontag suggests, is pervasive in Lévi-Strauss’s work: “The tropics are not merely sad. They are in agony. . . . The anthropologist is thus not only the mourner of the cold world of the primitives, but its custodian as well. Lamenting among the shadows, struggling to distinguish the archaic

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from the pseudo-archaic, he acts out a heroic, diligent, and complex modern pessimism” (80–81). Sontag’s internationalist journey in the 1960s was dominated by movements through varieties of “complex modern pessimism.” In reading Lévi-Strauss, she found that the tropics were “not merely sad” but “in agony”; and five years later she made her first trip to Asia, to Hanoi, where she experienced at first hand the “tristes tropiques.” “Trip to Hanoi” (1968) suggests in its title a context framed by traveling and journeying rather than the polemics and denunciations of the antiwar movement. Sontag, a representative 1960s liberal in many ways, was naturally opposed to the war in Vietnam; but the journey occasioned an open-ended narrative of cultural encounter, self-exploration, and anthropological investigation. She was an enthusiastic acolyte of Roland Barthes (Against Interpretation applied his semiotic methods to contemporary popular culture), and her first paragraphs about Hanoi almost read as if she were anticipating his L’Empire des Signes (1970) in the light of Vietnam. Barthes found himself in a Japan where the very basis of being “in” a culture was radically destabilized by linguistic alienation—cut adrift among the signs of a foreign language whose significances he had no means to understand. “Trip to Hanoi” begins as an analogous journey into intellectual discomfort and disturbance. As one journeys outward into a foreign place, one moves inward into a psychological-intellectual realization that linguistic and cultural difference remove familiar reference points. This is a banal point when stated baldly; but in Sontag’s Asian disorientation some rather piercing realizations about the nation then emerge. Self-representation is important. Sontag declares herself to be “a stubbornly unspecialized writer who has so far been largely unable to incorporate into either novels or essays my evolving radical political convictions and sense of moral dilemma at being a citizen of the American empire.”29 Although this sentence carries a straightforward oppositional charge in the reference to the “American empire,” the essay’s critique in fact grows out of Sontag’s self-characterization as “stubbornly unspecialized.” She presents a defiantly “generalist” persona, pitted against the military and diplomatic specialists. In an age

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of technocracy (one can catch the trace of the attack on technocracy, bureaucracy, and specialization that had appeared in David Riesman’s and Christopher Lasch’s polemics) the nonspecialist will simply arrive, observe, and work toward her independent essay. Sontag’s identity is also self-scrutinizing and ironic: like Paul Rabinow in Morocco she chooses to place herself in quotation marks, to become “American” rather than taking American identity as a given. There are also deep parallels with Richard Wright’s work of the late 1940s and 1950s. For both writers, a form of open-ended humanistic encounter, on the street or in the marketplace or in a home, forms the basis of the reportorial style. The method’s deliberate amateurishness and serendipity might guarantee insights denied the specialist. Sontag had not been to Asia before, but the trip proved at first to be even more alienating than she had imagined: “But being in Hanoi was far more mysterious, more puzzling intellectually, than I expected. I found that I couldn’t avoid worrying and wondering how well I understood the Vietnamese, and they me and my country” (207–8). From the start of the essay Sontag shifts the focus from the war itself toward the construction of national identities and the networks of representation that have already created for her an a priori image of Vietnam: “Vietnam had become so much a fact of my consciousness as an American that I was having enormous difficulty getting it outside my head” (209); Vietnam has, as it were, colonized the American imagination. But there are immediate disjunctions between representation and reality. Being in Vietnam is like meeting “a favorite movie star . . . and finding the actual person so much smaller, less vivid, less erotically charged, and mainly different” (209). Eventually, after citing a Godard movie—Godard was one of her reference points for establishing a poetics of defamiliarization (and another link with French culture)—she settled into citing her own journal to illustrate the initial encounter with Asia. Her first entry: “The cultural difference is the hardest thing to estimate, to overcome. A difference of manners, style, therefore of substance” (212). Her attention to style, surface, and signs had led to a form of critique where the apparent superficialities of a foreign culture constituted a paradoxical substance. If a sympathetic outsider could barely understand Vietnamese

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society, what would this imply about the broader American project to read, decode, and manage Asia? In Sontag’s essay the sheer resistance constituted by cultural difference would always serve to undermine Western attempts to master non-Western worlds. These entries constitute the first part of the essay, and as one reads further a clever formalistic response to Vietnam emerges. Sontag underwent a change in her relations to the country, and after a while, she claimed, she had gained some understanding; her original impressions were just that—impressions eventually overtaken by a richer awareness. She created a formalistic method to embody the transition: there is an opening record, transcribed from journals, which is the account of a naïve entrant into the contact zone where one meets foreigners. Then there is a reflective, approbatory account of Vietnam’s social and cultural richness. Initially, Sontag is perplexed. Seen through the eyes of American liberalism, Vietnam lacks density, irony, complexity and the sense of self that are the hallmarks of civilization. America for Sontag was a cultural blunderbuss—built on “the self-righteous taste for violence, the insensate prestige of technological solutions to human problems” (234). Yet, she argued, the national culture had also created spaces for a rich self-actualization; the American self was a rich, layered entity—“All I seem to have figured out about this place is that it’s a very complex self that an American brings to Hanoi” (229). Sontag herself had created further exploratory narratives of interiority and selfhood in experimental fictions such as Death Kit (1967). Compared to this sociopsychological richness, the shapes of Vietnamese collectivism seemed thin. Eventually, she begins to enjoy “the ambiguities of my identity” (230), acknowledges the “callowness and stinginess of my response” (234) and then enters into a dialogue not with her own complexity but that of another culture. As a quasi-anthropologist, textual critic, and cultural theorist, Sontag had a very different way of “doing” international relations to that of the typical analyst. There is little of Realpolitik in her writing, but nor is she particularly engaged with the heavy machinery of classic Marxist theory. Instead, her writing works upwards and downwards in its analyses. “Upwards” toward the nuances of language and mannerism in social encounters, toward a careful observation of the

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codes of encounter between her American party and their North Vietnamese hosts; “downwards” toward the deep structures of this alien society, particularly the religious and social structures that have created thoroughly non-Western conceptions of self. The essay then becomes a form of highly self-aware, self-monitoring autobiography, where the journey into a foreign space occasions a critical account of one’s own American identity. For Sontag, Vietnam in 1968 triggered a form of reverse ethnography, as she became self-critically aware of her own cultural identity; yet as we search backwards into the patterns of American literary internationalism it is Richard Wright, again, who emerges as the prescient figure in developing a narrative where American identity would be scrutinized through travel and cultural encounter. But whereas Sontag had to make her first trip to Asia to find that contact zone, for Wright otherness could be found closer to home, in the West, in Europe, and particularly in Spain.

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7

African American Representations of the Hispanic

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Remaking Europe

In Color and Democracy Du Bois described the Spanish empire’s decline and positioned Spain as a political frontera, a borderline state where European glory and failure shone: “Spain illustrates the interaction between European labor and colonial slavery, between democracy and oligarchy. Today the valiant ancient heart of Spain lies near death, overrun with the lice of grandees, land hogs, and piteous ignorant masses. Only the beautiful limbs are alive and twitching with the dream of La Hispanidad.”1 Other Americans found Spain to be a paradoxical country full of vigorous energy and antediluvian cultures, an amalgam of decline and romantic vivacity. Some black writers were interested in flamenco, a dance form that seemed quintessentially Spanish and the incarnation of many key Hispanic cultural themes. Ralph Ellison’s 1954 essay “Flamenco” highlighted a certain primitivism in Spanish culture. “Cante Flamenco,” he wrote, was a folk form “which has retained its integrity and vitality through two centuries during which the West assumed that it had, through enlightenment, science, and progress, dispensed with those tragic, metaphysical elements of human life which the art of flamenco celebrates.” In flamenco one could find a cultural continuum linking the present back to a premodern, preenlightenment world. The progressive Richard Wright, as we shall see, disliked this

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primitivism; Ellison, however, admired flamenco’s ancient passion and staked a claim for its integrity. His flamenco dancers drew “a great deal of their vitality from this tradition that contains many elements which the West has dismissed as ‘primitive,’ that epithet so facile for demolishing all things cultural which Westerners do not understand or wish to contemplate. Perhaps Spain (which is neither Europe nor Africa but a blend of both) was once more challenging our Western optimism.”2 That is, Spain’s folk-culture could be decoded within an interpretative matrix solidly entrenched in arguments about modernity and the meaning of Western culture. Ellison also linked flamenco primitivism to black musical forms such as the spiritual and jazz. Ellison found in jazz, in the spiritual, and in flamenco a non-Western, nonclassical authenticity. Rejecting the charge of “primitivism,” he found in these musical forms a deliberate harshness: “The nasal, harsh, anguished tones heard on these sides are not the results of ineptitude or ‘primitivism’; like the ‘dirty’ tone on the jazz instrumentalist, they are the result of an esthetic which rejects the beautiful sound sought by classical Western music.”3 Ellison’s essay lays out some of the questions that Richard Wright would explore at greater length in Pagan Spain (1957). Two points stand out. Ellison positions Spain as a hybridized country, both European and African. Spain straddles two civilizations—and black writers explored Spain in part as a way to explore their own dual identities within and outside American culture. Ellison identified the parallels between Spanish culture and his own black American culture—after all, “Americans have long found in Spanish culture a clarifying perspective on their own.”4 Second, Spanish culture embodied a primitivism that challenged ideals of a classical Western culture. Flamenco (and for other writers, bullfighting offers a similar challenge) presented a roughhewn and folkloric plenitude in place of an elite culture founded on received ideas of beauty. Spain emerged in the work of Ellison and Wright as a place that deserves the overused term hybrid. At the start of Pagan Spain Wright recalled a 1946 conversation with Gertrude Stein, who encouraged him to visit that country: “‘You’ll see what the Western world is made of.

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Spain is primitive, but lovely.’”5 As Stein had sensed, Spain might be a terrain both “Western” and “primitive.” The African American writer used this insight to create a reverse ethnography, identifying a primitive otherness within European space. By so doing Pagan Spain revises the stereotype of a West that is both unitary (“the West”) and advanced. For Wright, Spain was also a bridge, a place where Europe and Africa meet. This was not a wholly comforting notion; but it did mean that the West was less monolithic than the developmental model suggested—a country, even a European one, might be primitive while putatively Western. African American representations of Spain are significant because they disrupt and reshape the developmental paradigm. Development codifies countries, typically deploying a linear model of progress and fitting countries into the familiar stages of evolution (thus the First, Second, and Third worlds). Spain, though, slipped between categories or, to use the language of development, between “worlds”; and African American writers were insistently interested in Spain for just that reason. The midcentury impulse to go to Spain was shared by many American writers: a desire to visit the site of the epochal civil war, which was for the leftist artist the foundational ideological struggle. Wright himself confessed that “the fate of Spain hurt me, haunted me; I was never able to stifle a hunger to understand what had happened there and why” (10). In his interest in Spain, and his “hunger to understand” its fate after the fall of the Republic, Wright kept company with many midcentury American artists whose careers evinced a distinct “Hispanophilia.” Recalling a trip to Madrid in 1947 Saul Bellow wrote: “And then of course I had followed the Spanish Civil War and knew as much about what had gone on in Spain between 1936–8 as a young American of that time could learn.”6 At that time the Abstract Expressionist painter Robert Motherwell created his series of Elegies to the Spanish Republic, a parade of largely black canvases dominated by oblique representations of archetypal Spanish subjects such as bullfighting.7 These works emerged from the intense ideological struggles of the 1930s and 1940s, and reflected the widespread sympathy of many American artists for the Republican cause. But they were also works in tune with the steady globalization of U.S. writing and art—the sense that events in Spain,

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four thousand miles away, might now become (as they did for Motherwell) imaginative touchstones animating years of production. Pagan Spain is usually placed as a minor work in the Wright canon, but read within the context of development it reveals itself as a supple, ironic commentary on establishment models of the global political economy, an African American riposte to the overwhelmingly white models of globalization forged by 1950s theorists. Wright’s working manuscript title, “Pagan Spain: A Report of a Journey into the Past,” demonstrates his sensitivity to these questions. The idea of a journey “into the past” is a not unfamiliar one in the writing of the period; it animated Matthiessen’s work in Southeast Asia and Latin America. Wright’s text explicitly parodies the tradition of colonial and anthropological reports from primitive lands. Foregrounding a sense of a journey backwards to earlier stages of development, Wright mimics a pseudoscientific colonial discourse. Wright transposed a white discourse of African exploration into a European setting. He, the black explorer, will now create a “Report” on the antediluvian culture of Spain. Such ironic reversals are typical of Pagan Spain’s articulation of a reverse ethnography that creates looking-glass anthropology where a progressive black American explores the customs of a foreign, ancient, European civilization.8 Pagan Spain emerges from an intellectual context formed by other American writers and artists who had traveled to Spain; but it pushes the familiar representation away from the civil war’s left/right toward a developmental opposition (primitive/progressive). Wright had arrived in a country textualized and represented by Stein, Motherwell, and Hemingway. But he also encountered a terrain written by black Americans. Although the progenitor of his trip was Gertrude Stein, the journey then became a mapping of Wright’s racial and cultural identity as a black American Protestant. In exploring a fascination with Spain, he edged himself into specific literary genealogy: a chain of black American writers who found in Spain a seductive and fascinating cultural zone. Wright’s journey was framed by the context of late American modernism, but it was equally framed by African American writing. As M. Lynn Weiss notes, in one of few specific accounts of Pagan Spain, the “larger ambition” was “to place the history of African

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Americans (and particularly Wright’s own history) in a global context.”9 Weiss charts that “ambition” by looking at Pagan Spain in the framework of Wright’s oeuvre or via analogues with white American writing about Spain. She notes Wright’s meeting with Hemingway in 1937 at the second American Writers’ Congress in New York, mentions his contact with Stein, and concludes that “Wright was especially conscious of this literary tradition and of his place in it.”10 But it seems equally likely that Wright was working within, and against, specifically black forms of written engagement with Spain. Take, for instance, Nella Larsen. Applying for a Guggenheim Foundation award in November 1929, Larsen specifically contrasted America with France and Spain, and argued for the “intellectual and physical freedom for the Negro” in Europe. She received a grant in 1930 and, after residence in Paris, traveled through Andalucía and Mallorca in 1931–32.11 Her biographer, Thadious Davis, notes rather listless journeys among the Anglo-American expatriates. Larsen’s great claims for Spain failed to generate new writing. Meanwhile, Claude McKay was working in Bilbao, Madrid, and Barcelona. He spent the winter and spring of 1929–30 in Spain and produced the manuscript “The Jungle and the Bottoms” (he later rejected the text for publication). McKay, Jamaican-born and sometime editor of the Liberator, shared the intensely romantic interest in Spain that affected many American artists: “I am glad I shall at last grow romantic about some country,” he wrote to his agent.12 McKay became at the end of his life a Catholic, and he credited his conversion partly to the Spanish trip. But in his autobiography, A Long Way from Home (1937), McKay also stressed Spain’s significance as a hybridized place where antique Catholicism rubbed against North Africa and the Islamic world. Traveling between mainland Europe and his home in Morocco, McKay understood Iberia as transitional site between civilizations: “Once again in Spain, I inspected the great Moorish landmarks. And more clearly I saw Spain outlined as the antique bridge between Africa and Europe.”13 African American writers remapped Europe. Paul Gilroy has identified Wright’s “metacommentary on the value of western civilisation” in Black Power, and one might extend this notion of a “metacommentary” to incorporate a broader tradition of black writing about Spain—a Spain

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interpreted as a kind of laboratory of “western civilization.”14 These writers saw the interconnections between Europe and Africa and were less interested in European distinctiveness than in the “antique bridge” of the Iberian Peninsula. This interest in topographical bridges, connections, and borders, articulated by black writers from the 1930s through the 1950s, now seems prophetic. Robbie Robertson suggestively redraws the global map in The Three Waves of Globalization: “The world consists of three main continents—Afro-Eurasia, the Americas, and Australia. Thus Europe is not a continent but a subcontinent, and the ‘Near East’ or ‘Middle East’ is more properly described as West Asia.” Traveling in and writing about Spain, African American writers presciently sensed the wisdom of identifying not a hermetic European continent but a place of transitions and bridges called “Afro-Eurasia.”15 The central figure in the Afro-Eurasian tradition was Langston Hughes. The Baltimore Afro-American asked Hughes to go to Spain during the civil war because he had learned Spanish when staying with his father in Mexico. His memoir, I Wonder as I Wander (1956), deploys a now-familiar romanticism: “One of my dreams had always been to go to Spain,” he writes. “I had touched Spain briefly during my days as a seaman—Valencia and Alicante—but had not been able to go inland. I loved what I saw then of Spain.”16 Hughes effectively became a war correspondent, but he took an explicitly African American line on the conflict’s racial dimensions, notably Franco’s decision to deploy North African troops. For Hughes, the Moorish ancestry of Spain was resonant; he noted traces of “Moorish blood” still visible in the population.17 Hughes developed a more nuanced and sophisticated response to Spain than that seen in his early political poetry. His writing from the 1930s had tended to overlook larger historical narrative in favor of propagandistic immediacy. Poems such as “Hero—International Brigade” and “Madrid—1937” are examples of competent agitprop poetry locked in the civil war’s immediate drama. They invoke and reinstate a familiar iconography of heroism and battle sites but do little to forge a fresh language of political conflict. I Wonder as I Wander moves on from this classic leftist form toward a writing sensitized to the complexities of the struggle, particularly racial crosscurrents: central passages of

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the reminiscence deal with the black presence among the Republicans. One chapter, “Negroes in Spain,” is a litany of names, an internationalized list that testifies to black presence:

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At Villa Paz I saw also Ed White, one of the first two men of color to come to Spain in the original Lincoln Brigade. The other, Alonzo Watson, had been the first Negro slain in the Spanish War. In the hospital at Quinto I talked with Crawford Morgan of New York. Under treatment at Benicasim were Frank Alexander of Los Angeles, George Waters from San Francisco, Andrew Mitchell of Pittsburgh, Jeff Wideman and Henry George of Philadelphia, and Nathaniel Dickson of Chicago. In the various transport units there were a number of St. Louis Negroes—Tom Brown, Frank Warefield, Jimmy Cox, Larry Dukes, Walter Callum.18

For Hughes, to write about the Civil War as an African American is to map Spain in terms of blackness—and to configure America as a series of black cities (“New York . . . Los Angeles . . . San Francisco”). Like Wright, Hughes, even as he moved out into the new terrains of American literary internationalism, was also creating a fresh sense of America itself: a nation being remade by internal black migration into a series of significant urban centers. Hughes seeks out examples of black sacrifice to position within a narrative about resistance to fascism. Thus the elegiac ring to these sentences: “The other, Alonzo Watson, had been the first Negro slain in the Spanish War.” What happens here is that Hughes moves toward placing Spain as a significant African American lieu de mémoire, a site of memory, a place where history and private commemorative writing interacted.19 Published just before Pagan Spain, I Wonder as I Wander embraces some of the same concerns. Although there is no direct evidence that Wright’s text was written as a counterpoint to that of Hughes, the authors’ long and close involvement suggests a shared nexus of interests. In the mid-1930s Wright had enlisted Hughes’s support for New Challenger magazine; and during at least two periods of his life (1935 and 1951) Wright gave public lectures on Hughes’s work. Their two books might be read as a furtherance of a lifelong literary conversation, a dialogue that had now turned outwards into interna-

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tionalist writing and Spain.20 Hughes, for instance, anticipates the attentiveness to religion that will be such a major part of Wright’s study. He notes the Falangists’ religiosity: “The Falangist papers reaching Madrid were most religious, even running in their advertisements slogans such as viva cristo rey! viva franco! as if Christ and the General were of equal importance.”21 What one sees here is the development of cultural politics: a writing alert to the structures of Spanish politics, culture, and society. Hughes’s realization that even the secular world of politics is saturated with religious iconography meshes with Wright’s condemnation of Hispanic “paganism.” As such, I Wonder as I Wander both anticipated and perhaps underpinned Wright’s attempt in Pagan Spain to decode a foreign culture’s foundational structures. What this African American genealogy of writing about Spain demonstrates is an increasingly concrete awareness of local politics and culture, and especially a sense of variegated identities within that country. Hughes and Wright became authors who “write back” to Stein and Hemingway by telling these other, overlooked Spanish stories. Stein had told Wright that Spain would demonstrate “what the Western world is made of ”; but it was Wright, rather than Stein herself, who pursued an explication of what that phrase might mean. And for Wright, it was the “pagan” that constituted a Spanish ideology. Richard Wright’s “Other World” Wright himself had first written about Spain during the civil war; in 1937 he published six articles on the topic for the New York Daily Worker. They shared Hughes’s desire to draw attention to black American presence in the conflict, listing African Americans in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.22 Wright was also keen to draw correspondences between the position of African Americans and the Spanish Loyalists, thus creating a cross-cultural comparison that anticipated Pagan Spain. These articles were relatively early instances of Wright’s expanding cultural internationalism. One might think of Wright’s career in terms of a steady movement toward cultural anthropology: questions of cultural otherness and mediations between different societies came decisively

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to the fore during his 1950s work. He moved on from the polemics and urban naturalism of his early career to become a literary anthropologist, translator, and traveler. In 1959–60, for instance, he attempted to publish “This Other World: Projections in the Haiku Manner.” He had completed some four thousand haiku, although the project was to remain unpublished (the manuscript is in the Beinecke Library at Yale University). Floyd Ogburn has written about these poems as a departure from Wright’s established poetic; but one might see these poems in a continuum with the Wright who earlier in the decade traveled to the Gold Coast and then Spain. The journey into the poetics of alterity maps out a journey into the other, on the page, just as Wright’s literal voyages took him away from the Western order of things. The title of the Haiku project is telling. “This Other World”: in journeys both actual and written, Wright sought “these other worlds.”23 Wright left France for Spain on August 15, 1954. He had just returned from a trip to the Gold Coast of Africa, and in writing Black Power he had noted the persistence of tribalism and paganism. Michel Fabre, Wright’s biographer, characterizes these trips to Africa and Spain as linked by a preoccupation with irrationality. Underlining Wright’s “own faith in rationality” Fabre contends: “For the first time in Africa, Wright was really afraid, afraid of the pagan religion with its incomprehensible and bloody practices.”24 Fabre is surely right to locate this link between Wright’s varied travel books—even if he was looking at the utterly different terrains of Francoist Spain and decolonized Ghana, Wright had deployed a form of “globalist” analysis that enabled him to identify communalities across cultures. His 1950s hypotheses underscored the centrality of progress and development to national cultures; he then sought out instances of the primitive or the pagan to illustrate the absence of such development. This concern with primitivism might seem a highly refracted form of exoticism, but it became a subtle instrument of analysis because Wright then turned primitivism back upon the West itself. As Wright traveled to Spain in 1954 and 1955, and worked on the manuscript from February 1956, a sense of the pagan acted as the guiding logic to demonstrate how a European nation had reversed itself down the developmental ladder, becoming a backwater.25

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There is a recurrent cultural irony at play in Pagan Spain. The profoundly secular Wright finds Spanish Catholicism to be pagan in its intensity; the Spanish, faced with an African American, insistently associate him with the natives discovered by imperial missions. Many encounters turn on Wright’s resistance—comic and exasperated—to Spanish representations of him as the archetypal heathen subdued by the conquistadores. In one early meeting Wright is taken to Barcelona cathedral and told, “‘the first Indians that Columbus brought from America were baptized’” (16). The Spanish elide differences between African Americans and Native Americans: both are Other. Wright then becomes a generic primitive and an object for solicitous but patronizing ministrations. In a later exchange, a visit to a village sees him become quite literally the object of scrutiny. While peasants stare at him, he is “an object that was neither human nor animal” (131–32), Wright becomes the target of the racialized gaze.26 Above all, the villagers configure Wright as a “heathen”: “It was beginning to make sense; I was a heathen and these devout boys were graciously coming to my rescue. In their spontaneous embrace of me they were acting out a role that had been implanted in them since childhood. I was not only a stranger, but a ‘lost’ one in dire need of being saved. Yet there was no condescension in their manner; they acted with the quiet assurance of men who knew that they had the only truth in existence and they were offering it to me” (16–17). The obtrusive phrase here is “the only truth in existence.” Pagan Spain is a text where the object of anthropological study usurps the ethnographer’s position. Wright is often constructed by the Spanish gaze; but equally, he himself decodes and interprets the Spanish. He can present himself as an enlightenment traveler, quizzical and ironic, imbued with relativism and a sense of enquiry. What marks out the Spanish as premodern and pagan is the belief that they possess “the only truth in existence.” Wright and the reader are complicit in their knowledge and sophistication, while in an ideological reversal the Spanish become modern equivalents to the indigenes who met Columbus. Pagan Spain can be read quite literally as a meditation on Stein’s phrase, “Spain is primitive, but lovely.” For Stein, Spain’s primitiv-

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ism denotes a familiar notion of romantic “backwardness.” Images of Spanish ruin and romantic failure emerged in American writing as early as Washington Irving’s The Alhambra (1832); but Wright was the first writer to attempt a detailed ideological analysis of Iberian backwardness. “Paganism” is cognate with this backwardness, but it also has a politicized inflection, denoting a religious cultural order hostile to progress, modern liberalism, and rationality. Wright used “pagan” ironically: the term has no sense of pleasure or sensuality, signifying instead dark irrationality and resistance to modernity. Exploring Spain alongside journeys to Africa and Indonesia, Wright found a bitter lesson for the European colonizers. That archetypal imperial power, Spain, had become a bizarrely antediluvian society. At the center of its national identity, the sheer backwardness of premodern belief; within Spain’s civilization trenchant antimodernism incubates. The Spanish thought they had brought civilization to the heathen peoples of the Americas, but Columbus had transported a fervently elemental Christianity from which the Spanish barely progressed. “Spain” now signifies a curious and dangerous fusion of intense Catholicism and repressive totalitarianism; the country has conspicuously fallen out of the currents of historical progress. At one point Wright even imagines this historical backwardness encoded in landscape itself. Amid the empty hills he sees the occasional industrial chimney, marking out Spain’s feeble progress: “There were no signs whatever of industrial or farm life and when, later, I did see a rare stack-pipe, black or red, lost and lonely in the scaly hills, it resembled an exclamation point, emphasizing how far Spain had fallen to the rear of her sister European nations” (117). Underpinning this commentary is a straightforward progressivism; Wright reads off a landscape literally encoded with signs of development. Terrain becomes text, a script where the traveler finds marks of economic or political advance. Pagan Spain complemented Wright’s other works of the 1950s as an ironic critique of European pretensions to advancement. It was a skeptical take on Galbraith’s “decade of development” and European pretensions to advancement. Spain was a modern nation configured as part of a dark continent, saturated with superstition, irrationality, op-

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pression, and totalitarianism. In his final paragraphs Wright explicitly rooted this “irrational paganism” in 1492’s imperial impulse:

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In 1492, in the name of God, the Son and the Holy Ghost, the Catholic king and queen, Ferdinand and Isabel, had driven the Moors from Spain, had liquidated the Jews, and had scattered a handful of wilful Gypsies (who were supposed to have forged the nails that went into the cross of Christ!) to the winds. The Inquisition, that cold and calculating instrument of God’s terror, had whipped the Spaniards into a semblance of outward conformity, yet keeping intact all the muddy residue of an irrational paganism that lurked at the bottom of the Spanish heart, and Spain had been ready with one Will, one Race, one God, and one Aim. . . . And Spain, despite all the heroic sacrifices of her liberals, of her poets, of her lovers of liberty, had remained stuck right at that point. (191)

This is a diatribe, saturated with Wright’s suspicions of Catholicism and right-wing totalitarianism. It is also an image of antidevelopment, of what happens to countries that fail to progress. For Wright, 1492, rather than initiating a fresh wave of development and progress, marked the internal halting of Spanish civilization and the unleashing of an Inquisitorial regime and a single-minded ideology that were the antithesis of progress. Wright’s apostles of modernity are the “liberals . . . poets . . . lovers of liberty”; on the other side of the developmental chasm sit the Church and the imperialists. Wright had created his own, highly partisan form of a liberal, republican progressivism, where Spain’s monarchy, its Church, and its empire were inserted into a Manichean worldview, a historical fable where a country could literally become stuck at an earlier stage of history. The Composition of Pagan Spain: “Combination” As a work of travel literature and reportage, Pagan Spain furthered Wright’s fascination with factual or documentary discourses, and with a literary globalism that might draw on the analytical methods of the so-

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cial sciences. Earlier texts, such as 12 Million Black Voices (1941), quite deliberately invoked academic research in anthropology and sociology; the subtitle, A Folk History of the Negro in the United States, pitched for scholarly weight. The use of images (Wright was cocredited along with “photo-direction by Edwin Rosskam”) also evinced an interest in photo-documentary realism; the same year saw Walker Evans and James Agee publish Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.27 Wright later provided the introduction to Black Metropolis (1945), the study of black Chicago by Horace R. Cayton and St. Clair Duke. Black Metropolis was a sociological and polemical work, a monumental analysis of the African American urban community that folded together statistical and demographic analysis with political theory. Wright introduced the book with praise for the “honest science” of Chicago—the sociological research of luminaries such as the University of Chicago’s Robert E. Park.28 In a telling comment Wright noted that “the dominant hallmark of the book is the combination throughout of the disciplines of both sociology and anthropology.”29 Such “combination” is the formalistic key to Pagan Spain. The text straddles stylistic registers as it dips into and out of a variety of generic conventions. Pagan Spain might be read as a typical example of the discursive polyphony that Michael Kowalewski contends is typical of travel writing. Kowalewski points to the “dauntingly heterogeneous character” of this form: it “borrows freely from the memoir, journalism, letters, guidebooks, confessional narrative, and, most important, fiction.”30 These various registers can be found in Wright’s book, but its two dominant modes are a form of analytic essay (derived from political science or sociology) and a wryly ironic first-person narrative. When he began to work on the “Spanish job” Wright examined the nation’s history; he also researched at the United Nations library in Geneva, reading “up-to-date information on the development of Spain’s economy.”31 This combination of historical reading with socioeconomic analysis provides Pagan Spain’s template. One way to read this text would be as a calculated entry into a dialogue with these other forms of analysis. Wright was certainly aware of academic codes and methods. On his journey to Geneva he was accompanied by his old friend,

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Gunnar Myrdal, and then Wright dedicated Pagan Spain to Myrdal and his wife: “For my friends alva and gunnar myrdal who suggested this book and whose compassionate hearts have long brooded upon the degradation of human life in Spain” (no page number given). Pagan Spain’s analytical, essayistic, and academic registers are clearly indebted to Wright’s grounding in the social science of Myrdal, Park, and the Chicago school. At the argument’s center is a commentary that would not be out of place in a work of political science. One example: Wright positions throughout his study a series of extended quotations from a Falangist study, Formación Política: Lecciones para las Lechas. He uses this text to mesh Columbus’s explorations with Spanish fascism. The text is in the form of a Socratic dialogue of questions and answers. One query asks: “Since when have we known that Spain has a destiny to fulfil?” to which the answer given is: “Since the most remote ages of its history.” The litany of imperial episodes includes the conquest of the Americas, the moment “when the sovereigns, Isabel and Ferdinand, began, through the Universities and the Spanish missionaries they sent there, to civilize the whole of America” (30). The Formación Política has two functions within Pagan Spain: first, it acts as a skein to link together the text’s disparate sections; second, it reveals the Spanish ideology in the ideology’s own words. This is self-revelation, an exposure of pagan Spain through its own discourse. Wright grandiloquently deploys Formación Política as a representative text for the West in its totality: “I was staring at the mouth, at the veritable fount of Western history” (30). This is Wright’s answer to Stein’s comment that Spain is where one can find what the Western world is made of. He recasts Stein to imagine this “West-ness” in explicitly ideological terms: Spain as the avatar of imperialism. What Wright is doing with this form of critique is to search for a country’s central, defining ideology or what Myrdal had termed a “creed”: through the nation’s texts or documents that ideology or creed reveals itself. Wright steadily defines the Spanish ideology: pagan religiosity, antimodernism, authoritarianism, racism, secrecy. At this point his debt to social and political science becomes explicit. Both Black Metropolis and An American Dilemma were constructed around

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the identification of a central, common American ideology; the broad gist of both works was that African Americans shared that belief system, and that more should be done to incorporate them into society. Gunnar Myrdal had explicitly identified the American “creed” at the very start of An American Dilemma: “Americans of all national origins, classes, regions, creeds, and colors, have something in common: a social ethos, a political creed.”32 In writing about Spain, Wright transposed the logic of An American Dilemma, seeking out the “social ethos” or creed that the Spanish held in common; but he then reversed Myrdal’s American progressivism, locating a European creed of antidevelopmentalism. Pagan Spain’s argumentative pattern moves between a generalized, theoretical analysis and highly specific, localized illustrations of Spanish life. Wright attempts, not always successfully, to yoke together a generalizing rhetoric (centered on ideology or creed) with the travel-writer’s reliance on telling vignettes or cameos. Pagan Spain’s random and varied encounters are bracketed by a cultural anthropology attuned to this underlying creed or social ethos. When he confirms the correspondence between Spanish Protestants and African Americans the reader recognizes a carefully precise, social scientific rhetoric: “I shall describe some of the facets of the psychological problems and the emotional sufferings of a group of white Negroes whom I met in Spain” (137; Wright’s italics). Behind such sentences lies Wright’s reading of sociologists such as Myrdal and Cayton. At the same time, Pagan Spain undoubtedly positions its neoscientific rationale alongside a more familiar humanism. Note in the above sentences Wright’s emphasis on the “psychological problems” and “emotional sufferings” of the Protestants: even as he is drawn toward the distanced, putative reasoning of the sociologists, Wright always remains a humanist, a traveler concerned with individual suffering in its specific context. One unsettling scenario takes its cue from Spain’s hostility toward its tiny Protestant minority. Wright here follows Myrdal’s logic in An American Dilemma by focusing on minorities and their discontents. The “only truth” trumpeted by the Spanish was a pre-Enlightenment Catholicism: political opposition, in this authoritarian state, equaled religious heterodoxy. The title of one section, “The Underground

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Christ,” could hardly be more explicit. Wright’s account of underground Protestantism plays on some stereotypical fears of Catholicism as an inquisitorial religion, while he admits his own distance from his childhood faith: “I was born a Protestant. I lived a Protestant childhood. But I feel more or less towards that religion as Protestants in Spain feel towards Catholicism. What I felt most keenly in Spain was the needless, unnatural, and utterly barbarous nature of the psychological suffering that the Spanish Protestant was doomed to undergo at the hands of the Church and State officials and his Catholic neighbours. For that exquisite suffering and emotional torture, I have a spontaneous and profound sympathy” (136). Travel for the African American writer could be a negotiation with religious identity; we have already seen how the hajj enabled Malcolm X to assert his Islamic selfhood while paradoxically imagining himself as a typical, tongue-tied American abroad. Wright found another form of doubled religious identity in Spain. He remains the fiercely disaffected atheist, but his acute sensitivity to daily oppression also means that for the Spanish Protestant he can experience a “spontaneous and profound sympathy.” Even as he writes about Spain, Wright turns back to America. The emphasis on individual liberty and freedom of expression, coupled with a dissection of the policing of Spanish society, create a distinctively African American account of Franco’s regime. While the book bears the contextual impress of the cold war and ideological struggles between Communism and Fascism (for example, in Wright’s fascination with totalitarianism), it is also marked by a black Southerner’s alertness to harassment and the psychology of marginality. Just as in earlier civil war writing he drew parallels between the Spanish Loyalists and African Americans, so Wright cannot help but see analogies between the Protestants in Spain and the “American Negro”: “I am an American Negro with a background of psychological suffering stemming from my previous position as a member of a persecuted racial minority. What drew my attention to the emotional plight of the Protestants in Spain were the undeniable and uncanny affinities that they held in common with American Negroes, Jews, and other oppressed minorities. It is another proof, if any is needed today, that the main and decisive aspects of

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human reactions are conditioned and are not inborn” (137). Crucially, the affinity is between the “American Negro” and the “Protestants in Spain,” not between Protestants of the two nationalities. Wright works in such passages as a polemical structuralist, an analyst of different societies concerned to map underlying cartographies of suffering. Note the lesson that Wright draws from the shared modes of suffering in the United States and Spain: “It is another proof, if any is needed today, that the main and decisive aspects of human reactions are conditioned and are not inborn.” The final lesson, in other words, is not merely that “oppressed minorities” throughout the world share a “background of psychological suffering”; it is that social conditioning underpins such pain: “Human reactions are conditioned.” Wright’s travels often lead to rather vertiginous moments, when the temporary liberation from the self that one might expect from travel collapses back into fixity and received identity. His acknowledgement of his Protestant origins is one such instance: travel as return to origin, not escape. If “Human reactions are conditioned,” then conditioning will always contain and circumscribe the potential for personal transformation promised by stepping outside of one’s own culture. Nevertheless, it is one thing to recognize for oneself that apparently marginal elements of a life-narrative might remain salient; it is another to find that selfhood constructed by a foreign viewer. This is the drama of identity that emerges in Pagan Spain. Wright has to recognize his Protestant inheritance and its continued relevance to his sense of culture. Equally, his status as “American Negro” remains totemic, central, and utterly relevant to his understanding of persecution. At the same time, Wright is profoundly discomfited by the importance the Spanish accord his skin color. For the Spanish, color—darkness—is historicized. Blackness has a historical narrative; to be black is to carry the mark of those who became the object of conquest and conversion. They insert Wright into historical narratives of conversion and redemption. A further, unsettling implication of Stein’s “what the Western world is made of ” now emerges. The “Western world,” placed in the long continuum that seems to be second nature to the Spanish, turns on encounters with difference, especially blackness. Having set out to discover a cultural

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identity “out there”—the West—Wright finds that he is what this “Western world” is made of, that his skin is an alterity used by that culture to articulate itself.

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A Western Man of Color Let us return to the moment when Wright first encounters the Spanish: “I was a heathen. . . . I was not only a stranger, but a ‘lost’ one in dire need of being saved” (16–17). What interests me here is the simultaneous recognition and obscuring of racial difference. The Spanish immediately mark his otherness; but by a process of transference this racial difference becomes that of the indigenous Americans. Race is also transmuted into a religious narrative of salvation. Why is Wright not recognized for what he is—the descendant of Africans? Framing this encounter, in fact, is a much larger displacement in the text: the exploration of various kinds of racial “Others” (the Moor, the Native American) in place of a recognition of the role that Africans played in the construction of the Spanish empire. Where, in short, is the discussion of slavery in Pagan Spain? If an African American writer approached this topic today, it is difficult to see how the subject of slavery could be overlooked. In place of Wright’s lacuna (slavery’s absence), there is a historiographic plenitude, as commentators position imperial Spain within comparative studies of slave-owning empires. Indeed, Robin Blackburn has recently argued that Spanish slavery was exemplary for the other European powers. For, “together with the Portuguese example, it was to serve as a sort of model for other colonists and colonial powers—just as the term ‘Negro’ was adopted into English, with a heavy implication of enslavement.” Even if they were to adopt other socioeconomic models, Blackburn adds, the colonists of North America “were very much aware of the Spanish practice of African slavery.”33 Blackburn’s magisterial study suggests one reply to Stein’s assertion that in Spain Wright would find “what the Western world is made of ”: the West is here “made of ” slaves, a practice established by the Iberian colonists. For Wright it was possible to disengage slavery and empire in ways that would not be possible today. As a writer concerned with liberation

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struggles, he was fascinated by imperialism and its decomposition, but his analysis of empire did not always lead to engagement with the hard facts of slavery. He wrote as an internationalist for whom anticolonial and anti-imperial paradigms were paramount, even though they did not always connect with accounts of slavery in its American context. Wright published Pagan Spain in 1957, at the juncture where this intellectual framework began to give way to a rewritten history of slavery. Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution (1956) and Stanley Elkins’s Slavery (1959) created a new historiographical space for institutional and comparative analysis (Elkins explicitly positioned North American slavery against its Latin American counterpart).34 Interestingly, one might read a comment Gunnar Myrdal made on Pagan Spain as an indirect but telling suggestion that a more searching analysis of that nation was needed—an analysis perhaps predicated on this new historical scholarship. Myrdal wrote to Wright in 1957, saying that the book was “only a preamble to the serious, penetrating, and revealing analysis of the country” he “ought someday to write.”35 Did Myrdal imagine that this “revealing analysis” would pay more heed to slavery, that “peculiar institution”? Myrdal felt that Wright had not really come to grips with Spanish realities, but read within the context of Wright’s other 1950s writings one can see that he would always take a very specific interpretative line on Spain. In a sense, that country took on a broader theoretical resonance for him, and what mattered was the overall shape of its irrationalism. Spain could then be fitted into his larger project, where countries were encountered and evaluated on the basis of their developmental status. It is evident from another 1957 text, the collection of lectures that made up White Man, Listen!, that Wright had worked his way toward a synoptic paradigm to “read” and then evaluate different countries. One essay in particular—“Tradition and Industrialization”—represents what is perhaps the finest condensation of his meditations on the new postwar globalism. For Wright “industrialization” stands for “modernity”; it is the hallmark of the advanced societies and the point to which the decolonizing world must aspire (hence his concern in Black Power with Africa’s industrial modernization). The essay makes it clear

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that the underpinning theme of all the travel books, including Pagan Spain, was modernity—and that from his fascination with modernity Wright was led to an interest in development (or its absence). Many of the argumentative positions outlined in the travelogues are here given an overarching global setting, as Wright outlines in shorthand a comprehensive model of Western civilization’s expansion and its encounter with Asian and African otherness. Declaring himself a “Western man of color” he acknowledges the West’s agency, while deploring its defensiveness and racism.36 Wright’s sense of historical transition is on full display, as is his sense of historical irony—the broad thesis is that having brought into being the Westernized elite of Africa and Asia, the West will now face an alternate form of modernity and hence a politicalcultural resistance to its own hegemony. For Wright, presenting himself as a clear-eyed observer of historical change, the West’s impact on “tradition” was welcome, since it helped to “smash the irrational ties of religion and custom and tradition in Asia and Africa” (93). Read in isolation, such comments (and other admissions, such as “I have been made into a Westerner” [81]) might seem an abnegation of Bandung, rather than a further exploration of its messages. But this is where Pagan Spain enters and alters the domain of Wright’s work. For Pagan Spain created a reading of the West marked by his “chronically skeptical . . . irredeemably critical, outlook” (79). The West had awakened the globe into modernity, but the West itself was becoming sleepy with antimodernism. The very antimodernism of Spain was, using this logic, yet more proof of the progressive power of Asia and Africa: the torch of development was moving from Europe to the formerly colonized nations. What strikes the twenty-first-century reader of these texts is their interlocked, mutually reinforcing power. Gertrude Stein had advised Wright that in Spain he would find what the West was made of; but for Wright, the “one world” (and he used the phrase in this essay) meant that each corner of the globe would shed light on another. The paganism and irrationalism of Europe ironically illuminate the capacity for progressive, rational development in Asia and Africa. At one point in “Tradition and Industrialization” Wright asked himself: “Am I ahead of or behind the West?” and answered himself: “My personal judgment

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is that I’m ahead” (86). Reading across and between Black Power, The Color Curtain, and now Pagan Spain one can see that he was, as he claimed, “ahead.” I argued in chapter 1 that development theory, a synthesis of sociology, nascent international relations thought, psychology, and liberal economics, became the dominant discourse in U.S. writing of the Other. Wright’s work, with its frequent excursions into social science and its willingness to incorporate these discourses into experimental, open-ended travel writing, demonstrates what a critical developmental theory might look like. Wright emerged from a similar intellectual terrain to the development theorists, and like them he was rooted in midcentury social and political progressivism. But in a text such as Pagan Spain he redrew the development matrix to produce images of cultural “progress” that were ambivalent and ironically skeptical about “what the Western world is made of.” Wright’s significance becomes a pivotal one, when we look back at his career from an early twenty-first-century position. He was one of the first writers to register a moment of transition, as a radical Marxism founded within the Victorian industrial order began to fade, while religious observance—as a political phenomenon—reasserted itself. Again and again, in Indonesia, Spain, and Africa, Wright finds himself among the true believers: Islamic, Christian, and Animist. His own ideas were forged within the space of secular radicalism, but the strength of his intelligence derived from the recognition that many of his meetings and conversations in every corner of the globe would be with people far removed from those Communist Party meetings evoked in The God That Failed.

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8

Ugly Americans and Vanishing Europeans

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American Presence, European Decolonization

The world has changed a great deal since Richard Wright flew to Indonesia and Paul Bowles drove around Morocco in a chauffeured Bentley. What E. P. Thompson termed the “enormous condescension of posterity” makes it tempting to emphasize the mistakes these writers made when they created their accounts of the post-European, decolonizing world. Fictions of development were marked by certain misprisions, but the nature of the misprisions is telling: a number of common difficulties recurs across a range of texts—of different genres (travel writing, fiction, social science survey), with different audiences. First, most American commentators assumed that “progress”—formulated as a Western, technologically driven, and increasingly secular movement— was the inevitable dynamic of all cultures. This belief animated Daniel Lerner’s hopeful progressivism. Certain literary intellectuals recognized the ideological centrality of this notion and then created countervailing representations: hence Paul Bowles’s sour resistance to the creation of a “European slum” in Morocco. Progress seemed to be driving cultures forward, extinguishing the archaic distinctiveness that fascinated these authors; the writer’s task became the commemoration of sites near extinction. What would these writers think of the conspicuous lack of progress or development in many parts of our world? Figures such as

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Wright, Buck, or (as we shall shortly see) Ernest Hemingway had little inkling of what we can now see as the postmodern world order, where highly progressed, technocratic states sit alongside the failed states whose political fractures fill newspapers and Web pages. Second, the development paradigm meant that the immediate historical backdrop to the postwar world was often obscured. Belief in the passing of traditional societies meant that decolonization’s fallout was barely registered by political or social theorists. Development proffered a model of historical change that at times discounted colonialism’s continuing relevance to the postcolonial situation. To work within the tradition of American progressivism, with its commitment to the future and its focus on a riveting contemporary scene, was to search for transition out of tradition rather than to acknowledge history in all its weight. Sociologists such as Robert Park and Everett Stonequist were fascinated by the cultural mobility and detraditionalization they registered around them in American society; their heirs, such as Daniel Lerner, carried forward this Emersonian fascination with the here and now, and with the future. The historical formation of a Lebanon or Iran seemed less significant—less interesting really—than the new selves and cultures brought about by transition into modernity. The third difficulty centered on religion. Often, a foreign culture’s religious practices appeared baffling, bizarre, or irredeemably exotic to social scientists and the fiction writers who followed in their footsteps. The sociologists Park, Stonequist, and Myrdal had tended to share a belief in the gradual secularization of the self. Few American travelerwriters really grappled with religion’s centrality in many cultures. Again, though, one notes the ways in which the African American globalist tradition managed to be more capacious and imaginatively resourceful than a good deal of “mainstream” commentary. Neither Du Bois nor Wright would have been surprised, I imagine, at the continuing—if not expanding—role that religion plays in the international affairs of the twentyfirst century. Although he wrote in a Marxist tradition, Du Bois always remained sensitive to the role that religion played in African American life, lavishly praising the “Negro Church” in an essay of that name (1912).1 Wright had his differences with Du Bois, but he found himself

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forced—in West Africa, Indonesia, and Spain—to share the older man’s receptivity to the place of religion in ordinary lives. While Wright had moved away from his own early beliefs, his 1950s travels repeatedly took him into churches, temples, and mosques. Nonetheless, when writers decisively engaged with a foreign place addressed religion’s continuing significance, they tended to lock non-Christian faiths (notably, Islam) into exotic narratives of magic and difference. Very few travelers sensed that religion—again we think of Islam—might continue to resonate as nationalism or as a form of political resistance to the West. This is one reason why Wright’s conversations in Africa and Asia were so important; he found himself surprised by, and having to account for, the ongoing importance of religious belief across global society, even though his own intellectual odyssey was toward self-secularization. To Wright’s credit, he always strove to register the continued power of such belief systems, even though he disliked religious fundamentalism (as he saw it), whether in the shape of tribal beliefs, Christianity, or Islam. His encounter with an Islamic radical at Bandung resonates as an exceptional moment, not only for the tension that underwrote the conversation, but for the exchange’s sheer idiosyncrasy, as Wright recognized that within the emergent nations that so thrilled him, there would be figures whose “pagan” intensity (to adopt his phraseology) resisted the transition to modernity. In this chapter I want to work with some of these issues—modernization, secularization, development—by juxtaposing four texts written in the 1950s: The Ugly American (1958) by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick; Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King (1959); Ernest Hemingway’s Under Kilimanjaro (written in the 1950s, although published posthumously); and a Carnegie Report on expatriate experience, missionaries, and diplomacy, The Overseas Americans (1960). In the texts we see fictional and sociological responses to decolonization; these authors constructed narratives that placed American protagonists in the terrain of the vanishing European. All these texts contain quite specific examples of development in action: episodes, vignettes, and plots that follow the expatriate, the “overseas American,” as this traveler brings ideas of pragmatic development to the post-European sites of

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Asia or Africa. For Lederer and Burdick, Bellow, and Hemingway, the fiction of development is also a stage for presenting a particular figure, the robust and neo-Rooseveltian pragmatic American who will replace the settlers, colonial administrators, and fonctionnaires of European empire.

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“The basic American ethic is revered and honored”: Burdick and Lederer In one of the period’s most notorious books, The Ugly American, the authors, William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, concluded their narrative with “A Factual Epilogue” that pinned the tale directly into a realworld setting. The book’s title gave rise to a cliché (the “ugly American” crashing around a globe he barely understands or cares to understand), a now-hackneyed phrase that masks the book’s role in performing significant cultural work. The Ugly American was as close as the American novel gets to a Graham Greene type of political fiction: an up-market but popular novel with traces of a thriller. It was a bestseller (the blurb on the cover of the current paperback announces, “the multi-millioncopy bestseller whose title became a synonym for what was wrong with American foreign policy”—note the past tense), and its success encouraged the authors to write a sequel, Sarkhan, published in 1965. The fictional republic of Sarkhan is a generic Southeast Asian nation, an invented realm whose geography and politics are all too similar to those of Vietnam. The novel directly records the unfolding drama of Vietnam in one episode, when American military and diplomatic personnel witness the final defeat of France’s Indochinese colonial regime at Dien Bien Phu (1954); Lederer and Burdick use these incidents to map the Western misunderstanding of the developing world (failures leading to communism’s onward march). Militarily, Western armies such as the French underestimate the brilliance of the guerilla tactics advocated by Mao. Culturally, too many Americans fail to understand the languages and distinctive histories of these developing nations. Technologically, the United States is too easily seduced by big infrastructural projects in poor countries, whereas small-scale local initiatives would have a more

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direct impact on quality of life. Diplomatically, the United States is woefully amateurish compared to the Soviet system. Burdick and Lederer call for a revolution in the training and the orientation of the American military-diplomatic establishment. Theirs is a jeremiad with lessons for the present. They also follow Richard Wright in advocating an engaged pragmatism as the means to develop the non-Western world. They imagine what we might even call a “micro-pragmatism” in The Ugly American: inventive, small-scale activity as the means to win the hearts and minds of peasants seduced by communism:

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We have been offering the Asian nations the wrong kind of help. We have so lost sight of our own past that we are trying to sell guns and money alone, instead of remembering that it was the quest for the dignity of freedom that was responsible for our own way of life. All over Asia we have found that the basic American ethic is revered and honored and imitated when possible. We must, while helping Asia toward self-sufficiency, show by example that America is still the American of freedom and hope and knowledge and law. If we succeed, we cannot lose the struggle.2

For Burdick and Lederer the “basic American ethic,” married to a pragmatic engagement with the local scene, establishes anticommunism and democratic self-sufficiency in Asia. Radical military tactics (based on Mao’s guerrilla strategy), innovative farming, sensitive diplomacy, and language skills: these form the transformational, revolutionary “American ethic” to be exported to the developing world. This particular ideal of development is thoroughly exemplary in its purpose. The “American ethic,” they write, is “revered and honored and imitated.” Through judicious deployment of “knowledge and law” countries will inevitably demonstrate their reverence for the American ethic, and then move up the developmental ladder. The novel dramatizes a range of incidents that center on American understanding of the foreign; it then becomes a critique of conventional diplomacy’s limitations. The context is the cold war, but characters deploy a language rooted in 1940s conceptions of “the world community.” American policy focuses on a mobilization of the world community

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against communism, as when prospective State Department employees are told about the environment they will operate in: “‘But in times of such momentous crises, when our country faces challenges unlike any she has ever faced, we must also realize that we have duties as citizens. And not only as citizens, but as members of the world community. In all lands we are beset by an evil world-wide conspiracy. We need our best people abroad to help contain this clever and malignant conspiracy’” (78). The paragraph blends two internationalist discourses: the mid1940s ideal of the global world community; and the paranoid style of a cold war discourse fixated on conspiracy. Later episodes use these two discourses for an analysis of the Sarkhan crisis—and by extension for an analysis of America’s relationship with Asia. The writers create a telling incident where the ambassador, Gilbert MacWhite, finds that his Chinese-speaking servant is a spy who can understand English. For MacWhite, “somewhere in his carefully trained mind, in his rigorous background, in his missionary zeal, there was a flaw” (105). Paranoia and “missionary zeal” intertwine; the missionary impulse finds itself tripped up by the “evil world-wide conspiracy.” In a broad sense, these oppositions serve to focus an even more fundamental question in The Ugly American. The novel asks whether American engagement with Asia will be contoured to local conditions (getting to know Sarkhan, its customs, and its language) or whether the predominant paradigm for thinking about the “Third World” will ineluctably remain the cold war, Manichean opposition. Finally, the novel seems to move toward a synthesis of the two theories, as Burdick and Lederer suggest the way to prosecute the struggle against ascendant communism is via a low-level, highly pragmatic “hearts-and-minds” mission attuned to local needs: Manichean strategy coupled to micro-pragmatic tactics. In a very direct way, the diagnostic qualities of The Ugly American resonated beyond fiction. With the United States embroiled in Vietnam’s deepening conflict, the analysis supplied by Burdick and Lederer proved resonant. As Neil Sheehan demonstrated in his Vietnam history Bright Shining Lie, the novel’s fictionalization of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia occupied a strange interzone where fact met fiction. The Ugly American’s central character, Colonel Hillandale, was

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based on Major General Edward Lansdale, a key figure in American adventures abroad in the 1950s and 1960s. It was Lansdale who while working for the cia “had guided Ramon Magsaysay, the pro-American Filipino leader, through the campaign that had crushed the Communist Hukbalahap rebels in the Philippines in the early 1950s.” The Ugly American helped to cement Lansdale’s position as a radical, freethinking, officer attuned to the new ways of cold war conflict. According to Sheehan, Vietnam officers such as John Paul Vann read the novel with interest: “The Ugly American, the novel by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer that had embellished Lansdale’s legend and made good sense to Vann when he had read it, was a political tract, ‘written as fiction . . . based on fact,’ to warn Americans that the United States was losing to Communism in an ideological battle for the minds of Asians. The book was a primer on how Americans could win this battle if they would learn how to get Asians to do what was good for America and Asia.” Sheehan adds that “it was accepted well into the 1960s as an example of serious political thought.”3 This crossover between fact and fiction works in both directions. The fictional world of The Ugly American is touched by the historical context of postwar involvement in Asian insurgencies. At the same time, Sheehan’s historical account of Vietnam sometimes reads as if it were a fiction created by those maverick analysts, Burdick and Lederer. Sheehan’s novelistic treatment of Vietnam and his extended meditation on John Paul Vann create a strange elision, as the figures of 1950s literary internationalism were incarnated in a real life figure. Sheehan shapes Vann as if he were a character from a developmental fiction. Vann is the modern American manager, a descendant of the men in grey flannel suits characterized by the postwar sociologists. He is a soldier, but he has an mba in logistics; his evenings in the field are spent compiling reports and strategic analyses. Furthermore, Vann’s solutions to the depressing failures in Vietnam are thoroughly progressive and in tune with the diagnosis promoted by Burdick and Lederer or, distantly, Daniel Lerner. For Vann, in Sheehan’s evaluation, is ultimately a figure committed to pragmatic engagement with Vietnamese society and that society’s steady modernization. Vann wanted to work with the grain of

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progressive, pro-Western elements within Vietnam; he also mistrusted solutions that depended on the U.S. military alone. One solution would be the “joint command” where Americans would give orders but the fighting would be done by the South Vietnamese: “The primary if unspoken mission of the American troops would be political . . . the core of a new strategy—the details of a program to attract the peasantry and change the nature of Saigon society.”4 Vann, in other words, wanted to export a revolutionary American ideology with its capabilities to reform and radically alter very different societies. To do this one had to emulate Daniel Lerner’s analysis of the Middle East and search for the transitional elements within a traditional society. That imaginative space where Americans represented their insertion into the developing world had become a place where popular fictions, real-life biographies, imagined narratives, and practical policy intersected and cross-fertilized.5 A text such as Ugly American embodied these disjunctions in a quirky, hybrid form that brought together the real and the imagined. The final chapter is “A Factual Epilogue,” in which the authors state: “Although the characters are indeed imaginary and Sarkhan is a fiction, each of the small and sometimes tragic events we have described has happened . . . many times. Too many times. We believe that if such things continue to happen they will multiply into a pattern of disaster” (271). Fictions have to move toward factuality, Burdick and Lederer suggest, because facts have become so pressing. “A pattern of disaster” threatens; political realities will now structure the novelist’s fiction making. In a way, Burdick and Lederer suggest, the American writer simply cannot afford the privileged space of disengagement from politics. So some sections of the text feature barely fictionalized question-and-answer dialogues about America and Asia, exchanges that might have been drawn from a newspaper interview. The Ugly American is not so much a “novel” as a compendium, a fragmented adventure story, and an intermittent international affairs essay. At the turn into a U.S. global order Burdick and Lederer fictionalized a telling paradigm for American engagement with the non-Western world. The Ugly American is an inchoate and middlebrow work; it is also a resonant text—still in print and embedded in the popular culture by

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dint of its memorably acerbic title. Burdick and Lederer posit a postEuropean model of how to read and manage the developing world. In their fictional country, Sarkhan, European presence is coming to an end; the world of the “ugly American” is also that of the vanishing European. Burdick and Lederer develop their “serious political thought” through certain types of representative men, imagined characters who point to the ways in which foreign policy might evolve. Burdick’s work, as Rupert Wilkinson has pointed out, reveals a continual fascination with the “expert,” an expatriate specialist who can engage immediately and decisively with alien cultures. “Burdick’s overseas scenarios are apt to feature a type of tough, brainy hero which we might call the cultural operator—one who can master a local culture on every level and then work effectively within it.”6 The Ugly American features a good number of these figures. Colonel Hillandale is the typical Burdick figure in his deployment of inside knowledge, in his case an interest in palmistry and astrology that enables him to engage with the locals’ mystical practices. The novel suggests that experts, these “operators,” are the way forward: the creation of insider specialists will enable American ideals to circulate powerfully through Asia, turning the cold war decisively in the West’s favor.7 Burdick and Lederer had few precedents when they came to invent their fictional Asian nation—or at least, few American precedents. The British imperial novel forms an underlying matrix for The Ugly American; but the authors had to invent a new figure to become a counterpart to the British settlers, soldiers, and imperial administrators. They also needed a gallery of figures to set against the Soviets: in this cold war setting, the Soviets played the best game, with their “professional” (a favorite term) corps of well-trained, linguistically adept diplomats and development experts. The Soviets in The Ugly American get on with the job, are brilliantly “professional,” eschew flashiness. The Ugly American addresses their threat by positioning a post-European, thoroughly American overseas operator: Asia now receives the technocratic U.S. soldier-diplomat. A brilliant meritocrat, this new figure succeeds the British imperialist; he is informal, resolutely democratic, and authentic to his bootstraps. Burdick and Lederer create overseas Americans who are, above all, anything but phony. It is as if the authors

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had taken the postwar ideal of “authenticity,” praised and developed by writers including J. D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, and Lionel Trilling, and deployed it as the imprimatur for a benign American imperium. Homer Atkins is the “operator” who will “win” the developing world for Western democracy. Such a character is a fictional embodiment of that casual, democratic militarism first seen in the hagiographic accounts of Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders: if America is to have imperialists, they should be—in dress and manner—informal, casual and everyday figures, not the starched mannequins of the British Empire.8 Atkins possesses an innate masculine virtue and an integrity that can be counterpointed (as Ugly American explicitly shows) against British stuffiness or French decadence. Gary Gerstle has argued that Roosevelt established casual, exemplary military platoons during the Spanish-American War by integrating Ivy Leaguers and Westerners, immigrants and blue bloods. The Rooseveltian platoon provided a model of what a modern American nationalism might look like: “Three cups of southwesterners, leavening tablespoons of Ivy Leaguers and Indians, and a sprinkling of Jews, Irish, Italians, and Scandinavians yielded, in Roosevelt’s eyes, a sterling, all-American regiment.”9 The Ugly American updates this ideal and inserts the Rooseveltian model into Asia. Burdick and Lederer imagine farmers, explorers, agronomists, and soldiers who unabashedly emerge from the small towns of the South and the West; these are the pragmatists, unafraid of mucking-in, easygoing and immediately likable. Their innate democratic affability, the novel suggests, forges an American charm that can win wars. The Ugly American is scathing about amateurish engagements in Asia but finds hope in a distinctively American, post-European amalgam of this down-to-earth pragmatism, militarism, and ideological fervor. If there is to be an American place in the non-Western world, Burdick and Lederer suggest, it will be occupied by embodiments of pragmatism, stalwart masculinity, and inherent modesty—internationalized incarnations of Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt. The chicken farmer, Tom Knox, embodies Midwestern straightforwardness; he is a poultry specialist from Iowa who wants to share his expertise with peasant communities but faces an entrenched development ideology that privileges big infra-

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structural projects. Tom is “thanked” for his work by a French diplomat who flies him back home via a series of banquets, shopping trips and thoroughly Orientalist encounters with nubile Asian dance troupes. By the time he arrives his thirst for a new form of American pragmatism in Asia has been slaked by this immersion in a world of Europeanized decadence. The message could hardly be clearer: Midwestern pragmatism (in the form of agricultural assistance) constitutes a way forward; European diplomacy offers seductive but ultimately decadent blandishments. Thus Ugly American envisages American empire as a struggle not only with the resistant non-Western cadres but also with the distractions of European diplomacy.10 The Ugly American’s recasting of the relationship between America and Europe is central to the text’s mapping of U.S. engagements in Asia. Clearly, Burdick and Lederer had created a narrative where American power would encounter and then succeed established European presence. What is significant is that this middlebrow yarn, with its curious mixture of exoticism and practical advice, had entered an arena already prepared by international affairs commentary. America’s movement into what still seemed to be a highly Europeanized global system had already elicited a range of prescient essays. It is chastening to read through some of the pivotal literary-intellectual journals of the period and to note how European geopolitical presence was still an overriding motif in discussions of the global scene. If American intellectuals came across references to North Africa, it was likely to be in the context of an essay such as G. L. Arnold’s piece, “French Politics: Failure and Promise,” published in Partisan Review (1953). Arnold discussed the “endless war in Indo-China” (France’s doomed last attempt to assert itself in Vietnam; the fiasco at Dien Bien Phu occurred a year later) or “tension in North Africa” (decolonization’s unfolding drama in Morocco and Algeria).11 This is the world on a cusp, the moment when decolonization and the cold war reshaped global alignments. Literary intellectuals and political commentators had begun to work out some of the dynamics of this new paradigm within the pages of journals such as Partisan Review. Also in 1953, Ludwig Marcuse published a piece called “European Anti-Americanism,” examining the

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ironic reversal whereby Europe had become the “colony” of its former “colony”; this was a powerful early critique of European anti-Americanism and an early acknowledgement of the United States as emergent global superpower.12 Another essay, by Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” foregrounded an important discussion of imperialism while defining the British Empire in historical terms; Arendt picked up Churchill’s phrase, “the liquidation of the British Empire,” to place British power firmly in the past.13 And a later essay by G. L. Arnold, “Co-Existence: Between Two Worlds,” remains firmly Eurocentric in its interest in continental culture but responds to a geopolitics where competing power blocs have forged a new international system. Even here, in the liberal heartland of the Partisan Review, we catch traces of cold war Manichaeism, as in Arnold’s early version of “domino theory” in the argument that India might be “lost” to the West through Communism.14 Partisan Review writers, then, sensed a moment of transition, as they identified the world order’s shifts. The Ugly American performed vital cultural work by creating a middlebrow narrative that responded to the elite analysis of journals such as Partisan Review. It suggested a post-European, and especially a post-British way of imagining the globe. It replaced “Empire” with developmentalism, and slotted that ideology into the larger framework of the cold war’s ideological struggle. It made its points simply but tellingly, deploying a comic book version of Emerson’s “representative men”—the kinds of Americans we find and should hope to find in Southeast Asia. Through its ramshackle hybridism (fiction, guidebook, polemic, satire) The Ugly American also shaped the emerging debates about the United States’s postwar internationalism. With its movement through a series of exemplary anecdotes, the novel has the comforting feel of a workbook or a primer in how one can become an “overseas American”: Foreign Postings 101. Saul Bellow and Ernest Hemingway: Overseas Americans The Overseas Americans: A Report on Americans Abroad was the title of a book published in 1960 by the Carnegie Project. Carnegie had funded

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(beginning in fall 1956, the date of Suez) a major Syracuse University project to examine the lives and experiences of Americans working abroad. From 1956 through to 1960 researchers compiled reports on what was patently felt to be a new turn in the relationship between America and the globe, as large numbers of U.S. citizens settled in territories that a generation before had barely registered on the national radar screen.15 The authors—Harlan Cleveland, Gerard J. Mangone, and John Clarke Adams—warned that “the American educational system has not yet mobilized its imagination and its resources to meet the urgent requirements that this unprecedented fact implies.”16 Their work would then center on the “new,” that is relatively new to the American experience, countries of Asia and Africa where U.S. military, missionary, and business presence was expanding. The project team placed researchers in Yugoslavia, Iran, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Japan, while two of the authors also visited Taiwan, India, Egypt, Ghana, and Brazil. What, they wanted to know, was the meaning of “overseas” (itself a rather British term, with its strong admission of insularity) in the post-Suez context? As with Daniel Lerner’s Passing of Traditional Society (also dating from this late 1950s milieu) the team’s research methods would consist of the interview, the questionnaire, the personality test, and the “biographic data sheet.” And as with Lerner’s work, David Riesman took his place in the background of the study—here he is thanked in the preface for his “penetrating observations.” This is yet another American reading of what is in effect the “Majority World” through the interpretative matrix of social psychology, with its charts, tables, and polls.17 The Overseas Americans remains an important litmus test of how in the post-Suez, pre-Vietnam era American internationalism was reforming itself. It also supplies a vital analogue for the literary treatments of “abroad” that appeared at this time in such texts as The Ugly American or Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King. Perhaps the most telling aspect of the preface is the authors’ frank account of why Americans are now abroad in such large numbers: “Borne by tides of goodwill and dollars, the United States diplomat and technician, the preacher and the professor, are working to militarize, proselytize, or to reorganize the lives of their foreign cousins. Most of the latter are not unhappy to have these

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American citizens in their countries; they are, however, often truculent about the behavior and attitudes of their visitors.”18 Whether or not foreign societies, from Brazil to Japan, really wanted to become the focus for American-led militarization or proselytizing is not a question that occurred to the Carnegie experts; cold war imperatives obscured difficult questions of international cultural relations that retrospectively appear crucial. The sheer “goodwill” of the overseas Americans is a self-evident truth for the Carnegie writers; but one person’s goodwill is another person’s interference, especially if the two have different colored skins and follow different gods. The Overseas Americans will then follow a line of argument also suggested in The Ugly American: if you can take the ugliness out of the expatriates’ behavior, America’s pure products will emerge all the brighter. The problem is that “behavior and attitudes” obscure “goodwill”—the Carnegie Project will provide pragmatic resources (as does The Ugly American) for this behavioral shift, which becomes a vast national project of readjustment and a counterpart to those “American Century” recalibrations of the national psyche repeatedly advocated (in the postwar domestic realm) by commentators such as Whyte, Riesman, Rieff, and then Lasch. I am struck by the ever-presence of the missionaries. Among the familiar tables and charts is a list of the 244 U.S. citizens interviewed as the basis of the project. Unsurprisingly, missionaries and their activities were a major site for the evaluation of expatriate lives; the three main categories of “Americans at Work Abroad” were “Government People,” “The Missionaries,” and “The Businessmen.” Around one in eight of the expatriates were missionaries or volunteers for church organizations. The missionaries, Carnegie pointed out, were unique for their language skills, their commitment to a single culture, and their relatively low (for American expatriates) standard of living. Nonetheless, they remained embodiments of a distinctive national ideology of progress and development: “As evangelists for schooling and sanitation, for seed selection and farm machinery, for economic development and individual freedom, the missionaries everywhere made friends for ‘progress’ . . . and for the United States.” Thus they became an “integral part of American cultural imperialism.”19

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As American policymakers, intellectuals, and writers began to formulate early responses to the post-Suez realm, Saul Bellow created his own freewheeling riff on these themes of pragmatism, evangelism, and American immersion in Africa: Henderson the Rain King (1959). As a onetime student of anthropology and the former editor, as Morris Dickstein wryly notes, of a journal called The Noble Savage, Bellow’s turn toward Africa, and his creation of an uproarious primitivist picaresque, seemed a natural step.20 Set against the context I have described in this book, Bellow’s novel also emerges as a gleeful, comic assertion of American pragmatism in an African setting. He swept up the received characters and situations of the midcentury decolonization era and fed them into a burlesque recasting of the imperial novel. Henderson himself is a gruff idealist and a typically diverse assemblage of American types, as are so many of the “imperial selves” found in Bellow’s work. He is a scholar, a would-be poet, a one-time soldier, and an explorer; he also embodies that wonderment, exuberance, and childlike (and Emerson-like) selfhood found throughout Bellow’s fiction. But now this American self is set adrift in Africa. The technocratic and pragmatic dimensions of such a representation are then foregrounded, almost as if Bellow were writing in counterpoint to The Ugly American (published the year before). Henderson himself is a brilliant recasting of The Ugly American’s idealism, technocracy, and “ugliness.” Speaking in his amplified, mock-heroic first-person, Henderson himself draws attention to his size, his sheer physical presence, and grotesquely amusing details such as the tattoo of his wife’s name that sits on his expanding waistline. The reader smiles and laughs with the protagonist; he is a farceur, but an engaging one. The plot that then unfolds is indebted to Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), replaying the contrast between Yankee technological progressivism and absolute backwardness (European feudalism or African rituals). What strikes the twenty-first-century reader is the gusto with which Bellow redeploys stereotypical images of African rituals and mysticism that seem halfremembered from a college anthropology course. Equally, Henderson himself has self-reliance and neoindustrial know-how in abundance. The novel thus reads as if it were a parody of a development-era text: a

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hyperbolic fantasy about the overseas American and his wonderful capabilities. One also notes the careful references to heroes of the British Empire, such as the explorer of Labrador, Sir Wilfred Grenfell; Henderson walks in imperial footsteps, while recasting British endeavor in terms of earthy American comedy.21 Indeed, the novel, rather like the text that Hemingway was working on during the 1950s (Under Kilimanjaro), can be read as an American “writing-back” to the British Empire. The terrain and the plotlines are familiar enough from the literature of empire; but Bellow’s sheer gusto and exuberance carry the narrative forward, almost as if he were trying to overcome the political caution that one might feel: that having got rid of one set of white men, the last thing Africa needs is another set. This is development as a comedic act. The sheer human presence of Henderson suggests that the American character can overcome otherness and forge new contacts between the Emersonian self and the undeveloped world. Good nature becomes political—a sense that the American buffoon-technocrat can finally enter into the underdeveloped world and become the “rain king.” The novel parodies many of modernism’s recurrent fascinations: primitivism, ritual, and the contemporary self—Henderson moves through a fictional Africa engineered by Conrad, Eliot, and Hemingway. Henderson the Rain King suggests that writing about a foreign space often becomes a discourse about one’s own inherited culture. For Bellow, that inheritance is the bequest of high modernism. Henderson, then, is “Mistah Henderson,” an all-too-recognizable comic inversion of Conrad’s Kurtz, traveling through a terrain that might have been imagined by J. G. Frazier. There is a kind of “mirroring” effect in the novel’s mapping of Africa: the country becomes a primitivist repository for the themes and tropes of Western modernism. And ultimately, Henderson’s comic imperial individualism remains Bellow’s cynosure; Africa signifies in terms of its usefulness to the American self and as a mechanism to articulate necessary changes in that self. At the end of the novel Henderson leaves Africa to fly back to America, accompanied by a lion cub. He is spiritually renewed, bursting again with vigor and passion for existence: the developing world has done its work. Unlike the European imperialists, Henderson has been a sojourner in foreign

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spaces, not a settler. His stay is a temporary one, part of a larger pattern of movement. The novel’s last lines crystallize a dream of restless American energy and physical vitality, spread across the world from Africa to the Arctic (Henderson is literally on top of the world), imagined against a backdrop of technological supremacy—the “beautiful propellers” of an intercontinental aircraft. Out of Africa (and its noisy black chaos), Henderson feels a sense of release and reaffirmation as he enjoys, in the last line of this quintessential overseas novel, the “pure white lining” of the North: “Laps and laps I galloped around the shining and riveted body of the plane, behind the fuel trucks. Dark faces were looking from within. The great, beautiful propellers were still, all four of them. I guess I felt it was my turn now to move, and so went running—leaping, leaping, pounding, and tingling over the pure white lining of the gray Arctic silence.”22 “It was my turn now to move”: indeed, many of these 1950s texts focus on an American desire to seize the nation’s day and then “to move” on the world stage. But the narrative structures of The Ugly American, Henderson the Rain King, and Hemingway’s Under Kilimanjaro also suggest the complexities of inserting American protagonists into terrains still warm with European presence. Burdick and Lederer opted for a highly pragmatic, real-life series of suggestions for the overseas American; Bellow pursued an exuberantly picaresque plot whose energy embodies the desire to get into Africa, to do things (and “I want” is one of Henderson’s plainspoken catchphrases). Under Kilimanjaro presents another, more twisted narrative response to decolonization. Although we associate late Hemingway with his elegiac memories of 1920s Paris (A Moveable Feast) or his friendships with Castro and sojourns in Cuba, a third place occupied his imagination: East Africa. In the summer of 1954 he began to write the vast, sprawling manuscript that would become the posthumous, abridged “Fictional Memoir” True at First Light (1999) and then (in full transcription) Under Kilimanjaro (2005). For the first version, Hemingway’s son, Patrick, edited the twohundred-thousand-word manuscript to produce a text that used about 75 percent of the original. In editing he tried to “emphasize” the love interest in the plot.23 Understandably, the son took the clearest route he could see into the thickets of his father’s work, and reshaped the text

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as a binary romance where Hemingway moves between the relationships with his wife and a native African woman. Patrick Hemingway also discussed the text as a postcolonial document, a fiction that grew out of a recognition that the white colonial presence in Africa was now at an end: “Africa is the one continent where the European invasion of a technologically less advanced people utterly failed except in the very southern portion. And so it was very interesting for me to read this book in that light because I realized that my father understood when he was there in 1953–54, that there was no future for—for want of a better term—white people at least in equatorial Africa.”24 Under Kilimanjaro, the less shaped version that has recently emerged, has the inchoate feel of a book that demands the revision and narrative excision typically associated with Hemingway. Nonetheless, the narrative’s posthumous publication should not obfuscate its significance. Its very range tracks a host of cultural and political motifs current in the 1950s. Hemingway’s love of the hunt—particularly the safari—had serendipitously led him into one of the contested spaces of the decolonization era. This is eccentric late Hemingway, but as with Dos Passos’s Brazil on the Move, the final stages of a modernist career witnessed continued engagement with world politics. The text recapitulates many of Hemingway’s classic motifs and stylistic tics, while addressing the new, decolonizing terrain of East Africa in the 1950s. Here are his typical discourses and subjects: a highly ritualistic, technical account of hunting; the sentimental and intermittently ironic language of marital love; the barely fictionalized memoir of Hemingway’s circle at a specific moment in time; and the tiresome barroom humor. The manuscript is then specifically located in terms of time, place, and political context. The place is Kenya, as it moves toward decolonization; effectively, after Indian independence and South Africa’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence, the country had become the last major British colony in terms of status (unlike Nigeria, Kenya had a large white settler population). Hemingway’s autobiographical first-person narrator moves among a late colonial cast: the white hunters, colonial officials, and “boys” of the savannah. But this was also the moment of the Mau Mau “emergency” (as it was known by the British), although

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Hemingway for the most part sidesteps commentary on the insurgency or the colonial authority’s brutal response.25 As Christopher Ondaatje (brother of the novelist Michael Ondaatje) has recently pointed out, Hemingway’s safari took place in the lands occupied by the Wakamba tribe, which was largely uninvolved in Mau Mau.26 Hemingway, as we shall see, had his own conceptions of indigenous identity, which usually revolved around a tribal authenticity untouched by the kinds of argument about land ownership or political enfranchisement that animated the insurgency. This seems to be a text more engaged with the legacy and mythology of white settler culture than a travel book alert to contemporary change within a late imperial order.27 Living and working in Kenya, Hemingway was an American abroad amid the British Empire’s literal and textual spaces. Hemingway’s text reads at times like a pastiche of a British late imperial text, a Waugh novel for instance. The mock-British drinking slang and comic figures such as the old soak, G. C. (“Gin Crazed”) feature prominently. Surrounded by the accoutrements of the settlers—the booze, rifles, and ironic social rituals—the narrator almost begins to “pass” as an American white settler, an imperialized (at least in a cultural sense) Midwesterner. Intersections between Under Kilimanjaro and the writing of Empire are at moments starkly immediate; Patrick Hemingway refers to his father’s wide reading in the literature of late colonialism, including books by Olive Schreiner, Isak Dinesen, Doris Lessing, and D. H. Lawrence.28 But if the American traveler, the overseas American, enters into the zone of European colonialism, he might run the risk of becoming European. There is a subliminal anxiety about identity running through this American text from the period of decolonization—an anxiety about being seen as European or, specifically, British. It is all too easy to become generically “Western,” to lose what is uniquely or exceptionally “American,” or even to become identified with the failures and decline of European empires.29 If America is assuming the mantle of the hegemonic Western power, then that assumption and its very distinctive cultural idiosyncrasies might be bleached out into a dangerously generic Occidental identity. American identity might even start to lose its vaunted exceptionalism when projected outside the

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United States. The Ugly American focused these problems in militarydiplomatic terms and deployed French culture as a defining measure to distinguish Americans from the Old World. For Hemingway, as for Matthiessen, the American traveler-writer is shadowed by the seductive narratives of heroic British exploration. Matthiessen, as we saw in The Cloud Forest, looked wistfully back to the days of the imperial explorers and could even see his own journeys as acts of obsolescent antiquarianism. Textual and contextual information also confirms Hemingway’s deep immersion in British colonialism; the narrative results of that immersion were conflicted plotlines and an awkward series of characterizations and self-characterizations: Hemingway became an honorary member of an African tribe in Kenya, but he also became an honorary British colonial official during his safari. In traveling through East Africa Hemingway moved into a literal and written space, and he inserted his own writing into the field of imperial textuality. Kenya was an intensely written place, the center of a broader East African world recounted in travel books and fictions by Evelyn Waugh and Wilfred Thesiger. Hemingway’s text is shadowed by this work. A colonial police officer says to him at one point that “‘we’re the last of the Empire builders. In a way we’re like Rhodes and Dr. Livingstone.’” Hemingway’s response: “‘In a way,’ I said.”30 From this context, it’s impossible to imagine the tone in which this statement is uttered, although it’s hard not to imagine a meld of laconic humor and irony underpinning these words. Empire’s literary legacy emerges a few pages later. Hemingway consciously invokes the late imperial literary context: “The old pukka sahib ones have been often described and caricatured” (169–70). One way to read Under Kilimanjaro is as an American text written back to the British Empire, a novel where the U.S. traveler directly inserts himself into a quintessential imperial terrain.31 But the cultural impress of Europe on the globe posed another worry—that of homosexuality. In a classic maneuver Hemingway demarcates and divides his tribes according to a code of loyalty and authenticity; and these tribal demarcations are also sexual. The Masai are portrayed as “coddled,” idolized by “the homosexuals”; but Hemingway venerated the Wakamba, who “were completely loyal to the Brit-

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ish”: “The Masai had been coddled, preserved, treated with a fear that they should never have inspired and been adored by all the homosexuals who ever had worked for the Empire in Kenya or Tanganyika because the men were so beautiful. The men were very beautiful, extremely rich, were professional warriors who, now for a long time, would never fight. They had always been drug addicts and now they were becoming alcoholics” (130). The Masai fight, Hemingway adds, under “a mass hysteria which cannot come off except under the influence of drugs” (130). Mark Spilka’s case for Hemingway’s “quarrel with androgyny” here becomes especially compelling, as the writer fights to fend off associations between romantic primitivism and homosexuality.32 When the dominant East African narrative of exploration and tribal knowledge is British, and when that narrative can appear so overtly camp, where does that leave the overtly heterosexual American writer? Hemingway’s dismissal of the Masai could hardly be more brutal, and the reader registers (as in A Moveable Feast) the unpleasant sound of old scores being settled. He produces what is, ironically enough, a rather British solution to the problem of being associated with imperial gay exoticism: he divides the indigenous tribes into the good and the bad (in this case, the straight and the queer), and through such division establishes a tribal hierarchy. Some tribes are more deserving of approbation than others.33 For Hemingway, the journey into Africa was on one level a journey into that American “technique” I analyzed in my discussion of Ugly American. Hemingway deploys the familiar ritualistic and technical accounts of how to hunt big game, for instance. But we also see how Hemingway, again in parallel to Burdick and Lederer, has to cope with the lingering European presence in so many parts of the world. And what does Hemingway do with the imaginative outreach of British imperialism? He invokes, resists, mocks, pastiches, and pays homage to the British Empire; but he refuses, as it were, to refuse it. Hemingway’s text, with its gallery of colonial types and its aristocratic joshing, encompasses the rhetorical presence and impress of the British upon East Africa. Hemingway creates a chaotic and inconsistent narrative response to that larger historical shift, the entry of the American into a terrain from which the European exits while living a rhetorical foot-

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print. This now seems a telling fictional embodiment of what happens at a historical turning point when empires fall, when one hegemonic force gives way to another, even though the former remains present in terms of narrative line and rhetorical impress. Under Kilimanjaro pulls in a multitude of directions, as Hemingway’s “fictional memoir” reimagines the culture and politics of decolonizing Africa. One narrative strand focuses on post-Lawrentian tribalism. Hemingway seems to have wanted to create a form of invented tribal religion—an invented tradition for the strangely hybrid world he finds himself in, an American among the white hunters and native gun bearers of the waning British Empire. Out of the remnants and shards of various cultures, Hemingway quixotically promises to invent his own tribal tradition (89). Whether this desire constitutes a considered response to cultural detraditionalization or merely amounts to intellectual scavenging is our next question. Hemingway’s self-fashioning is complexly related to his encounters with non-American cultures and his pursuit of an authenticity that can—rather paradoxically, perhaps—also absorb and synthesize cultural otherness. Hemingway is the most recognizably “branded” of U.S. writers in his general image of masculine independence, synonymous with self-reliant American masculinity. But his writing, especially when the writing veers toward overtly autobiographical meditations, usually alights upon an ability to pass himself off as a member of a different culture. In a sense, however, the two sides of Hemingway—if we momentarily separate them in this way—are part of the same persona. For Hemingway, personality or character is founded on ideals of technique and adaptability; by learning a particular hunting tactic, or how to fish or to box, one can achieve a certain mastery of self and environment. This mastery allows one to “pass” into a different cultural space, although one’s own innate character—the importance of being Ernest—remains undisputed. Under Kilimanjaro pushes this adaptation as far as it can go. Even late in his career, Hemingway continues to tug at the fabric of his selfcreated identity. Charo, his wife’s gun bearer, “had wished to convert me to Islam some twenty years before and I had gone all through Rama-

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dan with him observing the fast” (32). Typically, the accession to Islamic belief (and what a prospect that would be: Hemingway as an American-Islamic author!) comes not through a leap of faith but through the ritual and self-discipline of fasting. An important wrinkle in the text’s representational fabric occurs at this point. In his flight from the Masai, Hemingway alights on East African Moslems as repositories of integrity and authenticity. Stripped of doctrinal or devotional features, these figures stand for an archetypal image of loyalty. Charo is manly and ritualistic in his actions, and sufficiently Other to establish exoticism; but his presence is assimilated in ways that Islamic presence could not be accommodated by Wright or Bowles, largely because he lacks that edge of religious-ideological difference that the Western observer perceives as threatening. Charo occupies the space in Hemingway’s fiction where we find a disciplined male alterity that is culturally distinct but also admirable and also, quite possibly, attainable; it is the place where Hemingway places bullfighters, fishermen, and African hunters. Even though Charo wanted to convert Hemingway to Islam, Hemingway’s own flirtation with Islam emerges out of his own ability to reshape such cultural difference in the light of lifelong fascinations with stylized masculinity. Some forty years after Hemingway’s depictions of Islamic difference, Richard Powers and Don DeLillo encountered a religious difference that was less amenable to Western mastery and self-fashioning.

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9

“These great new times” Cosmopolitanism and Contemporary Writing

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The “world” in which we now live is in some profound respects thus quite distinct from that inhabited by human beings in previous periods of history. It is in many ways a single world, having a unitary framework of experience (for instance, in respect of basic axes of time and space), yet at the same time one which creates new forms of fragmentation and dispersal. —Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (1991)

In his 1991 study (a compound of travelogue, memoir, and political essay), Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World, David Rieff surveyed a culture undergoing social and economic transformation: “I walked through the streets of New York, and of half a dozen other American cities as well, and the colors of the skin of the people I passed were ones that had not been present in the America of my childhood. I saw racial types and heard languages that had never before been present on the American continent.”1 Although some of Rieff ’s judgments now seem to be misjudgments (like many early 1990s commentators, he overestimated both Japan’s rise to hegemony and the United States’s relative decline), he captured the importance of demographic shifts and international migration.2 In what he termed “these great new times” Rieff

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observed that the globe “had simply grown too crowded, and its prosperous areas had become too accessible from its slums.” New movements of people across previously cavernous distances constituted the emergence of the world’s hard facts into American life, “the dreary wake-up call of history and demography.” He even located a world-historical shift in his own lifetime, “the 1960s, which . . . now look like the white world’s demographic last hurrah.”3 Rieff ’s portrayal was ironic and intermittently saturnine, and other commentators (not least the business writer Joel Kotkin in his 1988 futurist work, The Third Century: America’s Resurgence in the Asian Era) adopted a more boosterish line on these developments.4 Nonetheless, Rieff ’s title was striking, and his thesis that the Third World was now, as it were, inside the developed world now seems, like many sound ideas, to have become a cliché. Demographic shifts, increasingly sophisticated systems of transnational transport, economic necessity, Western societies’ permeability: these factors (a potent mixture of pull and push imperatives) had changed the metropole. It is within this context recent American internationalist fiction demands to be understood. In this final chapter I want to explore current U.S. writing in its internationalist configurations, and to ask how two of the era’s major artists, Don DeLillo and Richard Powers, imagine “abroad.” The events of 9/11 give this discussion texture, as do the deeper rhythms of economic and technological globalization. I want to situate these writings (Powers’s Plowing in the Dark; DeLillo’s Mao II and Cosmopolis, and the essay “In the Ruins of the Future,” composed in response to the attack on the Twin Towers) in the context of the writing about cosmopolitanism that has effloresced during the past ten or fifteen years. In journals such as Public Culture, and across literary theory, anthropology, political science, and sociology, this term has achieved a totemic centrality. Arjun Appadurai, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Amartya Sen, Walter Mignolo, Ulrich Beck: the list of cosmopolitan thinkers is long and growing. How this body of thought relates to American internationalism is a critical question. It’s notable that many of these commentators were born and educated in Europe, Africa, and Asia but now work in the United States.5 If we live in an age of terror, as many contend, then we

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also live in a world conspicuously more cosmopolitan than it has ever been. How these social and political vectors work together, and how writers operate within this imaginary is my current subject. Two prescient works, written at the end of the twentieth-century and before 9/11, heralded a more troubling and increasingly threatening encounter between the American writer and non-Western cultures. Don DeLillo’s Mao II (1991) and Richard Powers’s Plowing the Dark (2000) are partly set in the strife-torn Beirut of the 1980s; both explicitly place the terrorist in a global fiction where the American abroad encounters increasing danger. The American traveler now finds himself confronting figures that reject his ideology. DeLillo and Powers also identify encounters where this traveler has ceased to have an identity outside “American-ness.” This is his personality’s summation, as if James Baldwin’s 1961 comment—that in leaving America one discovered what made one “American,” not “black”—had become an expatriate imprisonment.6 Powers and DeLillo take motifs seen in earlier U.S. representations of the developing world, and extrapolate these themes to discover grimmer subtexts. That would be a reading of literary internationalism as a form of genealogy, where successive generations of writers read out a narrative code’s implications. But another argument suggests itself: that the world has shifted in some way at the century’s end. A fresh internationalist paradigm has emerged, and writers have responded to the changed global climate. There definitely seems to be a tonal shift in American literary globalism if we move on from the late 1950s to the 1990s. Edginess, wariness, and an insidious anxiety enter these texts’ voices. Like the British protagonist of Ian McEwan’s recent fiction, Saturday (2005), these Western figures are abroad in a world made anxious: “And now, what days are these? Baffled and fearful, he mostly thinks when he takes time from his weekly round to consider.”7 Whereas McEwan positions his English neurosurgeon against a thoroughly quotidian context still offering the consolations of culture, art, and domesticity to an edgy consciousness, DeLillo and Powers pursue further disorientations by removing their protagonists from America and placing them within the spaces of global conflict. Each author heightens the ironies by the choice of profession

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they make for their protagonists: teacher and writer. These figures want to do well; they think of themselves in progressive terms. For both, the journey out of America is a journey into national identity; for each the scene of the foreign arouses trepidation, fascination, and fear. Matters are becoming fraught. In The Spider’s House Bowles’s protagonist fled Morocco on the edge of revolution. Throughout her family’s Chinese sojourn Pearl Buck witnessed the country’s repeated political upheavals. In rapidly decolonizing West Africa Richard Wright was appalled by a threatening primitivism he felt had no place within modernity. To be abroad for these writers was to be worried or baffled, but it was not yet fatal. Things had certainly worsened thirty years later, and for Powers and DeLillo the place of the encounter now becomes crucial. In Powers’s Plowing the Dark the promise of travel and the ideal of an expansive foreign otherness collapse into the kidnappers’ terrifying room: “You wait. The waiting becomes a game. Then the game becomes a contest. They mean to break your will. They find this cute. Some kind of victory for the world’s downtrodden, to make mighty America wet its pants. So it turns into a State Department mission, to suppress your bladder until the enemy concedes respect.”8 In the 1950s Paul Bowles had imagined Islamic culture as a sealed room, resistant to change. Islam’s attraction for Bowles’s expatriates was this very resistance to the modern. Intriguingly, it is an Islamic sealed room that recurs in the fin-de-siècle American novel: the kidnappers’ dingy basement. The victim, ransomed in exchange for militant prisoners held in Kuwait, suffers an existential fate. His identity becomes generic, becomes simply “American,” as he disappears into the black hole of foreign wars: “By now you’ve made the world papers. ‘Yet another American,’ like the reports you used to read and file away, unimaginable. Chicago now knows the name of those who captured you, while you as yet do not” (101). To the kidnappers, the victim is a figure whose identity is scrubbed down to national essentials. To the victim, the world has suddenly become opaque; his location and the kidnappers’ identities remain unknown. The middle ground of societal knowledge has vanished, to be replaced by fundamental ignorance or a brutal generalization, reducing individuals to indices.

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Wright and Buck created a midcentury peripatetic and communal internationalism. The writer traveled across disparate terrains but usually found him or herself in recurrently familiar scenes set in market, peasant village, and teeming non-Western street—the settings for bartering, storytelling, and humanistic encounter that recur in Black Power or My Several Worlds. Out of interviews, encounters, and conversations the writer found a space (social and written) for the open margin, a place where the relationship between the West and the rest had not yet been locked down irrevocably into geopolitical paradigms. Such spaces are barely present in the 1990s fictions of DeLillo and Powers. The hostage-takers’ basement replaces the market; the bracing encounter between the Western/“developed” self and the tribal/“undeveloped” African or Islamic Other gives way to kidnapping. There is a quite literal narrowing-down of possibility, as earlier environments of literary internationalism (African market, Asian jungle, Chinese village) abruptly transmute into claustrophobic urban spaces, saturated with dread. Plowing the Dark is probably less well known than Mao II, but it demonstrates a comparable bravery in its confrontation with the current scene. In place of documentary representation Powers positions a highly shaped, experimental remaking of political history. Plowing the Dark, a novel about computing, has a binary structure; it is composed in the form of two intertwined narrative strands. One thread centers on the virtual reality project, the other on the kidnapping of an American teacher who is half-Iranian and whose designation as an American confounds his hybrid background. A group of Islamist radicals in mid1980s Beirut hold Taimur Martin in a succession of secret rooms and hideaways. The novel creates two dichotomous worlds—the kidnappers’ cell and the space fashioned by computer engineers in their quest for a synthetic world. The latter is a controlled place “where all things work out” (144): “This is the place’s guiding rule. . . . No twist of plot, except what is stated” (144). Technology and advanced mathematics create an environment where the happenstance is erased. Powers places against “imagination’s room” a place that is in effect history’s room, the space where an American victim finds himself physically confined and buffeted by historical contingency. In virtual reality “all things work

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out”; but in historical time, chance and ideology mean things fail to work out. Even to eat or to relieve oneself have become almost impossible acts. Terrorism creates plots where the “twist” is shaped by the terrorist and where agency is removed from the victim. In Powers’s novel such loss of agency or control is the ultimate threat posed by terrorists to the Western self. But a paradox is that terror narratives produce powerful stories possessing their own compulsion, providing grand narratives in a world seemingly beyond such plots. Powers shares with DeLillo an interest in the connections between literary narrative, the “event,” and terrorism. For Powers’s drifting and aimless protagonist, the conflict in Beirut then has the awful fascination of “event”: “You’ve brought this all on yourself. Walked open-armed into a civil war. You’ve negotiated with it since childhood, this sick desire for event” (147–48). In a postmodern era of fragmentation, terrorism perversely maintains the imaginative reach of a grand narrative. Plowing the Dark, published at the cusp of a new century, concretizes and advances a debate staged in the previous quarter century’s U.S. writing about the national culture, modernity, and progress. Powers shapes a narrative, a dialectic between self-consciously technological forms of advancement (a digital culture giving rise to a virtual reality laboratory) and a rapidly integrating world where resistance to modernity is endemic. Here are the late twentieth century’s terrorists and computer engineers. Thus one of Powers’s topics, explicitly foregrounded at several moments in the text, is Francis Fukuyama’s finde-siècle thesis propounding the “end of history.” The novel begins in the mid-1980s, running through to the first Gulf conflict (1990–91) and the year of Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992). The virtual reality engineers pursue a mathematical and computational project that in its inevitability and logic might, in fact, serve as the symbolic embodiment of the end of history. But the text shows that even as a posthistorical culture was being theorized and celebrated, history churned on in its relentless, unpredictable ways. For the engineers, reality keeps catching up with and overtaking their work, as the new dawn of posthistorical certitude quickly gives way to another era of tension. The epigrammatic title introduces Powers’s ironic undermining

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of the 1990s ideology of posthistorical globalism and technological futurism: “History and its victims kept their hands to the plow, broken, exhausted, like an old married couple trapped for life in love’s death lock, unable to break through to that sunlit upland. The future, under construction, leveraged to the hilt, could only press forward, hooked on its own possibility” (154). The virtual world is one of computation and predictability; it proffers posthistorical certitude. Political change, history’s stuff, will become a matter for algorithmic inevitability. But the unexpected changes of the late 1980s, the chaos in Eastern Europe and the Middle East that Powers charts, mean that history overrides computation. History itself has a dogged determinism about it, but this is the certainty of “plowing”—“broken, exhausted.” Narratives are “unable to break through to that sunlit upland,” even as they incorporate the compelling fascination of the terrorist event.

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Mao II and the End of History DeLillo’s Mao II revisits and recasts many of the topics and scenarios discussed in this study. It opens with one of the American novel’s most scintillating representations of missionary life—except that in a telling reversal, DeLillo has a young protagonist absorbed into the Moonie cult and married during a communal ceremony in Yankee Stadium. The Eastern missionaries now come to the United States, entering the West to find converts. DeLillo has a keen eye for the new faiths of the postmodern order; Islam and new age cults now occupy religion’s global foreground. In the “American sunlight” of Yankee Stadium the young Westerners enter the cult’s heartland. Such symbolic moments herald larger shifts in global culture that create freakish conjunctions and connections across disparate societies. DeLillo’s subject, as throughout his later work from White Noise (1984), is postmodern America in all its networked complexity (as Tom LeClair writes: “DeLillo’s constant concern is postindustrial America in a multinational world”9). But that complexity will herald a series of deadly conjunctions, as previously separate zones disintegrate and collapse into one another. The exhilara-

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tion of 1950s internationalist texts—when air travel began in earnest and the writer could quickly find himself in the “contact zone” of an international meeting or African marketplace—has become a global anxiety. Writers themselves are under surveillance and assault. Bill Gray, the reclusive author at the novel’s dark heart, is a recusant figure who has declined to engage with the networks of the media and marketing. But he finds himself drawn steadily into engagement with the world, and specifically its apparent master: the terrorist. The novel’s imagined spaces are significant. Gray, the writer, lives in a remote area of upstate New York. At one point DeLillo paints a characteristically hallucinatory image of a small town on the Kansas prairies. But other settings are foreign cities: Athens, London, Beirut—DeLillo’s fiction responds to a world reconfigured into a series of interconnected urban nodes. Within this mapping, the world forms a starkly binary spatial code. Public spaces have become the bustling centers of a crowd culture that appears to extinguish autonomy. Communal spaces are dominated by crowds that offer threat, death, or personality’s extinction: the Moonie wedding or the English soccer tragedy at the Hillsborough stadium, where ninety-six fans were crushed to death. But the individual’s space has become confined and sequestered: Gray’s isolated house, hotel rooms, the hostage’s basement, the ship’s cabin where the writer expires. DeLillo is explicitly a novelist of ideas and a manipulator of the “strong” thesis. His characters do not embody or represent ideas or ideologies, but actively speak and debate those theories, usually in a mildly staged rhetoric hovering between authenticity and parody. One such idea, which became a signature for his work (and against which he repositioned himself in the wake of 9/11), was that writing and terrorism had moved into a contrapuntal relationship. DeLillo suggested across a good number of central passages that the writer was symbolically coupled to the terrorist. The writer shares the terrorist’s grievance, oppositionality, and resistance to authority. Furthermore, terrorism had absorbed from imaginative literature the ability to reach into the individual consciousness. Now, the imagination, and narrative itself, had become colonized by the predominant mode of terror. One of Mao II’s

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characters, Brita, confesses that “‘there is no moment on certain days when I’m not thinking terror. They have us in their power. In boarding areas I never sit near windows in case of flying glass. I carry a Swedish passport so that’s okay unless you believe that terrorists killed the prime minister.’”10 DeLillo’s meticulous replaying of motifs drawn from American literary internationalism creates one of the worldliest novels of recent years. Critics have often drawn attention to DeLillo’s sense of a networked world; but there is also a definite shape to his transnational cartography. The book has four significant locales. First, the United States itself. Even here there is a telling subdivision between the Manhattan and upstate New York places where Bill Gray now finds himself, and the hinterland of the Great Plains where he came from—and where his assistant (Scott) and the refugee from the Moonies (Karen) will meet in a desolate small town. Second, there is the Middle East: Beirut’s war-torn precincts, where the novel’s second protagonist, a Swiss aid worker, is held hostage; and Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran. Third, DeLillo’s East Asia reaches into America’s very heart with its cultural influence and soft power. Finally, Gray travels to the old Europe of London and Athens. DeLillo breaks each realm of culture and politics into a fractured shorthand or fragmented iconography. London is represented through near-parodic images: shabby hotel, drizzly street, black cab, meal in a wainscoted restaurant. Athens carries its own code: Metaxa brandy, dark-bearded Orthodox priests, and ridiculously dressed soldiers. DeLillo has carefully engineered the almost-clichéd, obvious descriptive flashes into a world of bleary touristy icons. The selection of these particular sites resonates. Is this the first American novel of the Asian century? Mao II is not Asian in the way that Pearl S. Buck’s novels obviously are—the narrative never touches Asia’s actual soil. Yet Asia has become a pervasive presence in DeLillo’s America, and is the embodiment of what it might mean to encounter a foreign culture. Asia signifies in three ways: as economic and technological engine; as harbinger of new cultural formations (the Moonies); and as site for a revolutionary politics whose power, though commodified in such representations as Warhol’s Mao pictures, can still be felt. “Mao II,” a Westernized image

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of Mao, a series of replicas (and part of a series of images Warhol made of Mao: a further replication), establishes a commentary on the demise of revolutionary politics. The novel was published in 1991, and one reading of the text might see the deployment of Mao as ironic closure to a century of revolution, Hobsbawm’s “Age of Extremes.” Even the most anti-Western and austere of revolutionaries can finally be incorporated and assimilated into the West; and in a further twist, commodification is also the moment for artistic transcendence. The West’s power, the image “Mao II” suggests, lies in a symbiotic melding of individualized creativity—enough to produce the artist Andy Warhol—and consumerist capitalism. Individual creativity, rapidly disseminated by the market’s replicated images and products, will defeat Maoism and other revolutionary movements. This might be a Fukuyama-esque or neoconservative reading of how DeLillo has created a fiction for the end of history. Two rejoinders might be placed against this interpretation. First, if this is a narrative emerging from a moment of historical closure, then the sense of an ending has arrived in enervated form. The sentences are bleached and clipped; the narrative design centered on plots of decline and defeat, chief among them Gray’s death. Liberal capitalism’s triumph and Communism’s fall have inaugurated a new world not with a bang but a whimper. Second, post-1989 plots, scenarios, and characters begin to take shape in DeLillo’s fiction. He notes the emergence of apocalyptic religious cults, technological interconnection, and forms of terrorism that reach deeply into the West. Mao II increasingly reads like a foreshadowing of the early twenty-first century. If there is a theoretical counterpart to these late twentieth-century American readings of the “Third World,” then it probably emerges with apt irony, given the continual intersections and counterpoints between French and American internationalism, in the work of a French historian of colonization, Marc Ferro. Ferro’s mordantly synoptic account, Colonization: A Global History (published in English in 1997), traces the relentless “unification” of the world by capitalism, of which colonization has been a vital component: “While there existed in the sixteenth century world economies—China, the West, the Islamo-

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Turkish world—unification has proceeded irreversibly and today there exist scarcely any endorheic zones outside the system.”11 “Endorheic” is the geographical term for a lake that does not have drainage to the sea, a closed basin. All “zones,” Ferro suggests, are ultimately part of one quasi-oceanic system we call the global economy. There is no longer an “outside.” Ferro’s account is significant. It emerges from that school of French Annales thought exemplified by Fernand Braudel, with its emphasis on the “longue durée” of history across epochs. For Ferro, the “worlds” created by the cold war and decolonization are less significant than the relentless undertow of history and the steady “unification” of the global system under what he terms “King Money.” Ferro’s approach, a 1990s systems analysis of global development, is analogous to the representation of world politics in work by Powers and DeLillo, where “zones” (a common term for all these writers) become part of a grid of interconnections. As with DeLillo and Powers, Ferro has tried to account for the voices contending the “standardization” of the world (for Ferro, undoubtedly, a regrettable universalization). In one important passage he identifies the antiphonal “counter-analysis” in these terms: “But it was the former colonized peoples who not long ago gave a similar example of calling official history into question: the griots in black Africa, ulemas and marabouts in Islamic countries have fought a battle against the prevailing modes of information and history, first on the ground of facts and narration, and afterwards on that of values by calling into question those which gave legitimacy to the colonial conquest.”12 For Ferro, globalization has become a final struggle over information. The oppositional voices of the griots or the marabouts fight their postcolonial struggle by waging war against the “prevailing modes of information and history.” Narration itself is now a battleground. It was within this context that DeLillo addressed 9/11. “Our world, parts of our world, have crumbled into theirs” When DeLillo looked back from September 2001 to 1991, he might have felt discomfited by his own prescience. Mao II read like a chronicle of deaths foretold. The mapping of the near future had achieved uncanny

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accuracy. Earlier work, particularly a 1983 essay on Lee Harvey Oswald written for Rolling Stone, “American Blood,” accumulated resonance in the light of historical change.13 His writing had returned obsessively to scenes of American hysteria, from the assassination of JFK (Libra) to the imagined environmental disaster of White Noise and the cults of Mao II. Now, DeLillo applied his “cool” analytical discourse to the “hottest” of topics. The essay written in immediate response to 9/11, “In the Ruins of the Future” was produced within the shadows of the event, but also within a self-shadowing cast by his earlier thoughts about terrorism and the global network.14 He had got it right, but rightness was a harsh premonition. Even the Roman numerals—Mao II—sat on the page like miniature configurations of the World Trade Center.15 The Twin Towers resonate through the text as one of a repertoire of late twentieth-century icons: Khomeini’s face, Mao, personal computers, Moonie mass weddings. The essay, published in Harper’s magazine in the United States and in the Guardian in Britain, bluntly asserted: “Today, again, the world narrative belongs to terrorists.”16 It created nothing less than a template for writing about global politics at the start of a new century. In his consciously fractured meditation on international crisis, the discourse of “the ruins,” DeLillo compressed his sentences into relentless clarity. Already, in the immediate aftermath of the event it had become evident language itself would become a casualty. Written in a Melvillean code of literary-political critique, “In the Ruins of the Future” addresses a crisis while articulating new forms of political-cultural analysis. DeLillo’s epigrammatic sentences build into a series of juxtaposed paragraphs and crosscut lines of enquiry that suggestively map an interpretative alterity. Rather than flowing outwards from a single perception or monolithic thesis, the essay has an angular but open-ended architecture, composed of intersecting analyses. One argumentative strut rests on what the reader recognizes as a poetic version of the global systems analysis rhetoric beloved by those policymakers who typically articulate readings of our networked world: “In the past decade the surge of capital markets has dominated discourse and shaped global consciousness. Multinational corporations have come to seem more vital and influential than governments. The dramatic climb

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of the Dow and the speed of the internet summoned us all to live permanently in the future, in the utopian glow of cyber-capital, because there is no memory there and this is where markets are uncontrolled and investment potential has no limit” (1). There is an incantatory quality to this discourse, a poeticizing of systems analysis and communications theory. But in DeLillo’s prose that language’s exuberant futurism shades into another language. Sentences become staccato and foreboding as a darker vision resonates. The one world of circuits and interconnections contains threat and dread: “Technology is our fate, our truth” (2). If we are fated to live in a technologically driven world, that technology might create unexpected eruptions. Worlds—“our world,” in fact—might no longer be discrete: “Our world, parts of our world, have crumbled into theirs, which means we are living in a place of danger and rage” (1). Global integration as disintegration becomes central. In DeLillo’s analysis one interpretative discourse crumbles into another, a process alarming and revelatory. The writer’s job is to move across these various interpretative matrices, combining and juxtaposing discourses to find the “crumbled” analysis of “the place of danger and rage.”17 The circuitry of American life emerged as a trope at the beginning of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), when Oedipa Maas looks down on San Narciso: “She thought of the time she’d opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had.” The electronic circuit and the highways are encoded with significance, “a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning.”18 For Oedipa, the highways create “ordered swirl,” an image Pynchon mapped onto the circuit board’s miniaturism. His resonant symbol established a sense of circuits as legible, able to create definition amid the “swirl” of contemporaneity. Working with similar tropes thirty years later, DeLillo imagines ragged and disordered circuits. His advance beyond Pynchon emerges from a realization that networks might in practice lead to fragmentation, not synergistic integration. As the information circulates and open circuits proliferate, so the network causes the collapse of dis-

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crete informational spaces and even, in the next global extension, of physical space. The essay does offer possibilities of redemption, moments where agency might be asserted, within the “place of danger and rage.” He inserts highly humanistic narratives into the analysis of grids and networks. The essay’s miniature narratives of loss establish an immediate emotionalism that counterpoints systemic dehumanization. The writer himself emerges in his own narrative, a suffering figure peering into the tragic scene at Ground Zero.

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It is possible to pass through some checkpoints, detour around others. At Chambers Street I look south through the links of the National Rent-A-Fence barrier. There stands the smoky remnant of filigree that marks the last tall thing, the last sign in the mire of wreckage that there were towers here that dominated the skyline for over a quarter of a century. Ten days later and a lot closer, I stand at another barrier with a group of people, looking directly into the strands of openwork façade. It is almost too close. It is almost Roman—I-beams for stonework, but not nearly so salvageable. Many here describe the scene to others on cellphones. “Oh my God, I’m standing here,” says the man next to me. (2)

The scene centers on a ruined architecture “almost Roman” in its overwhelming imperial destruction. Faced with a barely “salvageable” panorama, the writer reaffirms human presence by acts of witness. Repeatedly, the essay literally replays moments of chance communion, either directly on Manhattan’s streets or through communications networks—“exchange of every sort” (1). With its checkpoints, fences, barriers, and wreckage, the vista takes on a plethora of overtones. The writer stands in a partly literal, partly symbolic landscape, searching for an exchange that will offer solace. The cold war remains with us, the essay implies, but with such indirection that to suggest this is what DeLillo “says” sounds like a corruption. One can read “In the Ruins of the Future”—an American hymn ending with the Islamic blessing, “Allahu akbar”—as a return to the scene of witness for the globalist writer.

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Faced with “danger and rage,” DeLillo enters the American street, picking his way through the rubble, listening in to cell phone conversations, imagining other narratives: “We live in a wide world, routinely filled with exchange of every sort, an open circuit of work, talk, family and expressible feeling” (1). There is an “open circuit” not only of information or money or commerce but of sentiment. This rhetorical movement, with its invocation of simple humanism—“expressible feeling”—reminds us of Richard Wright’s wish to reinstate the “human heart” into cold war politics, or Paul Rabinow’s breaking of the anthropological contract during his Maghrebi sojourn. In the “open circuit . . . ideas evolve and de-evolve, and history is turned on end,” DeLillo writes (2). The essay’s oblique radicalism rests on skepticism, a doubled sense that ideas can “evolve and de-evolve.” In his fiction the evolution of ideas can lead to a constriction, a determinism that robs individuals of agency. The work, as Tom LeClair shows in what is the best study of DeLillo, is obsessively fascinated by such systems or loops. Trapped within an informational network, the protagonist finds himself locked into an “inevitabilist” narrative. Within the system, though, spaces of uncertainty and contingency survive where human adaptability might create new ways of thinking, a fragile independence from positioning “in the loop.” There remains the “possibility that human existence that could be open rather than closed.”19 In White Noise DeLillo used this sense of the “open” to oppose “drift” to the “plan”: “May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan.”20 “In the Ruins of the Future” recasts the opposition. If ideas “de-evolve,” then plot’s logic might be reversible. Examined from the essay’s humanistic perspective, this is redemptive. If ideas “de-evolve,” then terrorism’s deathly teleology might reverse itself, averting the horrifying sequence of events that culminated in the towers’ collapse. DeLillo presents the de-evolution of ideas to offset the realization that “today, again, the world narrative belongs to terrorists.” Why does DeLillo say that the “world narrative” belongs to the terrorists “again”? Who were the terrorists who previously owned the “world narrative”? The questions are never answered; in a world where plots lead to death, and where narrative belongs to terror, the

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writer hopes to loosen a deathly teleology. As Marco Abel comments: “The essay repeatedly wonders, What if the event were like this, then what? or if it were otherwise, then what?”21

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Eric Packer’s Car In his account of the cosmopolitan thought developed by Henry James and Edward Bellamy, Thomas Peyser argued these figures had located “the globe as the fundamental unit of human association” (his italics).22 Peyser’s study, Utopia and Cosmopolis, maps what might be American cosmopolitanism’s first stage, emergent at the turn into the twentieth century, when figures such as William Dean Howells formulated global conceptions of community. For Peyser, the late Victorian period was an idealistic and cosmopolitan moment and led to a “remarkable outpouring of utopian writings.” Even so, the classic American realists, while focusing on a cosmopolitan culture (Howells edited that inaugural transnational journal, The Atlantic, during the 1870s), had misgivings. Peyser notes that first-generation cosmopolitans sensed the new worldliness might produce dilettantism: “The arrogance of the chauvinist . . . is succeeded by the complacency of the connoisseur.” Furthermore, “if cosmopolitanism now expressed a fashionably open-minded stance toward experience . . . the relativity that went with it had its drawbacks.”23 These cosmopolitan discontents provided the matrix for Henry James’s writing. He created dangerous connoisseurs such as Gilbert Osmond (The Portrait of a Lady) or complex plots, notably that of The American, suggesting that cosmopolitan encounters might even undermine that most grand of Victorian narratives, the marriage plot. For the contemporary writer, further cosmopolitan discontents have emerged. Threat and danger are now central to worldliness. An earlier generation of realists brooded on dangers encountered by rootless Americans abroad in Europe. But a more recent generation of authors has located a cosmopolitanism that remakes national cultures in exciting but disturbing ways. If the world is consolidating into the One World, then even consolidation’s main architect, the United States, will inevitably be changed. This is the paradox DeLillo’s work sensitizes us to. In

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Mao II he suggested the world was penetrating America and remaking its culture. In Cosmopolis (2003) the processes of global interpenetration are faster, more hectic, and deeper. The novella makes plain DeLillo’s hypothesis about the contemporary scene: “World is supposed to mean something that’s self-contained. But nothing is self-contained. Everything enters something else.”24 This “everything” might mean people or ideas or things. Indeed, in Cosmopolis the world’s “everything,” now washed up on the streets of Manhattan, includes consumer goods, displaced migrants, ideologies, and advanced technology. DeLillo has always been a novelist working within an America become “Americana” (the title of his first book, published 1971): a useful term for the sports and pop cultures, and the domestic political demonology that saturate his work. Increasingly, DeLillo has shown that this Americana is subject to reverse internationalization, as when the Asian Moonies rally in Yankee Stadium. The world comes to America and transforms its cities. One result of this insight can be seen in the texture of his novels, especially those teeming cosmopolitan scenes that punctuate his plots. Mao II begins with the Moonies, while in Cosmopolis New York’s streets have become part of the paradoxically “Third World” America David Rieff saw in Los Angeles. In the following passage DeLillo even uses a term, “the street,” more familiar to us in formulations such as the “Arab street”: “Black men wore signboards and spoke in African murmurs. Cash for gold and diamonds. Rings, coins, pearls, wholesale jewelry, antique jewelry. This was the souk, the shtetl. Here were the hagglers and talebearers, the scrapmongers, the dealers in stray talk. The street was an offense to the truth of the future. But he responded to it” (65). Contemporary capitalism has shaped Cosmopolis’s protagonist, the uber-financier Eric Parker. He is the “symbolic analyst” embedded in financial markets, transnational networks, and technological modernity. He has responded to “the truth of the future,” but “the street” persists, churning away outside Packer’s apartment. Richard Wright flew to West Africa and Indonesia to witness the street vendors and griots. For DeLillo’s character a walk through New York brings the world to one’s home. In a United States “awash,” as the social theorist Arjun Appa-

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durai has observed, “in these global diasporas,” Packer moves through “the souk, the shtetl” of downtown Manhattan.25 The new city includes “the exiled head of state of some smashed landscape of famine and war” (10), while the bodyguards, cab drivers, and service workers have arrived from war zones in Somalia or the Balkans. DeLillo constructs Cosmopolis around a life in the day of Packer, this fantastically wealthy financier. The plot nods to modernist texts such as Joyce’s Ulysses or Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway, but has immediate American precedents. In Seize the Day (1956) Saul Bellow followed his protagonist, Tommy Wilhelm, around New York during a day of happenstance encounters set against the postwar city’s bracing modernity. The allusion to Bellow is part of Cosmopolis’s foundation in the postwar literary stratum, in texts produced by DeLillo’s predecessors and contemporaries: Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, and Philip Roth. Packer, with his quarterback’s name, his business acumen, and his ceaseless ejaculations, is a version of the American Century hero fashioned by these earlier writers. He has the swagger, philosophical expansiveness, and sexual appetite of Bellow’s Herzog (Herzog), Mailer’s Rojack (An American Dream), and Roth’s Portnoy (Portnoy’s Complaint). His character is that utterly distinctive compound of Emersonian romanticism, (William) Jamesian “will,” and postwar sexual appetite that exploded into 1950s and 1960s fictions. DeLillo represents Packer as a brilliant “primitive” set loose against Manhattan’s modernity. Packer, to use the ironic language James Baldwin took from French colonialism, is both “évolué” and “non-évolué.” He is a sophisticate, an analyst, and a connoisseur; but also impulsively physical, driven by sexuality and violence. He is a heavily muscled street fighter with a taste for modern poetry and random sexual encounters. DeLillo punctuates Cosmopolis with moments that seem to echo much recent U.S. drama or film—explosions of that machismo seen in Mamet or Scorsese: the sudden murder, the “take-down,” the fist in the face. Packer shoots his bodyguard for the most atavistic of reasons: male rivalry. “Torval was his enemy, a threat to his self-regard” (147). Earlier U.S. writers, I have suggested, sensed something troubling in cosmopolitanism. Thus the vampiric transnationalism of Henry James’s Gilbert Osmond. In Packer, DeLillo has created another unsettling cosmopolitan, the cosmopolitan

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as primitive and American thug: “Carefully he kicked him in the nuts, watching him spaz and crumple in Torval’s grip. When the flash units lit up, he attacked the photographers, landing a number of punches, feeling better with each one” (142). In Cosmopolis the cosmopolitan self ’s autonomy is ultimately constrained by a plot bringing Packer to his end in a ruined building, shot down by a former employee. The exuberant possibility suggested by earlier hypermasculinism is defeated. The heroes of Mao II and Cosmopolis are both dead by the end of their narratives. Exposure to the foreign, and movement across national spaces and cultures, gives rise to American plots marked by confinement and violence. Planted within global contexts, DeLillo’s protagonists are enmeshed in narrative patterns that channel and finally undermine the cosmopolitan plenitude promised by their identities as writer or financier. For both Bill Gray and Eric Packer the “one world” is ultimately a world of deadly teleology. Cosmopolis reads as if DeLillo had rewritten the classic New York novel (a form shaped by modernity: Manhattan Transfer, The Great Gatsby, Seize the Day) in the light of recent social theory’s conceptualizations of what Ulrich Beck has called the “risk society.” Beck’s influential analysis identified a “new modernity” where risk had become a central determinant in social organization. Although many societies might have moved beyond “material immiseration,” they now faced “immiseration through hazards.”26 Environmental and biological hazards create what Beck memorably termed a “Shadow Kingdom” threatening life on earth: “The risk society is thus not a revolutionary society, but more than that, a catastrophic society. In it the state of emergency threatens to become the normal state” (Beck’s italics).27 This is recognizably the world of DeLillo’s fiction, and one thinks immediately of the “Airborne Toxic Event” in White Noise. For another social theorist, Anthony Giddens, accelerating globalization has created a new formation of risk, and this in turn creates the reflexive pattern of risk assessment that is so much a part of modern experience: “A significant part of expert thinking and public discourse today is made up of risk profiling—analyzing what, in the current state of knowledge and in current conditions, is the distribution of risks in given milieus of action.”28

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Beck and Giddens would recognize the world of Cosmopolis. Security is a major issue, and the culture of risk and risk profiling shapes the fictional city. Packer’s car, in which he peripatetically crosses the city, encapsulates this ambivalent melding of cosmopolitan dialogue and obsession with security. Protected by bodyguards, ceaselessly alerted to threat, he is a man caught in complexity and endangered by contingencies. The vehicle is a refuge, a self-created prison on wheels. Meanwhile, risk assessments, accounts of advanced weaponry, and meditations on the financial markets’ instability drive DeLillo’s mordant dialogue. Outside the car, the streets suggest a new geography of danger. The television carries reports of political assassinations; demonstrations erupt; a protestor chooses self-immolation; a bomb goes off; mourners commemorate a dead rapper. The social theorists Anthony Elliott and Charles Lemert have suggested the current stage of globalization has produced a “new individualism,” as contemporary capitalism and advanced technology reshape our private lives. They argue that “we are in the midst of a global transformation of intimacy . . . the massive expansion of new information technologies opens up new possibilities and new risks for everyone on a scale that previously did not exist.”29 The world of Cosmopolis, with its merging of high technology, ever-present risk, and a Western individualism that is both utterly advanced and atavistically primitive, suggests a shape for twenty-first-century cosmopolitanism. DeLillo’s novella is a satirical, comedic, and violent fable of the cosmopolis. Yet recent conceptual work on cosmopolitanism has at times seemed markedly utopian. Such writing has predicated a confident contemporary self able to converse across national borders. In Kwame Anthony Appiah’s essay “Cosmopolitan Reading,” a world made up of these individuals takes shape, a utopian globe where difference is acknowledged and “conversations are possible”: “Cosmopolitan reading presupposes a world in which novels (and music and sculptures and other significant objects) travel between places where they are understood differently, because people are different and welcome to their difference. Cosmopolitan reading is worthwhile because there can be common conversations about these shared objects, the novel promi-

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nent among them.” And “what is necessary to read novels across gaps of space, time, and experience is the capacity to follow a narrative and conjure a world: and that, it turns out, there are people everywhere more than willing to do.”30 DeLillo’s cosmopolis shares Appiah’s sense of “gaps of space” through which “significant objects” travel, but it’s notable that he creates a disturbingly surreal version of cultural transmission. DeLillo’s “significant object,” a thing that practically becomes a character, is the customized stretch limousine carrying Packer. DeLillo brilliantly imagines the car and reminds us of the automobile’s centrality in such modernist classics as The Great Gatsby. But this limousine is a new thing and a premonition of a future. It is a global museum on wheels, a work of high technology, fitted with computer displays, an infrared camera, and a heart monitor. The floor is Italian marble. Packer has had the car “prousted,” cork-lined against noise, just as the French writer’s apartment was soundproofed (70–71). He coveted the limo because “he thought it was a platonic replica . . . less an object than an idea,” but as it sits on the street it is thrillingly and materially there as an object: “He wanted the car because it was not only oversized but aggressively and contemptuously so, metastasizingly so, a tremendous mutant thing that stood astride every argument against it” (10). As the limo moves through anticapitalist protests, demonstrators batter and spray paint it. It becomes a thing of brutalized beauty: “There were dozens of bruises and punctures, long burrowing scrape marks, swaths of impact and discolor. There were places where splashes of urine were preserved in pentimento stainage beneath the flourish of graffiti” (101). Now it is “a striking sight under the streetlamp, with a bruised cartoonish quality, a car in a narrative panel, it feels and speaks” (157). DeLillo has always had a more than theoretical interest in modern forms of communication (television and the Internet), in artistic production, and in how we create cultural value. His novels are littered with cultural workers: writers, photographers, curators, artists, and professors. In Cosmopolis he rearticulates what might be seen as “high” cosmopolitan theory by taking cultural significance out of the museum or the university, and placing it on the street. Cosmopolis maps cosmopolitan value in a thoroughly twenty-first-century manner. What, Packer’s

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limo asks us, is “significant” about many of the objects we value, which after all are far more likely to be mass consumerist products than elite artifacts. How does significance circulate in a world of digital technology? Cosmopolis suggests that the next stage in cosmopolitan thought will have to account for both cultural exchange and Appiah’s “common conversations” within a twenty-first-century context forged by turbocharged consumerism and digital networking.

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Conclusion Writing in Hanoi in 1968, the year many commentators see as a decisive turning point for the Vietnam War, Susan Sontag described her “moral dilemma at being a citizen of the American empire.”31 Seven years later the conflict was lost, and U.S. forces left Saigon in a chaotic evacuation. But Sontag’s identification of a global American status that was imperial proved prescient, and the country did not, as it had during the 1920s, turn toward isolationism. These large patterns of geopolitics and international affairs have been crucial and ongoing in the lives and works of many writers, as this book has shown. For Pearl S. Buck, Peter Matthiessen, Richard Wright, Paul Bowles, Don DeLillo, and Sontag herself, history was not only a matter of “representations” but of a direct encounter between the creative artist and world affairs. As essayists, travel writers, and polemicists American intellectuals have responded to, and also helped to bring into being, debates about cultural internationalism, global integration, and cosmopolitanism. Sontag declared herself a “citizen of the American empire,” and one way to understand the writers I have presented is as articulators of a distinctively civilian vision of what it might mean, as an American, to move through foreign spaces at a time of expanding American power. The responsibilities of the civilian writer can be seen in many of the texts surveyed in this book. And the dilemmas of being an American civilian abroad, at a time of “cold” or “long” wars against a range of enemies, work their way into the lives and works of these authors, creating patterns of exile and censorship (one thinks of Baldwin, Bowles, Buck, Du Bois). Yet late twentieth-century “American Century” internationalism has left

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us, too, with often-overlooked but compelling narratives. From Buck’s memoirs of missionary-era China, through Wright’s 1950s travels, and Matthiessen’s journeys to the “Stone Age” of Southeast Asia, a genealogy of contemporary American literary internationalism takes shape. In the most recent configurations of that genealogy, Susan Sontag’s son, David Rieff, along with experimental novelists Richard Powers and Don DeLillo, have folded these narratives into the homeland, showing how “home” now has a conspicuously cosmopolitan cast, as technology, migration, and terrorism have created a risk society now forever embedded in a global network. DeLillo’s 9/11 essay, “In the Ruins of the Future,” offered a simple but telling global vision: “We live in a wide world, routinely filled with exchange of every sort, an open circuit of work, talk, family and expressible feeling” (1). The “exchange” might be routine, but for many of America’s writers the efforts to describe that exchange have been anything but routine. In response to a world becoming more integrated, a world where one could now step on a plane and disembark halfway round the globe into a totally different culture, the American writer found him-or herself the object of foreign surveillance or, too often, domestic suspicion. To adopt Amartya Sen’s fine phrase, these were writers looking for a “nonsolitarist understanding of human identity.” But in a time of division, of the “cold” war that seemed hot in its impact on the movements of literary intellectuals, a “nonsolitarist” drive towards global understanding became marginal or even appeared dangerous. As Sen goes on to say, adopting a line from Derek Walcott: “We have to make sure, above all, that our mind is not halved by a horizon.”32 Whether or not U.S. culture really wants or needs to imagine a world that is not in some way “halved” is a question that the twenty-first century will answer; but we can thank DeLillo and his kindred American internationalists for framing the terms of this question for us.

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Notes

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1. The American Writer and Development 1. Richard Wright, The Color Curtain: A Report of the Bandung Conference (1956; repr., Jackson ms: Banner Books, 1994), 11–12. 2. Wright’s sense of Bandung’s importance demonstrates his farsightedness as a political thinker; recent accounts of Bandung echo his analysis: “Thus from the 1955 Bandung conference onward, third world entities converged in their foreign policy goals on crucial matters involving their dignity or self-understanding as moral subjects (identity), their autonomy as sovereign agents (integrity), or their freedom to choose (will)” (Siba N. Grovogui, “Postcoloniality in Global South Foreign Policy: A Perspective,” in The Foreign Policies of the Global South: Rethinking Conceptual Frameworks, ed. Jacqueline Anne Braveboy-Wagner, 31–48 [Boulder co: Lynne Rienner, 2003], 33). The “Final Communique” of this Asian-African Conference (April 18–24, 1955) is reprinted in A. W. Singham and Tran Van Dinh, Conferences of the Non-Aligned Countries 1955–1975 (New York: Third Press Review Books, 1976), 7–9. See also Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 191–92. According to historian Thomas Borstelmann (in a recent account of American foreign policy and race relations), “The Eisenhower administration sent no greeting to the conference and did its best to ignore it or sabotage it” (The Cold War and The Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena [Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 2001], 96). 3. Undated letter, Phil Graham to President Kennedy, cited in Katharine Graham, Personal History (1997; repr., New York: Vintage, 1998), 248. Germaine Tillion, Algeria: The Realities, trans. Ronald Matthews (New York: Knopf, 1958).

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224  Notes to pages 2–9 4. Graham, Personal History, 248. 5. Graham, Personal History, 587–88. 6. Daniel Boorstin, America and the Image of Europe: Reflections on American Thought (New York: Meridian Books, 1960), 13. 7. Virginia Whatley Smith, “French West Africa,” in Richard Wright’s Travel Writings: New Reflections, ed. Virginia Whatley Smith, 179–214 (Jackson ms: University Press of Mississippi, 2001). Wright planned to spend four months in Francophone West Africa, starting his journey in Senegal, but failed to raise the funds for this further 1950s travelogue. 8. For this reason, the familiar Orientalist paradigm, where a clear “line,” in Said’s formulation, divides Orient and Occident, becomes less persuasive. Reviewing the cultural relationship between Europe and Asia, Said noted a “common denominator,” the “line separating Occident from Orient” (Edward Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Race and Class 27 [1985]: 2). 9. Recent studies also stress “recovery” as the critical task of literary internationalism. Bruce A. Harvey observes of the early nineteenth century that we have “virtually no recovery and analysis of the texts that would better help us see the cultural dimensions of American abroad in the non-European world” (American Geographics: U.S. National Narrative and the Representation of the Non-European World, 1830–1865 [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001], 3). 10. For one of the most imaginative responses to the United States in the wake of 9/11 see Ian Jack, ed., Granta 77: What We Think of America (London: Granta, 2002). The epigraphs from Harold Pinter and Michael Ignatieff map the extremity of response: “A fully-fledged, award-winning, gold-plated monster . . . it knows only one language—bombs and death” (Pinter); “The only country whose citizenship is an act of faith, the only country whose promises to itself continue to command the faith of people like me, who are not its citizens” (Ignatieff) (9). 11. Rod Edmond argues: “It is time for colonial discourse studies to be historicized in more than theory” (Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gaugin [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 12). 12. Stephen Ambrose, Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy since 1938, seventh edition (New York: Penguin, 1993), xi. 13. Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985), especially 141–65. See also Thomas Hill Schaub, American Fiction in the Cold War (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). 14. David Riesman and Nathan Glazer, “The Intellectuals and the Discontented Classes,” Partisan Review 22 (1955): 48. 15. C. Wright Mills, “The Military Ascendancy,” The Power Elite (1956; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 211.

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Notes to pages 9–16  225 16. Mills, Power Elite, 206. 17. The Economist, November 22, 1952, cited in Mills, Power Elite, 210. 18. John Kenneth Galbraith, Economic Development (Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 1964), 2, 41, 47. 19. Max Lerner, “A Note on Reading,” in The Age of Overkill: A Preface to World Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962), 313–14. 20. Lerner, The Age of Overkill, 145, 151. 21. Lerner, The Age of Overkill, 157. 22. Lerner, The Age of Overkill, 147. 23. George Kennan, Russia, the Atom and the West (New York: Harper, 1958), 73. 24. Kennan, 74. Kennan’s dry imagining of a “Third World” keen to call on whoever would help it develop, regardless of ideology, is echoed by cold war historians: “The mass of the newly emerging peoples had little interest in the ideological struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States. They wanted only political independence and release from grinding poverty. To obtain these, they were willing to borrow from both systems, and if Soviets and Americans would compete for their allegiance and resources, so much the better” (Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War 1945–1992, seventh edition [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993], 171). 25. Irving Horowitz, Three Worlds of Development: The Theory and Practice of International Stratification (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 291–332. 26. Horowitz, Three Worlds of Development, 293. 27. Horowitz, Three Worlds of Development, 5. 28. David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972), 123. 29. George Dekker, The American Historical Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 73–98. Susan Manning, Fragments of Union: Making Connections in Scottish and American Writing (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 63–64. 30. One example: in refusing to apologize for colonialism, George Kennan laconically noted that “it was simply a stage of history” (Russia, 74). Historian Michael Hunt has seen the decolonization era in thoroughly Stadialist terms: “Americans found it easy to distinguish the civilized from the barbarian, the advanced from the backward. They confidently arrayed themselves and other peoples along that continuum according to their estimate of their cultural achievements and its close correlative, skin colour” (Michael H. Hunt, “Conclusions: The Decolonization Puzzle in U.S. Policy—Promise versus Performance,” in The United States and Decolonization: Power and Freedom, ed. David Ryan and Victor Pungong, 207–29 (Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan and St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 216. 31. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Structure of Nations and Empires: A Study of the Recurring Patterns and Problems of the Political Order in Relation to the Unique Problems of the Nuclear Age (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959), 1.

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226  Notes to pages 17–23 32. Manfred Halpern, The Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa (Princeton nj: Princeton University Press, 1963). For an overview of the development era and figures such as Halpern from a 1980 (post-Iranian revolution) U.S. perspective, see John L. Esposito, ed., Islam and Development: Religion and Sociopolitical Change (Syracuse ny: Syracuse University Press, 1980). Esposito’s contributors could now see that the model adopted by Halpern and Lerner in the ’50s and ’60s failed to account for Islam’s continuing vitality within so-called traditional societies. See Michael C. Hudson’s skeptical take on secularization, “Islam and Political Development,” in Islam and Development, ed. Esposito, 1–24. 33. David Reynolds, One World Divisible: A Global History Since 1945 (London: Penguin, 2000), 86–87. 34. David Riesman, introduction to Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (1958; repr., New York: Free Press, 1964), 10–11. 35. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902; repr., New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), 12. The American counterparts to Marlow’s ironic commentary are Mark Twain’s satirical squibs of 1900–1901, written in response to the Boer War and events in the Congo. In “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (1901) Twain satirized the “Torches of Progress and Enlightenment,” and asked, “shall we go on conferring our Civilization upon the peoples that sit in darkness, or shall we give those poor things a rest?” (Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays 1891–1910, 457–73 [New York: Library of America, 1992], 461). 36. Lerner, Passing of Traditional Society, 410. 37. Lerner, Passing of Traditional Society, 409. 38. For a caustic assault on the “Enlightenment creed” of technologically driven progress, see John Gray, Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern (London: Faber and Faber, 2003). 39. Lerner, Passing of Traditional Society, 250. 40. Reynolds, One World Divisible, 67. For a contemporary U.S. view of how the dissolution of European empires continues to shape the “American Century” and current geopolitics see Karl E. Meyer, The Dust of Empire: The Race for Mastery in the Asian Heartland (New York: Public Affairs, 2004). 41. The major study of the “nonrational” dimensions of American foreign policy is Robert Dallek, The American Style of Foreign Policy: Cultural Politics and Foreign Affairs (New York: Knopf, 1983). “The country,” he writes, “has continued to use foreign policy in nonrational ways to express current hopes and fears” (xix). 42. James E. Cronin, The World the Cold War Made: Order, Chaos, and the Return of History (New York: Routledge, 1996), 257. 43. Reynolds, One World Divisible, 1. 44. Riesman and Glazer, “The Intellectuals and the Discontented Classes,” 63.

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Notes to pages 24–29  227 45. Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 46. Clarence K. Streit, Union Now: The Proposal for Inter-democracy Federal Union (“Shorter Version”; New York: Harper and Brothers, 1940), x. Streit produced a steady stream of pamphlets, essays, and books on these themes. See also World Government or Anarchy: Our Urgent Need for World Order (Chicago: World Citizens Association, 1939). The movement had its enemies, too. See Stephen A. Day, We Must Save the Republic (Scotch Plains nj: Flanders Hall, 1941), for an attack on the “Anglomaniacs” who advocated union with Britain. 47. Charlotte Burnett Mahon, ed., Our Second Chance (New York: Woodrow Wilson Foundation, 1944). 48. Traces of this universalism can be found in political and social commentaries of the late 1940s through to the early 1960s. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., referred to “the noble dream of world government” in The Vital Center (Cambridge ma: Riverside Press, 1949), 240. Reinhold Niebuhr attacked the idea in “The Illusion of World Government,” Foreign Affairs 27 (1949): 379–88. In a 1960 essay, “The American Crisis” (cowritten with Michael Maccoby), David Riesman called for an internationalism that would link domestic participatory democracy to a global revitalization: “In order for us to live with our abundance, there must be greater participation in the political life of the United States and of the world” (Abundance for What? And other Essays [Garden City ny: Doubleday, 1964], 49). This essay, a study of national character, globalism, and American power in the cold war, now seems sharply prescient.

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2. The “Skin Game” 1. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The African Roots of War,” Atlantic Monthly 115 (May 1915): 707–14, reprinted in W. E. B. Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses 1890–1919, ed. Philip S. Foner, 244–57 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 251. 2. Alain Locke, “The Great Disillusionment,” lecture delivered to the Yonkers Negro Society for Historical Research, September 26, 1914. Reprinted as an appendix to Alain Locke, Race Contacts and Interracial Relations: Lectures on the Theory and Practice of Race, ed. Jeffrey C. Stewart (Washington dc: Howard University Press, 1992), 105–10. Locke attacked “the pretensions of European civilization to worlddominance and eternal superiority” (107). 3. Stewart, introduction to Race Contacts, xxvii. 4. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, “The Realities in Africa: European Profit or Negro Development,” Foreign Affairs 21 (July 1943): 724. 5. Du Bois, “Realities in Africa,” 722. 6. W. E. B. Du Bois, abstract to “Prospect of a World without Race Conflict,” American Journal of Sociology 49, 5 (1944): 450.

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228  Notes to pages 30–35 7. U.S. State Department, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation (Washington dc: U.S. Government, 1949). 8. On his way to the 1943 Casablanca conference FDR stopped in Gambia: “Appalled by the poverty and disease he witnessed there, he wrote to Churchill describing the territory as a ‘hell-hole.’ About the French he was even more scathing” (Martin Meredith, The Fate of Africa: From the Hopes of Freedom to the Heart of Despair [New York: Public Affairs, 2005], 9). 9. Du Bois, “Prospect of a World,” 453. 10. Du Bois, “Prospect of a World,” 451. 11. W. E. B. Du Bois, Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1945), 7–8. 12. See “China and Africa,” a speech given in Peking on the occasion of his ninetyfirst birthday (February 23, 1959). 13. Du Bois, Color and Democracy, 17. 14. Du Bois, Color and Democracy, 43. 15. Du Bois, Color and Democracy, 43. 16. Du Bois, Color and Democracy, 91. 17. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Careers Open to College-Bred Negroes” (Commencement Address, Fisk University, June 1898), in Writings, 827–41 (New York: Library of America, 1996), 831. 18. Ross Posnock also cites this phrase and then discusses Du Bois’s analysis of modernity and transnationalism in “Black Intellectuals and Other Oxymorons: Du Bois and Fanon,” in Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual, 87–110 (Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 1998). 19. James B. Stewart has argued that Du Bois’s internationalism was also framed by a model of evolution through stages. He examines two essays in particular: “The Development of a People” (1904) and “Mr. Sorokin’s Systems” (1942) (“In Search of a Theory of Human History: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Theory of Social and Cultural Dynamics,” in W. E. B. Du Bois on Race and Culture: Philosophy, Politics, and Poetics, ed. Bernard W. Bell, Emily Grosholz, and James B. Stewart, 261–88 [New York: Routledge, 1996]). 20. W. E. B. Du Bois to George Padmore, December 10, 1954, January 27, 1955 (The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois, vol. 3, 1944–1963, ed. Herbert Aptheker [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1978], 374–75). 21. Femi Ojo-Ade, “Africa and America: A Question of Continuities, Cleavage, and Dreams Deferred,” in Of Dreams Deferred, Dead or Alive: African Perspectives on African-American Writers, ed. Ojo-Ade (Westport ct: Greenwood Press, 1996), 15. For another skeptical account of Wright’s reading of Africa, see Ngwarsungu Chiwengo, “Gazing through the Screen: Richard Wright’s Africa,” in Richard Wright’s Travel Writings, ed. Smith, 20–44.

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Notes to pages 35–39  229 22. Kwame Anthony Appiah, “A Long Way from Home: Wright in the Gold Coast,” in Modern Critical Views: Richard Wright, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 181–82. 23. Wright presented his encounter with the Communist Party as a struggle between the individualistic intellectual and a party machine dominated by paranoid bureaucracy. His midcentury liberalism pitted the freethinking intellectual against party discipline. See the classic account of leftist disillusion in Richard Crossman, ed., The God That Failed (New York: Harper, 1949), 115–62. 24. Richard Wright, Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (1954; repr., Westport ct: Greenwood Press, 1974), 48–49. Further references are given in the main body of the text. 25. It is worth pointing out the centrality of markets for many American travelerwriters. To encounter the Victorian British Empire, for instance, was to witness a global trading system and endemic impoverishment. The “primal scene” of the U.S. literary internationalist was, perhaps, Herman Melville’s remarkable account of Liverpool docks “The Dock-Wall Beggars,” in Redburn (1849) (The Writings of Herman Melville, vol. 4, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle [Evanston il: Northwestern University Press, 1969], 185–88). 26. Wright’s account of the African economy, and his emphasis on the circulation of goods, can be read in conjunction with David Trotter’s useful analysis of the literary representation of trade, Circulation: Defoe, Dickens and the Economies of the Novel (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988). 27. Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton nj: Princeton University Press, 2001), 302. 28. Cited Irene L. Gendzier, Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study (New York: Grove Press, 1973), 264; Gendzier reviews Fanon’s impact in the United States on 262–65. 29. Peter Geismar, Fanon (New York: Dial Press, 1971), 152. Michel Fabre outlines a further connection between Fanon and Wright: “On January 6 1953, Fanon had written Wright a fan letter: he had all of Wright’s books in French and even Twelve Million Black Voices in English” (“Wright, Negritude, and African Writing,” in Michel Fabre, The World of Richard Wright [Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985], 212). 30. Ato Sekyi-Otu, Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience (Cambridge ma: Harvard, 1996), 16. 31. A persuasive account of the intersections between American and Francophone black intellectuals, and their varied responses to decolonization is Eileen Julien’s article, “Terrains de Rencontre: Césaire, Fanon, and Wright on Culture and Decolonization,” Yale French Studies 98 (2000): 149–66. Julien argues that Wright and Césaire “make too little of the colonized”: “Wright sees, at best, the ‘tragic elite’ who must drag their colonized people into modernity” (165).

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230  Notes to pages 39–47 32. A recent historical evaluation suggests that both Du Bois and Wright were in their separate ways correct: “Nkrumahism” was variously defined as “scientific socialism” and a complex ideology that Nkrumah was steadily developing (for instance, by drawing on traditional African ideas) (Martin Meredith, The Fate of Africa: From the Hopes of Freedom to the Heart of Despair [New York: Public Affairs, 2005], 162–63). See also Young, Postcolonialism, 242–46. 33. Michael H. Hunt, “Conclusions: The Decolonization Puzzle in U.S. Policy— Promise versus Performance,” in The United States and Decolonization: Power and Freedom, ed. David Ryan and Victor Pungong, 207–29 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 224. Hunt cites State Department documentation from the period. 34. Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (New York: International Publishers, 1965), x. 35. Robert Park, “Human Migration and the Marginal Man,” American Journal of Sociology 33 (1928): 881–93. For a detailed discussion of this essay, its relevance to Wright’s thought, and the broader dimensions of Wright’s sociological method, see Carla Cappetti’s invaluable study, Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography, and the Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 61–64 and passim. My arguments read out the internationalist implications of Cappetti’s interpretation of Wright’s domestic ethnography. 36. Everett V. Stonequist, The Marginal Man: A Study in Personality and Culture Conflict (1937; repr., New York: Russell and Russell, 1961), 31. 37. Michel Fabre, Richard Wright: Books and Writers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990), 154. 38. R. Fred Wacker, “The Sociology of Race and Ethnicity in the Second Chicago School,” in A Second Chicago School? The Development of a Postwar American Sociology, ed. Gary Alan Fine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 138–39. 39. Robert Park, introduction to Stonequist, Marginal Man, xiv. 40. Stonequist, Marginal Man, 7–8. 41. Park, introduction to The Marginal Man, xiv–xv. 42. Stonequist, Marginal Man, 59. 43. Stonequist, Marginal Man, 207–8. 44. James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Surrealism,” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 1988), 134. 45. Clifford, “Tell about Your Trip,” in The Predicament of Culture, 173. 46. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 178. 47. Malcolm X, “Not just an American problem, but a world problem” (speech given at Corn Hill Methodist Church, Rochester, New York, February 16, 1965), in

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Notes to pages 47–56  231 Malcolm X: The Last Speeches, ed. Bruce Perry (New York: Pathfinder, 1989), 167– 68. 48. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 178. 49. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 179–80. 50. Bruce Perry, Malcolm: The Life of a Man who Changed Black America (New York: Station Hill, 1991), 335; see 260–68 for his discussion of Malcolm’s Mecca trip. Malcolm kept a diary that contained accounts of his journeys, a now-lost contribution to American literary internationalism. 51. Amiri Baraka, “Malcolm as Ideology,” in Malcolm X in Our Own Image, ed. Joe Wood, 18–35 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992), 29. 52. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 343, 331. 53. James Baldwin, No Name in the Street (1972), in Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1998), 367. Further references to this work are given in the main body of the text. 54. Baldwin’s recognition of domestic French repression, formed by postimperial rage, explains his criticism of Richard Wright’s view of France. Wright, Baldwin suggested, mistakenly saw Paris as a “city of refuge”: “But it was not a city of refuge for the French, still less for anyone belonging to France; and it would not have been a city of refuge for us if we had not been armed with American passports” (“Alas, Poor Richard,” in Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son [1961], in Collected Essays, 249). 55. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturalism (London: Routledge, 1992), 6. For the writers in this chapter the “contact zone” would outlast the era of “colonial encounters”—there will always be places (Baldwin’s Parisian street, Wright’s postcolonial African markets) where “radical inequality, and intractable conflict” are suddenly manifest. 56. James Baldwin, “The New Lost Generation,” in Collected Essays, 659–72: 665.

3. “You were in on the last days” 1. Until recently, however, relatively few critics had located Bowles’s significance for American orientalism and U.S. readings of Islam. The tide is now turning. See Brian T. Edwards’s important readings of Bowles and other Americans abroad in the Maghreb, Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express (Durham nc: Duke University Press, 2005). 2. Paul Bowles, The Spider’s House (1955; repr., Santa Rosa ca: Black Sparrow, 1999), no page reference. Future page references to the novel are given in the text. 3. Bowles recurrently commented on this “decomposing” Morocco—his sense

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232  Notes to pages 56–62 that historical change brought inevitable cultural decline. Thus a comment on Tangier (October 16, 1987): “Whatever charms the town once had have long since been forgotten. Bulldozers have run wild over the countryside, vegetation has been hacked away and trees everywhere chopped down.” He resumes: “Good things do not continue” (Paul Bowles, Two Years before the Strait: Tangier Journal, 1987–1989 [London: Peter Owen, 1989], 15, 35). 4. Simon Bischoff, ed., Paul Bowles—Photographs (Zurich: Scalo, 1994), 204. 5. Millicent Dillon, You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 303. 6. Ernest Gellner, “Morocco’s Recent History,” in Saints of the Atlas (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1969), 21. 7. Bowles frequently uses townscapes and landscapes in this symbolic way, as embodiments of Islam’s fundamental difference. In The Sheltering Sky or “A Distant Episode” the Western protagonist is disoriented within the claustrophobic labyrinth of the medina or the featureless emptiness of the desert: Islamic terrain contains either too many or too few geographical signifiers for the Western intelligence, Bowles suggests. 8. Though, ironically enough, the linguistically gifted Bowles never properly learned Arabic: “I never had the time to devote to studying Arabic. I was busy working, writing, writing music” (Bischoff, Paul Bowles, 214). 9. My comment makes Bowles sound as if he were a writer who “discovered” his thoughts while writing. In interviews, Bowles presented himself as a writer for whom the compositional process was a trancelike state, with little conscious revision of manuscripts: “The first draft is the final draft. I can’t revise. . . . I first write in longhand, and then the same day, or the next day, I type the longhand” (Daniel Halpern, “Interview with Paul Bowles,” Triquarterly 33 [1975]: 163). 10. Frederick Wegener, “‘Rabid Imperialist’: Edith Wharton and the Obligations of Empire in Modern American Fiction,” American Literature 72 (2000): 793. 11. By a nice coincidence, Bowles’s first published poems appeared in transition, a modernist magazine. 12. Abdelhak Elghandor, “Atavism and Civilization,” Ariel 25 (1994): 11. 13. The photographic record of Bowles’s life powerfully embodies this paradox. On one hand, the anthropological-exploratory images of life in the Maghreb. On the other, the bizarre shots of Bowles with his mother and father in their chauffeured Bentley. The Beat hero was driven around by a servant in uniform (Bischoff, Paul Bowles, 77). 14. Gellner, Saints of the Atlas, 18–19. 15. Clifford Geertz, Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (New Haven ct: Yale University Press, 1968), 80.

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Notes to pages 63–72  233 16. John P. Entelis, Comparative Politics of North Africa: Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia (Syracuse ny: Syracuse University Press, 1980), 30–31. 17. Clifford notes that even after the postmodern decentering of anthropology, “dwelling” remains central: “But despite the move out of literal villages, the notion of fieldwork as a special kind of localized dwelling remains” (James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century [Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 1997], 21). 18. “As primitivity, as the age-old antetype of Europe, as a fecund night out of which European rationality developed, the Orient’s actuality receded inexorably into a kind of paradigmatic fossilization. The origins of European anthropology and ethnography were constituted out of this radical difference” (Edward Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Race and Class, 27 [1985]: 5). 19. Gellner, Saints of the Atlas, 17. 20. Halpern, “Interview with Paul Bowles,” 159. 21. Some of Bowles’s journal entries critique the imperial economy: “Everyone knows that the Tamils did not emigrate to Ceylon on their own initiative. Why did the British want them there? Because they needed an impoverished, helpless group of agricultural workers who could be forced to work for minimal wages” (Two Years before the Strait, 22). 22. Bowles’s interest here seems to me more “ethnographic” than “representational” to use Michael North’s distinction. Bowles was fascinated by primitivism, but his narrative technique remained largely orthodox rather than forging North’s “dialect of modernism”: “Was this new interest primarily ethnographic, fixated on the culture that could be rather luridly imagined behind a single African artifact, or was it aesthetic , with the artifact seen as a new arrangement of shapes in space? Was it part of an escapist daydream or a radical disruption of European representational conventions?” (Michael North, “Modernism’s African Mask: The Stein-Picasso Collaboration,” in The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language and Twentieth-Century Literature [1994; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1998], 59). 23. Dillon, You Are Not I, 173. 24. In his introduction to the English translation, Lévy-Bruhl explicitly contrasted his ideas to those of the “English anthropological school” who saw similar mental processes in “us” and “undeveloped peoples.” Lévy-Bruhl emphasized different mental processes (Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, “Author’s Introduction” to How Natives Think [1910; repr., New York: Washington Square, 1966], 10). 25. Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, 25. 26. Lévy-Bruhl expressed his doubts his own ideas in a notebook entry from June 27, 1938: “As to the ‘prelogical’ character of the primitive mentality, I have already watered my wine for twenty-five years: the results which I have just reached concern-

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234  Notes to pages 72–78 ing these facts make this development final, by making me abandon a badly founded hypothesis, at all events, in cases of this type” (Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, The Notebooks on Primitive Mentality, trans. Peter Riviere [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975], 47). The original French Carnets were published in 1949, but there is no evidence that Bowles knew them; his theories were aligned with those of the early Lévy-Bruhl. 27. Dillon, You Are Not I, 174. 28. Geertz, Islam Observed, 9. 29. Geertz, Islam Observed, 43. 30. Geertz, Islam Observed, 25. 31. Dale F. Eickelman, Moroccan Islam: Tradition and Society in a Pilgrimage Center (Austin: University of Texas Press 1976), 6–7. 32. Geertz, Islam Observed, 64. 33. Halpern, “Interview with Paul Bowles,” 168. 34. Each of these texts now carries a tellingly convoluted “author.” See Driss Ben Hamed Charhadi, A Life Full of Holes, a novel tape-recorded in Moghrebi and translated into English by Paul Bowles (1964; repr., Edinburgh: Rebel Inc., 1999) and Mohamed Choukri, For Bread Alone, translated from Arabic with an introduction by Paul Bowles (1973; repr., London: Saqi Books, 1993). 35. Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 144. 36. Eickelman, Moroccan Islam, 21. 37. Eickelman, Moroccan Islam, 22. 38. Wole Soyinka, “Neo-Tarzanism: The Poetics of Pseudo-Tradition,” in Art, Dialogue and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. Biodun Jeyifo, 293–305 (New York: Pantheon, 1988). 39. Paul Rabinow, Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 23. Further references are given in the text. Rabinow’s account of the experiential basis of fieldwork reads, quite deliberately one supposes, as a “novelistic” account of his Moroccan trip—a “studied condensation of a swirl of people, places, and feelings” (6). At the heart of the text lies a calculated act of Gidean, existential assertion: Rabinow slept with a Berber prostitute. The confession of this act is presented as a breaking of the covenant of fieldwork—that one should somehow keep intact the “observer” part of being a “participant-observer.” One can see in Rabinow’s breaking of this covenant an attempt to remold the anthropological inheritance that Bowles also found himself working within when he inscribed Morocco. Yet one cannot help feeling that the women in this episode are deployed in an intellectually instrumentalist fashion not found elsewhere in this open-ended study. Rabinow tests the limits of ethnography, but the brown female body is part of the test.

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Notes to pages 81–83  235

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4. Sinophilia 1. Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle (1962; repr., London: Penguin, 2001), 154–55. Dick’s imaginary Chinese history continues: “The American workman, by 1960, had the highest standard of living in the world, and all due to what they genteelly called ‘the most favoured nation’ clause in every commercial transaction with the East. The U.S. no longer occupied Japan, and she had never occupied China; and yet the fact could not be disputed: Canton and Tokyo and Shanghai did not buy from the British; they bought American” (155). This is China as market. 2. “Communist China is the main aggressor in The Game Players of Titan (1963) where a satellite has bombarded the USA with lethal radiation and The Simulacra (1964) where nuclear missiles have been used” (David Seed, American Science Fiction and the Cold War: Literature and Film [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999], 143). 3. See also Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Klein covers popular journalism (Reader’s Digest), popular fiction (James Michener), and musicals/ films (The King and I, South Pacific). 4. Joseph Nye Jr., The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 19. Nye positions China as one of the “New Challengers” to American power (18–22). 5. Richard K. Betts and Thomas J. Christensen, cited in Nye, Paradox of Power, 18. 6. Frank Ninkovich, “The Modernization of China and the Diplomacy of Imperialism,” in The United States and Imperialism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 153. 7. Cited in Robert Dallek, The American Style of Foreign Policy: Cultural Politics and Foreign Affairs (New York: Knopf, 1983), 123. 8. James C. Thomson Jr., Peter W. Stanley, and John Curtis Perry, Sentimental Imperialists: The American Experience in East Asia (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 16. 9. George Kennan, “Reflections on the Walgreen Lectures,” in American Diplomacy, expanded edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 158. Kennan saw this sentimentality as a form of “national narcissism,” “of collective self-admiration.” The nation needed “reassurance about ourselves” (158). 10. Thomson, Stanley, and Perry, Sentimental Imperialists, 45. Also see the rest of this chapter, “Evangelism: The Search for Souls in China,” 44–60. 11. Jonathan D. Spence, To Change China: Western Advisers in China (1969; repr., New York: Penguin, 2002), 290. Spence argues that the Chinese wanted Western expertise but not Western ideology: “even at their weakest, they sensed that acceptance of a foreign ideology on foreign terms must be a form of submission” (290).

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236  Notes to pages 84–87 12. John K. Fairbank’s introduction to the 1968 edition of Edgar Snow’s Red Star over China is another illuminating description of China within the contexts of the American mission, Manifest Destiny, the Pacific frontier, and modernization. He imagines Snow looking at Asia. “In 1936 he stood on the western frontier of the American expansion across the Pacific toward Asia, which had reached its height after a full century of American commercial, diplomatic, and missionary effort. This century had produced an increasing American contact with the treaty ports, where foreigners still retained their special privileges. Missionaries had pushed into the rural interior among China’s myriad villages and had inspired and aided the first efforts at modernization. In the early 1930’s American foundations and missionaries both were active in the movement for ‘rural reconstruction,’ the remaking of village life through the application of scientific technology to the problems of the land. At the same time, Chinese students trained in the United States and other Western countries stood in the forefront of those modern patriots who were becoming increasingly determined to resist Japanese aggression at all costs. Western-type nationalism thus joined Western technology as a modern force in the Chinese scene, and both had been stimulated by the American contact” (John K. Fairbank, introduction to Edgar Snow, Red Star over China [1938; revised and enlarged edition, New York: Grove Press, 1968], 12). 13. John Dewey, “Message to the Chinese People” (1942), “Appendix A,” John Dewey: Lectures in China, 1919–1920, translated from Chinese and edited by Robert W. Clopton/Tsuin-Chen Ou (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1973), 305–6. As Paul Varg notes, there was a group of professors at the National University in Peking who attacked Christian theism “while strongly advocating the pragmatism of John Dewey and secular humanism.” Another popular Western thinker was Bertrand Russell (Paul Varg, Missionaries, Chinese, and Diplomats: The American Protestant Missionary Movement in China, 1890–1952 [Princeton nj: Princeton University Press, 1958], 99). 14. For further extended examples of Luce’s Sinophilia see Patricia Neils, China Images in the Life and Times of Henry Luce (Savage md: Rowman and Littlefield, 1990). 15. John King Fairbank, The United States and China (“New Edition,” Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 1958), 1–2, 7. 16. For a brief but telling overview of Sino-U.S. relationships in the cold war era, and the Chinese pursuit of the bomb, see Spence, “The Last Rounds: U.S.A. and U.S.S.R.,” in Spence, To Change China, 279–88. 17. Agnes Smedley, Battle Hymn of China (New York: Knopf, 1943); William Hinton, Fanshen (1967; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 18. Adams’s opera has a libretto by the poet Alice Goodman, whose words show a good deal of familiarity with the history of American representations of China. At one

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Notes to pages 87–91  237 point Chairman Mao sings a plaintive critique of “port imperialism” and the missionary impulse, defending his country’s integrity:

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We have all we need: New missionaries, businesslike, Survey the field and then attack, Promise to change our rice to bread, And wash us in our brothers’ blood, (And give us beads,) and crucify Us on a cross of usury. After them come the Green Berets, Insuring their securities. Mao, “Our armies do not go abroad,” act 1 scene 2, Nixon in China, music by John Adams, libretto by Alice Goodman (1987). 19. W. E. B. Du Bois, Worlds of Color (New York: Mainstream, 1961), 64. 20. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk” (1920), in Writings (New York: Library of America, 1986), 936. 21. Mapping the Global Future: Report of the National Intelligence Council’s 2020 Project (Washington dc: National Intelligence Council, 2004), 29, 47–48. It’s also worth noting that these demographic figures are for nations, and do not include ethnic subdivisions. Given projections (for example, by the U.S. Census Bureau) for the rise in the domestic nonwhite U.S. population (and relative stasis in the white population), one can safely say that the figure of 4 percent could be broken down to reveal an even smaller figure for the white population of 2020. 22. Samuel I. Bellman, “Popular Writers in the Modern Age: Constance Rourke, Pearl Buck, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Margaret Mitchell,” in American Women Writers: Bibliographical Essays, ed. Maurice Duke, Jackson Bryer, and M. Thomas Inge, 353–78 (Westport ct: Greenwood Press, 1983). 23. Peter Conn, Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Buck has on balance been better served by biographers than critics. See also Theodore Harris, Pearl S. Buck: A Biography, 2 vols. (New York: John Day Co., 1969). 24. Varg, Missionaries, Chinese, and Diplomats, 164. 25. Varg, Missionaries, Chinese, and Diplomats, 166; Pearl S. Buck, “Is There a Case for Foreign Missions?,” Harper’s (January 1933): 143–55. 26. Conn, Pearl Buck, 259–61. Conn notes in his preface that, in regard to the Buck fbi materials, “I am still appealing for release of the other material” (xvi). See also Natalie Robins, Alien Ink: The fbi’s War on Freedom of Expression (New Brunswick nj: Rutgers University Press, 1993). A nice example of fbi surveillance, and its

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238  Notes to pages 91–104 eccentric geopolitics, occurs in Clayborne Carson, Malcolm X: The fbi File (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1991), 179. The file reports Malcolm’s 1959 trip to the Middle East, but describes this as a trip to the “Far East”—an interesting relocation of Egypt to the Pacific Rim. 27. Pearl S. Buck, My Several Worlds (New York: John Day Co., 1954), 4. Later citations are given in the main body of the text. 28. Thomson, Stanley, and Perry, Sentimental Imperialists, 55. 29. Intriguingly, when Hollywood came to make a movie version of Buck’s most famous novel, The Good Earth (1931), her skeptical, relativist understanding of global politics was written out of the script. As Blake Allmendinger has argued, in the film a thoroughly progressive ideology takes center stage: progress improves on tradition; the West is better than the East. Although the movie (made in the 1930s) suggested parallels between China and the heartland of the Great Plains (a telling conjunction during the Depression), the film’s cultural politics were firmly tilted toward a “nativizing” of the novel (Blake Allmendinger, “Little House on the Rice Paddy,” American Literary History 10, 2 [1998]: 360–77). 30. Pearl S. Buck, China Past and Present (New York: John Day Company, 1972), 105. Later citations appear in the main body of the text. 31. A further point might be that Buck and Bowles (and Matthiessen, too) came from upper-middle-class backgrounds; all had relatively privileged upbringings—and part of that privilege was an access to foreign experiences beyond the reach of many Americans (who also, of course, could not access the non-Western world through empire, as many less privileged British or French citizens could, for better and worse).

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5. Nonalignment and Writing 1. Walter LaFeber, “The American View of Decolonization, 1776–1920: An Ironic Legacy,” in The United States and Decolonization: Power and Freedom, ed. David Ryan and Victor Pungongs, 24–40 (Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan and St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 24. 2. Paul Orders, “‘Adjusting to a New Period in World History’: Franklin Roosevelt and European Colonialism,” in The United States and Decolonization, ed. Ryan and Pungong, 63–84. For a good illustration of the ambivalence and complexity of American readings of the colonial system within the new context of the cold war see Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “Freedom in the World,” in The Vital Center, 219–42 (Cambridge ma: Riverside Press, 1949). 3. John Kent, “The United States and the Decolonization of Black Africa, 1945– 63,” in The United States and Decolonization, ed. Ryan and Pungong, 168–87: 169, 173.

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Notes to pages 104–112  239 4. Cary Fraser, “An American Dilemma: Race and Realpolitik in the American Response to the Bandung Conference, 1955,” in Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs, 1945–1988, ed. Brenda Gayle Plummer, 115–40 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 116, 135. Fraser, who is an historian, makes extensive use of Wright’s commentary of Bandung. 5. For the processes of composition behind The Color Curtain, which involved a typically “Wrightean” amalgamation of personal testimony, political and historical research, and neo-sociological interviews, see Virginia Whatley Smith, “Richard Wright’s Passage to Indonesia: The Travel Writer/Narrator as Participant/Observer of Anti-Colonial Imperatives in The Color Curtain,” in Richard Wright’s Travel Writings, ed. Smith, 78–115. 6. Wright, Color Curtain, 79, 218. Future references are cited in the main body of the text. 7. John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (London: Granta, 2002), 177. 8. Wright’s meetings in The Color Curtain can usefully be placed against the works of Bernard Lewis. See Lewis’s What Went Wrong? The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (2002; repr., New York: Perennial, 2003), especially 117–32, “Time, Space, and Modernity.” Also see Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (2003; repr., New York: Random House, 2004), especially 137–64, “The Rise of Terrorism.” 9. Contrast my argument about the local historical formation of representations of the “Orient” with that of John Carlos Rowe, who recently argued that U.S. Orientalism remains “relatively unchanged” from the nineteenth-century through to the present (Rowe, “Culture, U.S. Imperialism, and Globalization,” American Literary History 16 [Winter 2004]: 593). 10. Alongside the texts discussed in the main body of my study one might also place George Lamming’s “The Negro Writer and His World,” Présence Africaine 8–10 (1956): 325–27. 11. George Padmore, Africa: Britain’s Third Empire (London: Dennis Dobson, 1949), 193–218. Wright wrote the foreword to Padmore’s Pan-Africanism or Communism? The Coming Struggle for Africa (New York: Roy Publishers, 1956). 12. Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright: The Life and Times (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), 95. 13. “Life histories were particularly useful in the study of race relations because they revealed the way in which attitudes were formed and changed. Park urged his students to record these autobiographies in the individual’s own words and frame questions so as to reveal the organization and disorganization of attitudes as ‘the result of changes in fortune, and their incorporation and expression through and their

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240  Notes to pages 112–117 regulation by the organizations of which the individual was a member.’ In particular, the interviewer should treasure and ponder the ‘native utterances’, i.e. those unselfconscious statements of value which revealed what the subject assumed was ‘generally understood and taken for granted’” (Fred H. Matthews, Quest for an American Sociology: Robert E. Park and the Chicago School [Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1977], 162). 14. See Carla Cappetti’s discussion of Wright’s “participant-observer” technique in Writing Chicago, 199–200. 15. Richard Wright, in Richard Crossman, ed., The God That Failed (New York: Harper, 1949), 162. 16. Gilles Kepel, The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West (Cambridge ma: Belknap Press, 2004), can usefully be read alongside Wright’s encounter with Europeanized Moslems. He concludes his study with the hope that “moving beyond the ideological constraints of jihad and fitna and, indeed, beyond Europe’s geographical borders, these young men and women will present a new face of Islam—reconciled with modernity—to the larger world” (295). Wright also glimpsed such a possibility in the early pages of The Color Curtain. 17. Ruth Nanda Anshen, introduction to Gunnar Myrdal, Rich Lands and Poor: The Road to World Prosperity (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957), xvi. 18. Myrdal, Rich Lands and Poor, 55–56. 19. John Kay, “Poor States Stay Poor,” The Truth About Markets: Why Some Nations Are Rich But Most Remain Poor (London: Penguin, 2004), 267–69. 20. The classic formulation of “take-off,” according to John Kay, was an early work by W. W. Rostow: The Process of Economic Growth (New York: Norton, 1952). 21. Myrdal, Rich Lands and Poor, 60–61. 22. Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt, “On the Borders between U.S. Studies and Postcolonial Theory,” in Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature, ed. Singh and Shmidt (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 12. 23. The social theorist Zygmunt Bauman has recently glossed these political difficulties: he points to “the Bandung initiative to establish the incongruous ‘non-block block.’” Bandung was “sapped by the two super-blocks, which stayed unanimous on at least one point: they both treated the rest of the world as the twentieth-century equivalent of the ‘blank spots’ of the nineteenth-century state-building and state-enclosure race.” Thus, nonalignment was seen as “the blocks-era equivalent of that ‘no man’s land’ ambivalence which was fought off tooth and nail, competitively yet in unison, by modern states at their formative stage” (Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences [New York: Columbia University Press, 1998], 63). 24. Virginia Spencer Carr, “As the World Turns: Speaking His Mind as a Con-

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Notes to pages 117–121  241 servative, 1960–69,” in Carr, Dos Passos: A Life, 523–51 (Garden City ny: Doubleday, 1984). 25. Edmund Wilson, cited in Carr, Dos Passos, 534. 26. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, introduction to The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980, ed. Fraser and Gerstle (Princeton nj: Princeton University Press, 1989), ix. An account of the collapse of the cultural New Deal order might begin with an analysis of classic postwar liberalism, of which Thomas Hill Schaub has given the most convincing account. See his discussion of Norman Mailer and “Consensus Liberalism” in American Fiction in the Cold War (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 137–62. 27. An account of literary conservatism is a conspicuous lacuna in postwar literary history, even though various forms of ideological shift helped to create the equivalent of this “death of the New Deal order.” Different configurations of conservatism informed the work of Flannery O’Connor, Caroline Gordon, Allen Tate, Zora Neale Hurston, and (most importantly) Ayn Rand. For the kind of literary history that can pay attention to a politics of writing in the ways I’m suggesting, see Werner Sollors’s analysis of Hurston’s resistance to the desegregation of black schools: “Of Mules and Mares in a Land of Difference; or, Quadrupeds All?” American Quarterly 42 (1990): 167–90. 28. “Goulart,” writes William Keylor, “was a radical populist who supported redistributionist economic policies that alarmed the entrenched oligarchy and its supporters in the military. . . . The American ambassador and military attaché had been in touch with the plotters and later conveyed Washington’s approval of the coup.” Goulart went into exile and a military dictatorship was established (William R. Keylor, A World of Nations: The International Order Since 1945 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003], 263). 29. John Dos Passos, Brazil on the Move (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1963), 72. Future page references appear in the text. 30. John Dos Passos, “The Changing Shape of Society” and “The American Cause,” in Dos Passos, The Theme Is Freedom (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1956), 249–62. 31. Walter LaFeber, The American Age: United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad since 1750 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 556–59. 32. Although much contemporary criticism deals with the politics of representation(s), I suggest that a rather different form of criticism may take us further in the study of postwar American writing. For Wright, Baldwin, Buck, and Dos Passos, for example, it is the literal ground of politics that is important; the world of government, foreign policy, war and ideological praxis. They seemed to have maintained the ideal of la littérature engagée, in their various ways. For these figures, to write is inevitably to write about the world of politics in a very direct way.

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242  Notes to pages 122–131 33. C. L. Sulzberger, What’s Wrong with U.S. Foreign Policy? (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959). 34. C. L. Sulzberger, Unfinished Revolution: America and the Third World (New York: Atheneum, 1965), 3. For a harsher critique of Sulzberger’s kind of benevolent neoimperialism, see Christopher Lasch’s 1973 account of the long-term project of U.S. foreign policy, which Lasch also saw as basically Wilsonian: “Henceforth American imperialism clothed itself in the ideology of Wilsonian internationalism. Its grosser features—racism, militaristic appeals, the rhetoric of heroism and self-sacrifice—dropped away, to be replaced by a new emphasis on efficiency and the modernization of backward countries, ritualistic reassertion of the ‘right of self-determination,’ and loud professions of anti-imperialism (well suited to the interests of a nation that came late to the race for imperial spoils)” (The World of Nations: Reflections on American History, Politics, and Culture [New York: Knopf, 1973], 87). 35. Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 83–84. 36. Frank Ninkovich, Modernity and Power: A History of the Domino Theory in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 312, 317–18. Ninkovich’s conclusion to this book, 312–20, is an important analysis of foreign policy maneuvers, read through the prism of “modernity.”

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6. Stone Ages 1. Morris Dickstein, Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction 1945–1970 (Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 2002), 128. 2. Peter Hulme’s essay, “Traveling to Write (1940–2000),” is a good recent example of criticism that seeks to broaden our reading of Matthiessen by placing his work in a broader context formed by postcolonial and anthropological ideas (in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, 87–101 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002]). 3. Richard F. Patteson, “At Play in the Fields of the Lord: The Imperialist Idea and the Discovery of the Self,” Critique 21 (1979): 5–14. 4. Peter Matthiessen, The Cloud Forest: A Chronicle of the South American Wilderness (New York: Viking, 1961), 23. Future references to this work are given in the text. 5. Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War 1945–1992, seventh edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993), 209. 6. William R. Keylor, “From Chapultepec to Castro: The United States and Latin America, 1945–1962” and “The Inter-American System Since the Cuban Missile Crisis,” in Keylor, A World of Nations: The International Order Since 1945 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 93–113, 260–83.

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Notes to pages 131–135  243 7. Thomas J. McCormick, America’s Half-Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War and After, second edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 141–44, usefully summarizes this quintessential early 1960s development policy. 8. Matthiessen’s later “Indian” books include In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983) and Indian Country (1984). These books wed elegy to political resistance. A Navajo activist says ruefully at the end of Indian Country: “Now thousands of white people come, trying to take this land away from us, trying to kill us . . . If this government keeps on like that, I think it’s going to be end of the world” ([1984; repr., New York: Penguin, 1992], 329). 9. Halberstam has some wonderful, telling passages concerning the Kennedy administration’s self-confidence in its dealings with the undeveloped world: “The fascination with guerilla warfare reflected the men and the era: aggressive, self-confident men ready to play their role. . . . A remarkable hubris permeated this entire time” (David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest [New York: Random House, 1972], 122–23). 10. Milt Machlin, The Search for Michael Rockefeller (1972; repr., New York: Akadine Press, 2000), 7. Machlin concluded that the unlucky Rockefeller, last seen swimming away from a canoe, had fallen afoul of a feud between two tribes and had probably been killed. Machlin’s nonchalant acknowledgement of murder shows how cultural relativism entered into accounts of the Harvard Peabody expedition: “By their own laws—and what right have we to impose our rules on them?—they behaved in the only way possible: with honor and courage. We belong to a different civilization” (248). Rockefeller’s death was certainly an over-determined narrative and continues to attract attention. Samantha Gillison’s novel, The King of America (New York: Random House, 2004), is a recent fiction based on the disappearance. 11. Karl G. Heider, The Dugum Dani: A Papuan Culture in the Highlands of West New Guinea (1970). Robert Gardner, director, Dead Birds, Film Study Center, Peabody Museum, Harvard (dated 1964). Robert Gardner and Karl G. Heider, Gardens of War: Life and Death in the New Guinea Stone Age (New York: Random House, 1968). 12. Heider, Dugum Dani, 11. 13. O. W. “Bud” Hampton, Culture of Stone: Sacred and Profane Uses of Stone among the Dani (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1999), xviii. 14. Heider, Gardens of War, 23. As if to underline Harvard Peabody’s deployment and revision of classic anthropology, Margaret Mead supplied the introduction. 15. William Rothman praises Dead Birds for a neorealist documentary style that embodies a profound humanism. Gardner’s films “are sublime and beautiful poems in which each society Gardner films becomes a metaphor for the tenderness and cru-

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244  Notes to pages 136–143 elty we all are capable of recognizing when we look deep into our own hearts” (Documentary Film Classics [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 100). 16. Peter Matthiessen, Under the Mountain Wall: A Chronicle of Two Seasons in the Stone Age (New York: Viking, 1962), 196–97. Future references to this work are given in the text. This first edition included as an end piece an unfinished drawing by Michael Rockefeller, The Mountain Wall. 17. Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 187–90. 18. “Matthiessen is most obviously indebted to Tristes Tropiques (1955), the landmark text in which Lévi-Strauss converts anthropology (the study of man) into ‘entropology’ (the study of disintegration) by expressing the conviction that native cultures are dying out, to be replaced by a global ‘monoculture’” (Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998], 181). 19. Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (1922; repr. , London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), xv. 20. Argonauts of the Western Pacific, xv, 518. 21. Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 517–18. 22. Curtis LeMay with MacKinlay Kantor, Mission with LeMay (Garden City ny: Doubleday, 1965), 565. LeMay retired in 1965 and began a political career; he was the segregationist George Wallace’s vice presidential candidate in 1968. For a recent account of the racialized aspects of Vietnam, including the infamous My Lai massacre, see Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line, 213–21, 229–31. 23. Neil L. Whitehead, “South America/Amazonia: the Forest of Marvels,” in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, 122–38 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 133. 24. “At the end of the novel, no European-style order is established; quite the contrary, white penetration of native regions leads to disorder, madness, and death for whites and Indians alike” (Patteson, “At Play in the Fields,” 7). 25. At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965; repr., New York: Vintage, 1991), 44. Future references to this work are given in the main body of the text. There is a clear overlap between Tristes Tropiques and Matthiessen’s text in terms of their critiques of American evangelism. Lévi-Strauss had seen missions in the Amazon during the 1930s, and of them he noted, “their members came from Nebraska or Dakota farming families, in which young people were brought up to believe in the reality of Hell with cauldrons of boiling oil. For some, becoming a missionary was like taking out an insurance policy. Once they were certain of their own salvation, they thought there was nothing more they need do to prove themselves worthy of it, so that in the practice

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Notes to pages 143–155  245 of their profession they displayed shocking callousness and lack of feeling” (Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John and Doreen Weightman [1955; repr., New York: Penguin, 1992], 290). 26. The phrasing explicitly echoes the Marine Corps manual, which was one of the first official statements of “insurgent” or “guerilla” praxis by the American military (usmc, Small Wars Manual [Washington dc: gpo, 1940]). 27. As Alfred W. Crosby notes in the standard work on the subject: “Indications of the susceptibility of Amerindians and Aborigines to Old World infections appear almost immediately after the intrusions of the whites” (Ecological Imperialism, 198). 28. Susan Sontag, “The Anthropologist as Hero,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), 70. Further page references appear in the text. 29. Susan Sontag, “Trip to Hanoi,” in Styles of Radical Will (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 205. Further references are given in the main body of the text.

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7. African American Representations 1. W. E. B. Du Bois, Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1945), 31. Du Bois’s comment here reads—as does much of his work—like a premonition of recent work on America and empire. For a commentator such as Amy Kaplan, the United States’s entry onto the global (imperial) stage was counterpointed by Spain’s exit from that international scene in the Spanish-American War. See “Birth of an Empire,” in The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 2002), 146–70. 2. Ralph Ellison, “Flamenco,” Saturday Review, December 11, 1954, in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan, 7–11 (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 8. 3. Ellison, “Flamenco,” 10. 4. Ellison, “Flamenco,” 11. 5. Richard Wright, Pagan Spain (1957; repr., London: Bodley Head, 1960), 10. Future references in the text are to this edition; spellings are in accord with this British edition. Stein’s work on Spanish themes concentrated on Spain as crucible of modern art. See the two pieces, “Picasso” (1911/12) and “The Life of Juan Gris/The Life and Death of Juan Gris” (1927), in A Stein Reader, ed. Ulla E. Dydo, 142–43, 536–37 (Evanston il: Northwestern University Press, 1993). 6. Saul Bellow, “A Half Life: An Autobiography in Ideas,” Bostonia (November– December 1990), reprinted in Conversations with Saul Bellow, ed. Gloria L. Cronin and Ben Siegel, 248–77 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 274. Bellow

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246  Notes to pages 155–159 playfully suggested he might have been reincarnated from a Mediterranean ancestor, such was his sense of homecoming in Spain. 7. As Arthur Danto has written of these images: “‘Spain’ denotes a land of suffering and poetic violence and political agony, and ‘Elegy’ carries the literary weight of tragedy and disciplined lamentation” (Danto, Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present [New York: Noonday Press, 1991], 195). A useful collection of Motherwell paintings, which includes many examples of the elegies is Robert Motherwell, with a text by H. H. Arnason, second edition (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1982). 8. Wright’s ironic and refracted meditations on color have led some commentators to overlook the racial topics in Pagan Spain. John A. Williams even comments that “race was not his consideration in this book” (Williams, The Most Native of Sons [New York: Doubleday, 1970], 109). 9. M. Lynn Weiss, “Para Usted: Richard Wright’s Pagan Spain,” in The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture, ed. Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrichs, 212–25 (Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 1994), 213. 10. M. Lynn Weiss, “Para Usted,” 222. 11. Thadious M. Davis, Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), 345, cites Larsen’s Guggenheim application and goes on to discuss her travels in Spain (367–69, 372–83). 12. Claude McKay to William Bradley, cited in Wayne F. Cooper, Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 266. 13. Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home (1937; London: Pluto Press, 1985), 309. This autobiography also includes McKay’s three sonnets “for Barcelona,” 326–27. 14. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 1993), 151. 15. Robbie Robertson, preface and acknowledgements to The Three Waves of Globalization: A History of a Developing Global Consciousness (London: Zed Books, 2003), unpaginated. 16. Langston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey (1956; repr., New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 315. 17. Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander, 351. 18. Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander, 383. 19. The phrase “lieu de mémoire,” adopted from the French historian Pierre Nora, has proven suggestive for historians of African American culture. Genevieve Fabre and Robert O’Meally point to a “highly energized interaction of history and

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Notes to pages 160–167  247 memory” at “the nexus of personal and collective memory” (introduction to History and Memory in African-American Culture, ed. Fabre and O’Meally [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994], 7). 20. Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, second edition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 142–43, details the New Challenge project (intriguingly, Claude McKay was also involved). Cf. 115, 354 for accounts of Wright’s lectures. Addison Gayle, Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1980), 299, gives an account of Hughes meeting Wright just before the latter’s death. 21. Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander, 351. 22. Richard Wright, “Walter Garland Tells What Spain’s Fight against Fascism Means to the Negro People,” Daily Worker, November 29, 1937, 2. 23. Floyd Ogburn, Jr., “Richard Wright’s Unpublished Haiku: A World Elsewhere,” melus 23 (1998), 57–81. 24. Fabre, Unfinished Quest, 398–99. The information about the composition of Pagan Spain draws on Fabre’s detailed account of Wright in Spain, 407–25. 25. John Lowe’s analysis of Wright’s “Travel Diary” and the typescripts for Pagan Spain (in the Richard Wright archive at Yale) shows that the “pagan” was indeed his governing matrix. Wright also proposed, but did not write, a section called “The Pagan Heritage” where he would have discussed the Moorish and Jewish roles in Spanish history (John Lowe, “Richard Wright as Traveler/Ethnographer: The Conundrums of Pagan Spain,” in Richard Wright’s Travel Writings, ed. Smith, 119–47). 26. Kaplan in The Anarchy of Empire analyzes a Spanish empire now subject to the “American gaze” of early film (146–70). Wright’s comment suggests that for the black American within Spanish culture the “racialized” gaze will trump a “national” gaze. Kwame Anthony Appiah’s trenchant critique of Black Power, we recall, castigated Wright for redeploying a neocolonial gaze in his “anthropological fantasy” of African life. Perhaps, then, Pagan Spain (1957) marked a more sophisticated understanding of spectatorship and power than Black Power itself (1954). 27. Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States (1941; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1969). 28. Richard Wright, introduction to Horace R. Cayton and St. Clair Drake, Black Metropolis, xvii–xxxiv (1945; repr., London: Jonathan Cape, 1946), xvii. 29. Wright, introduction to Black Metropolis, xx. 30. Michael Kowalewski, introduction to Temperamental Journeys: Essays on the Modern Literature of Travel, ed. Kowalewski (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 7. 31. Fabre, Unfinished Quest, 411. 32. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944; repr., New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 3.

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248  Notes to pages 170–184 33. Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1998), 156. 34. Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (1956; repr., New York: Knopf, 1972), inaugurated a new wave of historical research on the topic and is now regarded as the foundational text in the modern historiography of slavery. Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), included extensive comparative accounts, including analyses of Spanish slavery (63–80). 35. Gunnar Myrdal to Richard Wright, April 16, 1957, cited Fabre, Unfinished Quest, 416. One can only speculate that Myrdal was aware of the new scholarship, especially the comparisons between forms of slavery in the Americas, and felt that such history would be valuable to a future study of “pagan Spain.” 36. Richard Wright, White Man, Listen! (Garden City ny: Doubleday, 1957), 75. Future references in the text are to this edition.

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8. Ugly Americans and Vanishing Europeans 1. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Negro Church,” The Crisis (May 1912), reprinted in W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis, 259–60 (New York: Henry Holt, 1995). From this essay: “Before such an organization one must bow with respect. It has accomplished much” (259). 2. William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, The Ugly American (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958), 284–85. Future page references are given in the text. 3. Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (1988; repr., London: Picador, 1990), 8, 75. 4. Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie, 527. 5. For a recent example of this cross-fertilization and hybridity see Richard A. Clarke’s imagined future history of terrorism in the United States: “Ten Years Later,” subtitled on the cover page as “Looking Back from 2011–-An Imagined History,” in The Atlantic 295 (January–February 2005): 61–77. 6. Rupert Wilkinson, “Connections with Toughness: The Novels of Eugene Burdick,” Journal of American Studies 11 (1977): 229. 7. The emphasis on specialists and practical engagement with “backwardness” is part of a larger ideological debate suggesting that the United States could pitch technological supremacy against Communism’s ideological seductions: “We have, in other words, a technological dynamism to set against the political dynamism of the Russians” (Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center [Cambridge ma: Riverside Press, 1949], 233). 8. The contrast between the styles of empire—in the literal sense of uniform—is

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Notes to pages 184–186  249 well made by Karl E. Meyer, who introduces his chapter “Patterns of Mastery, British and American” with photographs of the young Winston Churchill (in 1895) and Theodore Roosevelt (1898). Churchill, a second lieutenant in the Queen’s Own Hussars, wears a braided cavalry jacket and carries a plumed helmet; his pose is rigid. Roosevelt, in Rough Riders garb, wears informal khakis and a soft bush hat; his hand rests loosely on his hip (Meyer, Dust of Empire, 2). 9. Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton nj: Princeton University Press, 2001), 28. As Gerstle argues, the inclusiveness of this martial model was predicated on exclusion too: there were no African Americans or Asians in the regiment taken to Cuba. 10. The most admirable French presence is Major Monet, but he is a member of the Foreign Legion; the novel suggests that the legionnaire is basically an AngloSaxon manqué with a nice kepi. For a further source on the cultural politics inflecting relations between Europe and the United States at this time, see Volker R. Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe (Princeton nj: Princeton University Press, 2001). Berghahn’s account of American projects aimed at winning over snobby European elites (which looked down on U.S. provincialism) is pertinent to my discussion of The Ugly American: “Millions of dollars were spent in this struggle and it may well be that no other hegemonic power in history has ever invested as much as the United States did after World War II in changing foreigners’ perceptions of it as a civilization” (289). 11. G. L. Arnold, “French Politics: Failure and Promise,” Partisan Review 20 (1953): 675. 12. Ludwig Marcuse, “European Anti-Americanism,” Partisan Review 20 (1953): 314–20. 13. Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” Partisan Review 20 (1953): 381. In his November 1942 Mansion House speech Churchill claimed that he had “not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” Empire’s commercial basis is explicit here. But as R. F. Holland shows in his discussion of the Anglo-American alliance, domestic U.S. discomfort with the imperial model in turn compelled Britain to take a more progressive line with its colonies. Holland sees the Colonial Development and Welfare Act (1940) as a reply to American criticism—“development” thus becoming part of the British imperial lexicon as a response to this pressure (R. F. Holland, “Colonialism and the AngloAmerican Alliance,” European Decolonization 1918–1981: An Introductory Survey, 52–56 [Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985]). 14. G. L. Arnold, “Co-Existence: Between Two Worlds,” Partisan Review 21 (1954): 147–60. As the title suggests, one identifiable strand in Partisan Review thought was to maintain—however tenuously—a “co-existence” between the polar-

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250  Notes to pages 187–193 izations brought about by the cold war. Such acts of political nonalignment were increasingly difficult to maintain. 15. Christina Klein has summarized the American expatriate population at the end of the 1950s: “By the close of the decade, the 1.5 million Americans temporarily living and working around the world included 800,000 GIs and their families, 50,000 civilian government workers, and 100,000 members of what the Saturday Review called a ‘voluntary Third Force’ of missionaries, students, businessmen, and teachers” (Cold War Orientalism, 105–6). 16. Harlan Cleveland, Gerard J. Mangone, and John Clarke Adams, The Overseas Americans: A Report on Americans Abroad (1960; repr., New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), vii. 17. Cleveland, Mangone, and Adams, The Overseas Americans, xi, xiv. 18. Cleveland, Mangone, and Adams, The Overseas Americans, v. Reading this comment, one arrives at a clearer understanding of Richard Wright’s admonition in Black Power to Nkrumah to “militarize” Ghanaian society. If one’s country was going to be militarized by a foreign power, why not maintain national sovereignty by performing the task oneself ? 19. Cleveland, Mangone, and Adams, The Overseas Americans, 85. 20. Dickstein, Leopards in the Temple, 175. Dickstein sees the novel as a dead end for Bellow (167), although one might also see the book as a prime instance of Bellow’s ability to seize the cultural day, the zeitgeist (here, postwar narratives of primitivism and development). 21. “I was thinking mostly about my childhood idol, Sir Wilfred Grenfell of Labrador. Forty years ago, when I read his books on the back porch, I swore I’d be a medical missionary” (Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King [New York: Viking Press, 1959], 78). 22. Bellow, Henderson the Rain King, 340–41. 23. “An Evening with Patrick Hemingway,” The Hemingway Review 19, Special Section on True at First Light (1999): 10–11. Patrick Hemingway noted: “The manuscript itself, if it had been published exactly as it is, would have been difficult to follow, because Ernest Hemingway had not reached the stage with this manuscript where he did the ordinary housekeeping chores that a writer has to do with material he has drafted for the first time” (9–10). 24. “An Evening with Patrick Hemingway,” 11. 25. The historical excavation of Mau Mau has been a long time in the making, and only recently have we had investigations that help to contextualize Hemingway’s encounters with the British Empire in its latter East African days. See Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), and David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya

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Notes to pages 193–194  251 and the End of Empire (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005). On the evidence collated in these important revisionist accounts of decolonization, Hemingway’s realization—as reported by his son—that white rule had ultimately failed in Africa, failed to grasp the bitterness and repression that such failure eventually produced. Anderson, “Parasites in Paradise: Race, Violence and Mau Mau,” in Histories of the Hanged, 77–118, analyzes the white settler culture that Hemingway knew. 26. Christopher Ondaatje, Hemingway in Africa: the Last Safari (Woodstock ny: Overlook Press, 2004), 174. Ondaatje later writes about the text’s “strange blend of fact and fantasy, the true and the false, in this interesting but flawed book about Africa” (192). 27. Contrast Hemingway’s relative indifference to Mau Mau with Malcolm X’s invocation of the insurgency. One biographer reports of Malcolm’s speeches: “‘We need a Mau Mau,’ he repeatedly asserted” (Bruce Perry, Malcolm: The Life of a Man who Changed Black America [New York: Station Hill, 1991], 280). Henderson’s Histories of the Hanged captures some other references to Mau Mau within American culture, including the 1957 movie Something of Value (starring Sidney Poitier and Rock Hudson), where the insurgency is turned into a parable for the Civil Rights era. The movie was based on Robert Ruark’s popular 1955 novel, which presented a “heart of darkness” model of Africa: “To understand Africa you must understand a basic impulsive savagery that is greater than anything we ‘civilized’ people have encountered in two centuries” (Ruark, Something of Value [Garden City ny: Doubleday, 1955], no page given). Ruark himself also played an important role in U.S. segregationist politics. “Ruark’s fiction was critical of the rapid shift to black rule, and he openly mocked the ability of Africans to govern themselves. . . . Ruark became the white resistance’s ‘expert on Africa,’ and his writings were staples of segregationist publications” (Thomas Noer, “Segregationists and the World: The Foreign Policy of the White Resistance,” in Window on Freedom, ed. Plummer, 143). 28. “An Evening with Patrick Hemingway,” 14. 29. This is a dynamic shared by other American texts of the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. Bellow, in novels such as The Adventures of Augie March or Herzog, created extravagantly self-dramatizing American heroes who then find themselves in European spots (Paris, central London, rural Spain, the beach at Dunkirk) where their national identity is thrown into clear relief against archetypal foreign backdrops. 30. Ernest Hemingway, Under Kilimanjaro, ed. Robert W. Lewis and Robert E. Fleming (Kent oh: Kent State University Press, 2005), 143. Future references appear in the main body of the text. 31. Intriguingly, there is a significant difference at this point (“pukka sahib ones”) between Under Kilimanjaro and the earlier version, edited by Ernest’s son, Patrick Hemingway. True at First Light reads: “The old Pukka Sahibs have been often de-

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252  Notes to pages 195–200 scribed and caricatured. But no one has dealt much with these new types except Waugh a little bit at the end of Black Mischief and Orwell completely in Burmese Days” (Ernest Hemingway, True at First Light, ed. Patrick Hemingway [New York: Scribner, 1999], 139). Perhaps Patrick made a slight emendation to underscore his father’s knowledge of British imperial texts? The later (fuller) version has a significant mistake in the same passage, when Ernest Hemingway writes that “no one has dealt much with these since Nineteen Eighty-four” (170)—an egregious misreading of Orwell! Perhaps a proper knowledge of the “Pukka Sahibs” had become a matter of family honor for the son? 32. Mark Spilka, Hemingway’s Quarrel with Androgyny (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990): “Hemingway derives opposing yet overlapping strands of feeling about manhood from Victorian protofeminist and imperial fictions. Of course, he also derives them from his upbringing in a peculiarly British and androgynous home, where such fictions were amply shelved” (6). 33. This is the productive terrain—the intersection between Empire and the gay writing of the colony—that Alan Hollinghurst explored in rendering the fictional African journals of his character Lord Nantwich (Hollinghurst, The Swimming Pool Library [London: Chatto and Windus, 1988]).

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9. “These great new times” 1. David Rieff, Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 22. 2. Fears of the rise of (East) Asia, and in particular visions of Japanese hegemony, ran through early ’90s culture and provided an immediate context for such texts as Don DeLillo’s Mao II. Like some of the Californians Rieff encountered in Los Angeles, the Yale historian Paul Kennedy also addressed the challenge from the Pacific Rim in his Preparing for the Twenty-First Century, although his nuanced account managed to avoid the alarmism of much commentary. “The Japanese ‘Plan’ for a Post2000 World” and “Winners and Losers in the Developing World” have immediate relevance to my discussion, and the latter’s title demonstrates that development still maintained its power to structure analyses of world affairs (Kennedy, Preparing for the Twenty-First Century [London: HarperCollins, 1993], 137–62, 193–227). 3. Rieff, Los Angeles, 22, 215, 128, 180. 4. “American society itself is also going through a similar process of de-Europeanization,” Kotkin wrote. Embodying this trend, he cowrote the book with a Japanese author: “The United States can flourish anew in the age of Asia” (Joel Kotkin and Yoriko Kishimoto, The Third Century: American’s Resurgence in the Asian Era [New York: Crown, 1988], 2, 29).

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Notes to pages 200–210  253 5. My arguments in this chapter take their shape against the cosmopolitan theory developed by scholars working in many fields. See the following texts: Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992); Vinay Dharwadker, ed., Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2001); Frederic Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, The Cultures of Globalization (Durham nc: Duke University Press, 1998); Walter D. Mignolo, “The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism,” Public Culture 12 (2000): 721–48; and Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006). 6. James Baldwin’s essay, “The Discovery of What It Means to be an American,” which formed part of Nobody Knows My Name (1961), is the central account of how in traveling one loses an ethnic identity only to discover a national/cultural self. Intriguingly, when Baldwin wrote about this return to American selfhood, he used a vocabulary directly rooted in that language of development that has been my subject: “In short, the freedom that the American writer finds in Europe brings him, full circle, back to himself, with the responsibility for his development where it always was: in his own hands” (Collected Essays, 141). 7. Ian McEwan, Saturday (New York: Doubleday, 2005), 3. 8. Richard Powers, Plowing the Dark (2000; repr., New York: Picador, 2001), 96. Future references are given in the main body of the text. 9. Tom LeClair, In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 233. 10. Don DeLillo, Mao II (New York: Viking Penguin, 1991), 40–41. The reference here is to the assassination of the Swedish prime minister, Olof Palme, in 1986. 11. Marc Ferro, Colonization: A Global History (London: Routledge, 1997), 351. 12. Ferro, Colonization, 356. 13. Don DeLillo, “American Blood: A Journey through the Labyrinth of Dallas and JFK,” Rolling Stone, December 8, 1983, 21–22, 24, 27–28, 74. The reader looking for signs of DeLillo’s fascination with mortality in its American context will find no shortage of materials. A working title of White Noise was “The American Book of the Dead” (LeClair, In the Loop, 228). DeLillo has in his rare interviews accepted that public reticence and relative obscurity are linked to a desire to allow the work to enter the public realm autonomously, where it will accrete significance: “‘I’d rather write my books in private and then send them out into the world to discover their own public life.’” Committed to such oblique writing rather than public statements, DeLillo could only respond to 9/11 by sending out another coded response into the public realm, rather than offering himself up for interview on Larry King Live as the author of “American Blood” (Anthony DeCurits, “‘An Outsider in This Society’:

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254  Notes to pages 210–215 An Interview with Don DeLillo,” in Introducing Don DeLillo, ed. Frank Lentricchia, 43–66 [Durham nc: Duke University Press, 1991], 46). 14. For a searching analysis of DeLillo’s essay, and in particular an account of how DeLillo has put the very idea of representation at stake, see Marco Abel, “Don DeLillo’s ‘In the Ruins of the Future’: Literature, Images, and the Rhetoric of Seeing 9/11,” pmla 118, no. 5 (2003): 1236–50. 15. And Mao II had featured an eerily foreboding discussion about the towers: “‘Think how much worse.’ ‘What?’ she said. ‘If there was only one tower instead of two’” (DeLillo, Mao II, 40). 16. Don DeLillo, “In the Ruins of the Future,” The Guardian December 22, 2001, 1. Future references are given in the main body of the text. 17. For a recent discussion that also deploys this quotation (“In the past decade . . .”) but then moves into an account of Cosmopolis, see Jerry A. Varsava, “The ‘Saturated Self ’: Don DeLillo on the Problem of Rogue Capitalism,” Contemporary Literature 46 (2005): 78–107. 18. Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966; repr., London: Vintage, 1996), 14–15. 19. LeClair, In the Loop, 227. 20. Don DeLillo, White Noise (1984; repr., London: Picador, 1985), 98. Read retrospectively from a post-2001 perspective, his earlier work relentlessly provides contexts for “In the Ruins of the Future.” See, for instance, White Noise’s mordant observations about disaster: “Every disaster made us wish for more, for something bigger, grander, more sweeping” (64). 21. Abel, “Don DeLillo’s ‘In the Ruins of the Future,’” 1248. 22. Thomas Peyser, Utopia and Cosmopolis: Globalization in the Era of American Literary Realism (Durham nc: Duke University Press, 1998), x. 23. Peyser, Utopia and Cosmopolis, vii, 54, 97. Peyser’s account is particularly persuasive in its analysis of Howells’s ambiguous responses to the “cosmopolitan world”: “In the course of his career, Howells tried to envision a way to accommodate the multiplicity of values encountered in the cosmopolitan world, without, however, simply giving up entirely on the idea of an integrated community, even though he never entirely freed himself of his suspicions about the latter” (98). 24. Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis (New York: Scribner, 2003), 60. Future references to this work are given in the text. DeLillo’s emphasis on permeability and interconnection finds an echo in recent sociological writing about globalization: “In a global environment everything is linked to everything else. A principle that was for centuries a matter of Buddhist belief has become a hard social and economic reality” (Anthony Elliott and Charles Lemert, The New Individualism: The Emotional Costs of Globalization [London: Routledge, 2006], 176).

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Notes to pages 216–221  255

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25. Arjun Appadurai, “Patriotism and Its Futures,” in Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 172. 26. Beck, Risk Society, 52. 27. Beck, Risk Society, 72, 79. 28. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity in the Late Modern Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 119. 29. Elliott and Lemert, The New Individualism, 116. Many passages in this work suggestively juxtapose themselves against DeLillo’s recent writing: “Hence the merciless elegance of the liquid world: the comforts come with the violence; the violence accentuates the longing for comfort; and, in times like these, neither is likely to win the day” (180). 30. K. Anthony Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Reading,” in Cosmopolitan Geographies, ed. Dharwadker, 197–227: 224–25. Many of the most trenchant proponents of a cosmopolitan vision draw on their own life-narratives to explore this form of transnational identity. Both Amartya Sen and Kwame Anthony Appiah, interestingly enough, are the products of decolonized societies (India and Ghana), a notably Anglocentric education, and mature careers within the American academy. These writers, as their own utterly self-aware commentaries make clear, are the cosmopolitan winners within an increasingly integrated world. 31. Sontag, Styles of Radical Will, 205. 32. Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 185–86.

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Index

Adams, John: Nixon in China, 87, 236n18 Adams, John Clarke, 187 Africa: and Saul Bellow, 189–91; U.S. postwar policy and, 104; and W. E. B. Du Bois, 27–29; in writings of Richard Wright, 40. See also specific countries African American writers: globalist discourse of, 46–47; and religion, 47; and Spain, 153–73; and travel writing, 52; and understanding of colonialism, 28. See also specific writers Against Interpretation (Sontag), 147–48, 149 Al-Fassi, Allal. See Fassi, Allal AlAlgeria, 2, 50 The Alhambra (Irving), 163 Alliance for Progress, 120, 131 Almond, G. A., 11 Ambrose, Stephen, 7 America. See United States

“American Century” (Luce), 22, 84, 85–86, 147 American Civil Liberties Union, 90–91 American South, 51–52, 53 anthropology: and Paul Bowles, 65–66, 71, 73, 76–79; and Peter Matthiessen, 133–36, 139–40; and Susan Sontag, 149; in writings of Richard Wright, 112, 162 Appadurai, Arjun, 200, 215–16 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 200, 218, 255n30 Arendt, Hannah, 109, 186 Arnold, G. L., 185, 186 art and artists, 32, 220 Asia: as market, 85; and Richard Wright, 113; and W. E. B. Du Bois, 29–30, 32; in writings of Don DeLillo, 207. See also Korean conflict; Southeast Asia; and specific countries At Play in the Fields of the Lord (Matthiessen), 129, 142–47

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258  Index

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The Autobiography of Malcolm X (Malcolm X), 4, 47–49 Baldwin, James, 49–53, 241n32; fbi surveillance of, 91; and identity, 50, 201, 253n6; and internationalism, 220; as literary diplomat, 9; and new expatriates, 3; No Name in the Street, 4, 5–6, 49–53; and Paris, 52; terrorism in writings of, 53; and W. E. B. Du Bois, 46 Bandung conference: and Communism, 104; and Malcolm X, 47; and nonalignment policies, 240n23; and Richard Wright, 1–2, 104, 172, 177 Baraka, Amiri, 48–49 Barthes, Roland, 149 Bauer, P. T., 11 Beat generation, 144–45 Beck, Ulrich, 200, 217 Bellow, Saul: Henderson the Rain King, 4, 177, 189–91; modernism in writings of, 190; Seize the Day, 216; and Spain, 155 Berber decree, 61–62 Blackmer, D. L., 11 Black Metropolis (Cayton and Duke), 165, 166–67 Black Power (Carmichael and Hamilton), 38–39 Black Power (Wright), 3, 12, 34–36, 39, 41, 44–46, 106–7, 108, 112, 115, 157–58, 173 Bowles, Paul, 55–79; ambiguities in writings of, 67; and anticolonial nationalism, 58–59; and civilized world, 59; “Coca-Colonization” in writings of, 67; contrasts in writings of, 67–68; cultural loss in writings

of, 63–64; and destruction of native cultures, 140; disengagement in writings of, 61; exoticism in writings of, 69, 97, 146; as expatriate, 3–4, 57–58, 60, 232n13; and internationalism, 128, 147, 220; and Islam, 55, 57, 61–64, 69–71, 72–74, 75, 110–11, 202, 232n7; and Morocco, 55–66; mysticism in writings of, 69–72; nationalism in writings of, 56, 58–59, 70; and Orientalism, 56, 59, 69, 74, 77–78, 233n18; outsiders in writings of, 144–45; and Pearl S. Buck, 97; and Peter Matthiessen, 139, 144–45; and “primitive mind,” 140–41; primitivism in writings of, 63–64, 71–72, 233n18; and progress, 175; and religion, 74–75; restorationism in writings of, 74; serpent images in writings of, 68–69; and Susan Sontag, 150; transition in writings of, 58–59, 65–67, 79; as traveler, 5, 9, 238n31; and Westernization, 59–60 —Works: For Bread Alone, 75; A Life Full of Holes, 75; The Spider’s House, 4, 55–60, 60–76, 110–11, 139, 147, 202 Boxer Rebellion, 91, 92, 93 Brazil, 4, 118–21, 122, 192 Brazil on the Move (Dos Passos), 4, 118–21, 122, 192 British Empire: American responses to, 190; decline of, 186, 249n13; and Ernest Hemingway, 194; and Peter Matthiessen, 194; in writings of Richard Wright, 40 Buck, Pearl S., 89–94, 241n32; biculturalism in writings of, 94–95, 101; and China, 87, 98–99; contrast of,

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Index  259

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to post-9/11 writers, 202, 203; and exotic cultures, 92; exoticism in writings of, 97; expatriate experience in writings of, 97; and literary internationalism, 90–91, 98–99, 128, 220–21; on Mao Zedong, 95, 96; and missionary dissent, 101; mixedrace people in writings of, 95–96; nostalgia in writings of, 96; and Paul Bowles, 97; and progressivism, 99; self-development in writings of, 101; and underdeveloped world, 4; and United States, 98, 100; and universalism, 24, 99; upbringing of, 238n31; and Vietnam, 95, 97; and W. E. B. Du Bois, 31, 100; and white supremacy, 93 —Works: China Past and Present, 4, 89–90, 94–102; The Good Earth, 238n29; My Several Worlds, 4, 89–90, 91–94 Buckley, William F., 117 Burdick, Eugene: The Ugly American, 5, 177, 178–86, 194 capitalism, 29, 36–38, 42 Carmichael, Stokely: Black Power, 38–39 Carnegie Project: The Overseas Americans, 5, 177, 186–88 Carson, Rachel: Silent Spring, 127–28 Catholicism, 162, 163–64, 168 Cayton, Horace R.: Black Metropolis, 165, 166–67 Chamberlain, John, 85 change: in American culture, 6; in China, 83, 91–92; and Pearl S. Buck, 98, 101; and Peter Matthiessen, 132, 137–39; and Richard Wright, 106; in

writings of John Dos Passos, 121; in writings of Paul Bowles, 65–66, 67, 231n3; in writings of Richard Powers, 205 Cheever, John, 146 China, 81–102; American presence in, 87; identity of, 97; impact of missionaries on, 91–92; “loss of,” 86; and Malcolm X, 47–48; as market, 82; as nemesis, 82; and Pearl S. Buck, 94, 98, 100–101; and W. E. B. Du Bois, 31, 87–89; in World War II, 84–86 China Past and Present (Buck), 4, 89–90, 94–102 Cleveland, Harlan, 187 The Cloud Forest (Matthiessen), 4, 129, 132–33, 139–40, 146 cold war, politics of: and colonialism, 103–4; effect of, on American globalism, 7–8; and Malcolm X, 48; and Pearl S. Buck, 91, 100; and representations of China, 86; and The Ugly American, 179–80, 183; and unicultural universalism, 124; in writings of Richard Wright, 168 Cole, Thomas, 16 Coleman, J. S., 11 Color and Democracy (Du Bois), 3, 31–32 The Color Curtain (Wright), 2, 3, 12, 44, 88, 108–9, 111–15, 173 Communism: in China, 86; development models in opposition to, 15; and John Dos Passos, 117, 121; in Latin America, 131; and Richard Wright, 34–35, 113, 173, 229n23; as totalitarianism, 110 Conrad, Joseph, 17–18, 131, 140, 142, 190

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260  Index Cooper, James Fenimore, 16 Cosmopolis (DeLillo), 215–20 cosmopolitanism: in contemporary writing, 214–20; after 9/11, 200–201; and Pearl S. Buck, 99, 101; in Victorian period, 214; in writings of midcentury travel writers, 128; in writings of Paul Bowles, 66; in writings of Richard Wright, 41 cultural internationalism, 23–26, 123–24, 160 culture, 32, 33, 115–16, 228n18 culture, American: change and progress in, 6, 8; and national security, 8; and 1950s literary culture, 127; and Peter Matthiessen, 128, 146–47; as popular culture center, 123–24 culture, primitive: Beats as, 145; encounters with, 141–42; in writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, 32. See also culture, traditional culture, traditional: and Claude LéviStrauss, 148–49; and decolonization, 176; mistaken belief in, 175; and Peter Matthiessen, 129, 132, 139, 140, 144, 146–47; and Richard Wright, 107–8. See also culture, primitive Dean, Vera M., 11 Death Kit (Sontag), 151 decolonization: effects of, 176; and Ernest Hemingway, 191–92, 196, 250n25; models of, 116; and Paul Bowles, 55–56, 58, 70; and representations of abroad, 6; and Richard Wright, 107, 115 DeLillo, Don, 197; Europe in writings of, 207; Middle East in writings of, 207; and neo-conservativism, 208;

religion in writings of, 205, 208; security in writings of, 218; street scenes in writings of, 215; and terrorism, 204, 210, 253n13; urban spaces in writings of, 206 —Works: Cosmopolis, 215–20; “In the Ruins of the Future,” 210–14, 221; Libra, 210; Mao II, 6, 201–2, 205–10, 215, 217, 252n2; White Noise, 205, 210, 213, 217, 254n20 democracy, 122, 184 demographic materialism, 89 de-Occidentalization, 107 detribalization, 41, 42, 43–44 development: and American elites, 3; and Spain, 155; and tradition, 14; transformation of, 7; universal and bipolar models of, 23–26; in U.S. appeals to China, 84; in writings of James Baldwin, 51; in writings of John Dos Passos, 121, 122; in writings of Peter Matthiessen, 141–42, 143, 146; in writings of Richard Wright, 45–46, 122, 125, 156, 161, 172 development theory: American and European rivalry in, 12–13; classic texts of, 17–23; in Gunnar Myrdal, 115–17; and historical change, 175; and modernization, 10–16; and Richard Wright, 173; of “take-off,” 115–16 Dewey, John, 84, 236n13 Dick, Philip K., 31, 81–82, 87, 235nn1–2 Dinesen, Isak, 193 discontent, 14 disengagement, 61, 137. See also engagement Dos Passos, John, 117–25; and antiCommunism, 121; Brazil on the Move, 4, 118–21, 122, 192; as ex-left-

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ist, 118; fbi surveillance of, 91; and internal colonization, 119–20; internationalism of, 117–21, 128; literary conservatism of, 117–18, 120, 241n27; Manhattan Transfer, 119, 122; and neo-conservativism, 118, 121; and political world, 241n32; and Richard Wright, 119 Du Bois, W. E. B., 28–34; capitalism in writings of, 29; and China, 87–89; colonial system in writings of, 31–32, 33–34; Color and Democracy, 3, 31–32; culture in writings of, 32, 33, 228n18; and Eurocentrism, 31; and George Padmore, 111; and internationalism, 220; and James Baldwin, 46; and Malcolm X, 47; as Marxist, 39; and Pearl S. Buck, 31, 100; “The Realities in Africa,” 28–29; and religion, 32, 176; and Richard Wright, 34, 46; and Spain, 153; and white supremacy, 87–88; Worlds of Color, 87–88 Duke, St. Clair: Black Metropolis, 165, 167–67 Dulles, John Foster, 104 Eickelman, Dale, 72–73, 76–77 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 17 Eliot, T. S., 190 elites, American, 3 elites, intellectual, 30, 134 Ellison, Ralph, 153–54 engagement, 105–6, 179, 188. See also disengagement entropology. See culture, traditional environmentalism, 127–28, 138, 139 Eurocentrism, 30, 31 Europe. See British Empire; France evangelism. See missionaries

exoticism: and Richard Wright, 161; in writings of Ernest Hemingway, 196–97; in writings of Paul Bowles, 69, 97, 146; in writings of Pearl S. Buck, 97; in writings of Peter Matthiessen, 145, 146 expatriate experience: in The Overseas Americans, 186–88; and Paul Bowles, 3–4, 57–58, 60, 232n13; in writings of Pearl S. Buck, 97 Fairbank, John King, 86 Fanon, Frantz: influence of, 116, 147; and Richard Wright, 34, 107; The Wretched of the Earth, 38–39 Fassi, Allal Al-, 61–62 Fawcett, P. H., 130 fbi surveillance, 91, 237n26 Ferro, Marc, 208–9 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 91; The Great Gatsby, 217, 219 flamenco dance, 153–54 For Bread Alone (Bowles), 75 France, 50, 208, 231n54; cultural internationalism of, 147, 148, 150 freedom, 84, 104 Fukuyama, Francis, 204 Galbraith, J. K., 10–11, 12, 163 Gardner, Robert, 134–35, 243n15 Geertz, Clifford, 61, 65–66, 72–73, 76 Gellner, Ernest, 65–66 Ghana, 36–38, 250n18 Giddens, Anthony, 217 Glazer, Nathan, 8, 23 globalism: in post–World War II period, 24; and Richard Wright, 161; and United States, 7–8, 85; in writings of African Americans, 46–47; in writ-

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globalism (cont.) ings of W. E. B. Du Bois, 28–34. See also internationalism globalization, 6, 41, 93, 128 Godard, Jean-Luc, 150 The Good Earth (Buck), 238n29 Goodman, Alice, 236n18 Gordon, Caroline, 241n27 Graham, Katherine, 2 Graham, Phil, 2, 17 The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald), 217, 219 Hagen, Everett E., 11 Halberstam, David, 15, 133–34, 243n9 Halpern, Manfred, 17 Hamilton, Charles: Black Power, 38–39 Harvard Peabody Expedition, 133–35 Heider, Karl G., 134, 135 Hemingway, Ernest, 191–97; and decolonization, 191–92, 250n25; exoticism in writings of, 196–97; midwesterners in writings of, 193; primitivism in writings of, 194–95; as proto-postcolonial author, 4–5; self-exploration in writings of, 196; and Spain, 156, 157, 160; Under Kilimanjaro, 177, 191–97; white settler culture in writings of, 192–93 Hemingway, Patrick, 191–92, 251n31 Henderson the Rain King (Bellow), 4, 177, 189–91 Hinton, William, 87 Hirschmann, A. O., 11 homosexuality, 194–95 Horowitz, Irving, 14 Howe, Quincy, 85 Howells, William Dean, 214, 254n23 Hudson, W. H., 130 Hughes, Langston, 91; I Wonder as I Wander, 158–60

hunting, 192–93 Hurston, Zora Neale, 241n27 idealism, 75, 84 identity, American: in cold war, 8; and Ernest Hemingway, 193–94, 251n29; after 9/11, 201–2; and Richard Wright, 152, 156; and Susan Sontag, 151, 220; and The Ugly American, 194 identity, individual: in writings of Ernest Hemingway, 196–97; in writings of James Baldwin, 50, 201, 253n6; in writings of Pearl S. Buck, 101; in writings of Richard Wright, 112–13; in writings of Susan Sontag, 151–52. See also self Indian Country (Matthiessen), 243n8 indigenous culture. See culture, traditional individualism, 218 Indochina, 50, 185. See also Vietnam internationalism: cultural, 23–26, 123–24; and development theory, 22; and discontent or terror, 53; of John Dos Passos, 117–21; and Malcolm X, 48–49; after 9/11, 200; and Paul Bowles, 128, 147, 220; and Pearl S. Buck, 90–91, 98–99, 128, 220–21; in pre-Vietnam era, 187–88; in The Ugly American, 179–80; of United States, 84–85; and W. E. B. Du Bois, 31, 32–34, 228n19; in writings of midcentury travel writers, 128. See also globalism interviews, attitudes revealed in, 112 “In the Ruins of the Future” (DeLillo), 210–14, 221 In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (Matthiessen), 243n8

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Index  263 Iran, 17, 176 Irving, Washington: The Alhambra, 163 Islam: culture of, after 9/11, 202; and Daniel Lerner, 19–20; and Ernest Hemingway, 196–97; and Malcolm X, 48–49; mistaken ideas about, 177; and Paul Bowles, 55, 57, 61–64, 69– 71, 72–74, 75, 110–11, 202, 232n7; and Richard Wright, 105, 109, 110–11, 113 I Wonder as I Wander (Hughes), 158–60 James, Henry, 214, 216 Japan, 199, 252n2

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Kallen, Horace, 85, 123–24 Kennan, George, 13–14, 83, 235n9 Kennedy, John F., 2–3, 120–21 Kenya, 192–94 Kerouac, Jack, 144 kidnapping, 202–3 Korean conflict, 91, 97 Kotkin, Joel, 200, 252n4 Lansdale, Edward, 181 Larsen, Nella, 144, 157 Lasch, Christopher, 150, 188 Latin America. See South America Lawrence, D. H., 193 Lebanon, 176, 203–4 Lederer, William J.: The Ugly American, 5, 177, 178–86, 194 Leiris, Michel, 44–45 LeMay, Curtis, 141–42, 244n22 Lerner, Daniel: and cultural mobility, 176; influence of, 20; and life history, 112; Middle East in writings of, 17–18; The Passing of Traditional Society, 11, 17–21, 124; and progress, 175; transitional figures in writings of, 17–19

Lerner, Max, 11–13 Lessing, Doris, 193 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 139–40; on missionaries, 244n25; and monoculture, 244n18; and Peter Matthiessen, 146–47, 148, 244n18; and Susan Sontag, 147–49 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 71–72, 77, 78, 140–41, 147, 233n24 Lewis, Bernard, 239n8 Lewis, W. Arthur, 12 liberal consensus, 110, 121–22, 123 Libra (DeLillo), 210 A Life Full of Holes (Bowles), 75 literary conservatism, 117–18, 120, 241n27 literary diplomacy, 9–10 literary internationalism, 5, 90–91, 98, 159, 201 Locke, Alain, 28, 46, 227n2 A Long Way from Home (McKay), 157 Luce, Henry, 87; “American Century,” 22, 84, 85–86, 147 Maghreb, 76–79 Mailer, Norman, 145, 184, 216 Malcolm X, 47–49; and anticolonial struggle, 47; The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 4, 47–49; and Gunnar Myrdal, 47, 124; and Islamic selfhood, 168; on Mau Mau insurgency, 251n27; and Richard Wright, 47, 124; as traveler, 49; and W. E. B. Du Bois, 31, 47; and white supremacy, 47–48 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 139–41 Mangone, Gerard J., 187 Manhattan Transfer (Dos Passos), 119, 122 Manifest Destiny, 83

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264  Index Mao II (DeLillo), 6, 201–2, 205–10, 215, 217, 252n2 Mao Zedong, 95, 96 Mapping the Global Future, 89, 237n21 marabouts, 72–74, 76–77, 141 Marcuse, Ludwig, 185–86 Marginal Man (Stonequist), 41–44, 46–47 market scenes: in writings of James Baldwin, 50, 52, 229n25; in writings of Paul Bowles, 65–66; in writings of Richard Wright, 35–36, 108. See also street scenes Marxist interpretation: and development theory, 21–22; by Frantz Fanon, 39; and Richard Wright, 36, 107; by W. E. B. Du Bois, 39 Matthiessen, Peter, 128–47; and British exploration narratives, 194; cultural loss in writings of, 140; and disengagement, 137; environmentalism in writings of, 138, 139; exoticism in writings of, 145, 146; and exploration and encounter, 129–30, 142; and globalization, 128; and John Dos Passos, 121; as literary diplomat, 9; mixed-race people in writings of, 143–44; Native Americans in writings of, 143–44; natural history in writings of, 130–31; Otherness in writings of, 137; outsiders in writings of, 144–45; and Papua New Guinea, 129, 133–34; and political engagement, 132; and “primitive mind,” 137; and primitivism, 132, 145; race and racism in writings of, 143–44, 144; and “savage humanity,” 141; transition in writings of, 146; and transnationalism, 128; upbringing

of, 238n31; and Vietnam, 129; and western consciousness, 137 —Works: At Play in the Fields of the Lord, 129, 142–47; The Cloud Forest, 4, 129, 132–33, 139–40, 146; Indian Country, 243n8; In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, 243n8; Under the Mountain Wall, 4, 129, 133–37, 139–40, 147 McEwan, Ian, 201 McKay, Claude: A Long Way from Home, 157 McLuhan, Marshall, 20 Melville, Herman, 229n25 Middle East, 17–18, 207. See also specific countries Mignolo, Walter, 200 migration, 43 militarization, 8–9, 188, 250n18 military intervention, 141–42 Millikan, Max F., 11 Mills, C. Wright, 8–9, 14 missionaries: and China, 83; and development theory, 18–19; dissent of, 101; and Indonesian Islam, 109; in The Overseas Americans, 188; and Pearl S. Buck, 90, 91, 97, 101; sense of superiority in, 83–84; in writings of Don DeLillo, 205; in writings of Peter Matthiessen, 142–44, 145–46, 244n25; in writings of Richard Wright, 39, 40 mixed-race people, 95–96, 143–44 modernity: and Peter Matthiessen, 132; and Richard Wright, 106, 110, 171– 72; and United States, 124; in writings of Don DeLillo, 217; in writings of John Dos Passos, 121; in writings of Paul Bowles, 63–64, 74

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modernization, 10–16, 19, 82 monoculture, 244n18 Morocco: as French protectorate, 61–62, 76; interpretations of, 66–76; and Paul Bowles, 55–66 Motherwell, Robert, 155–56 Myrdal, Gunnar: An American Dilemma, 166–67; comment of, on Pagan Spain, 171; culture in writings of, 115–16; in development theory, 12, 20, 121–22; and Richard Wright, 114–17, 166; Rich Lands and Poor, 114–15, 122; and secularization of the self, 176; social science techniques of, 113 My Several Worlds (Buck), 4, 89–90, 91–94 nationalism, 56, 58–59, 70, 177 Native Americans, 143–44, 162, 170 natural history, 130–31 neo-conservativism, 118, 121, 208 New Deal order, 118, 241n26 New York ny, 53, 59–60, 74, 207 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 16 9/11, responses to, 200–202 Ninkovich, Frank, 82–83 Nixon, Richard, 94 Nixon in China (Adams), 87, 236n18 Nkrumah, Kwame, 39–40, 45, 230n32 non-alignment policies, 40, 240n23 No Name in the Street (Baldwin), 4, 5–6, 49–53 Nye, Joseph, Jr., 82 O’Connor, Flannery, 241n27 oppression, 34 Orientalism, 56, 59, 69, 74, 77–78, 233n18

Otherness, 35–36, 137, 152, 155, 160–64, 170, 172, 173 outsiders, 34–35, 144–45 The Overseas Americans (Carnegie Project), 5, 177, 186–88 Padmore, George, 111–12 Pagan Spain (Wright), 3, 44, 51, 105, 154–57, 159, 160–70, 173, 247n26 Palestine, 21 Papua New Guinea, 129, 133–34 Paris, 52 Park, Robert, 20, 41, 42–43, 112, 113, 123–24, 165, 176 Partisan Review, 8, 185–86 The Passing of Traditional Society (Lerner), 11, 17–21, 124 Peru, 129, 142–47 Plimpton, George, 128 Plowing the Dark (Powers), 6, 201–2, 203–5 Posnock, Ross, 113–14 Powers, Richard, 197; Plowing the Dark, 6, 201–2, 203–5 primitivism: and Peter Matthiessen, 132, 145; and Richard Wright, 161, 162; of Spanish culture, 153–54, 162–63; transformation of, 7; in writings of Ernest Hemingway, 194–95; in writings of Paul Bowles, 63–64, 71–72, 233n18 progress: in American culture, 6; and development, 141–42; and development theory, 12–13, 15–16; in midcentury liberalism, 121–22, 123; mistaken belief in, 175–76; and Paul Bowles, 175; and Peter Matthiessen, 146; and Richard Wright, 42, 105–6, 108, 161, 173; and technology, 20–21; trans-

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progress (cont.) formation of, 7; and W. E. B. Du Bois, 32, 88; in writings of Gunnar Myrdal, 116–17 progressivism, 99 Pynchon, Thomas, 211 Rabinow, Paul, 65–66, 78–79, 213, 234n39 race and racism: as animating force, 105; and James Baldwin, 49; and Malcolm X, 48, 49; and Pearl S. Buck, 90–91, 93–94; and Spanish civil war, 158–59; and W. E. B. Du Bois, 29– 30, 31, 32–33, 87; in writings of Peter Matthiessen, 143–44, 144; in writings of Richard Wright, 124–25 Rand, Ayn, 241n27 “The Realities in Africa” (DuBois), 28–29 religion: and African American writers, 47; as animating force, 105; centrality of, 176–77; and development theory, 22; and Langston Hughes, 160; and nationalism, 177; and Paul Bowles, 74–75; and Richard Wright, 109, 168; and W. E. B. Du Bois, 32, 176; in writings of Don DeLillo, 205, 208. See also Catholicism; Islam restorationism, 74 Rich Lands and Poor (Myrdal), 114–15, 122 Rieff, David, 199–200, 215, 221 Rieff, Philip, 188 Riesman, David, 8, 14, 17–18, 20, 23, 150, 188 Rockefeller, Michael Clark, 133–34, 137, 243n10 Rockefeller Foundation, 133 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 22, 103, 117 Roosevelt, Theodore, 184, 248n8

Rostow, W. W., 12, 15 Roth, Philip, 216 Rowe, John Carlos, 239n9 Ruark, Robert, 251n27 Russo-Japanese War, 108 Salinger, J. D., 184 Schreiner, Olive, 193 Seize the Day (Bellow), 216 self, 13, 176. See also identity, individual self-development, 101 self-exploration, 149, 196 self-representation, 149–50 Sen, Amartya, 200, 221, 255n30 sentimental imperialism, 83 Shannon, L. W., 11 Sheehan, Neil, 180–81 Silent Spring (Carson), 127–28 “skin game,” 48, 49. See also race and racism slavery, 170–71 Smedley, Agnes, 31, 86–87 Snow, Edgar, 86, 236n12 Spain, 153–70 Spanish civil war, 155, 158–60 social psychology: and Arab society, 20; and national consciousness, 8; and The Overseas Americans, 187; of postcolonial Gold Coast, 37–38; and sociocultural shifts, 42–43 Sontag, Susan, 147–52; Against Interpretation, 147–48, 149; and American identity, 151, 220; and cultural encounter, 149; Death Kit, 151; and French cultural internationalism, 147, 148, 150; and interiority narratives, 151; and networks of representation, 150; psychological analysis in writings of, 4; self-exploration in

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writings of, 149; and self-representation, 149–50; and underdeveloped world, 4; and Vietnam, 149–51 South America, 129, 130–31, 132–33, 163. See also specific countries Southeast Asia, 178–86. See also Indochina; Vietnam The Spider’s House (Bowles), 4, 55–60, 60–76, 110–11, 139, 147, 202 Stadialist theory, 16–17, 141–42 Stein, Gertrude, 154–55, 156, 160, 169, 172 Stonequist, Everett, 20, 41–44, 46–47, 113, 176; Marginal Man, 41–44, 46–47 street scenes, 52, 215. See also market scenes Streit, Clarence K., 24, 85 Suez fiasco, 17 Sulzberger, C. L., 122–23, 242n34 Taiwan, 97–98 “Tarzanism,” 77 Tate, Allen, 241n27 technology, 20–21, 248n7 terrorism: and Don DeLillo, 204, 206–7; after 9/11, 201; in writings of James Baldwin, 53; in writings of Richard Powers, 204 Thesiger, Wilfred, 194 Third World, 14–15, 23 Tibet, 98, 100 Tillion, Germaine, 2 totalitarianism, 109–10, 113, 168 transition: in mid-1950s–mid-1960s, 121–22; in writings of Paul Bowles, 58–59, 65–67, 79; in writings of Peter Matthiessen, 146 transnationalism, 128

travel, democratization of, 5 travel writing: and cultural internationalism, 220; decentralization of, 5–6; and James Baldwin, 52–53; as literary diplomacy, 9; and Pearl S. Buck, 94; and Peter Matthiessen, 128, 132; representational contract of, 132; and Richard Wright, 3, 9, 35, 161, 165 tribalism, 105 Trilling, Lionel, 109, 184 12 Million Black Voices (Wright), 165 The Ugly American (Lederer and Burdick), 5, 177, 178–86, 194 Under Kilimanjaro (Hemingway), 177, 191–97 Under the Mountain Wall (Matthiessen), 4, 129, 133–37, 139–40, 147 United Nations, 31 United States: and China, 84, 85; ignorance of, of nonwestern world, 6; and Pearl S. Buck, 98, 100; technological supremacy of, 248n7; as theory, 17–23. See also American South; New York ny United World Federalists, 24 universalism, 24, 99 Updike, John, 146 Vann, John Paul, 181–82 Vietnam: and Pearl S. Buck, 95, 97; and Peter Matthiessen, 129; as Stone Age culture, 141; and Susan Sontag, 149– 51; and The Ugly American, 180–82; and U.S. intellectual-political elite, 134. See also Indochina Ward, Barbara, 11 Waugh, Evelyn, 194

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268  Index Westernization, 22, 59–60, 108, 124, 172 Wharton, Edith, 58 White Man, Listen! (Wright), 171 White Noise (DeLillo), 205, 210, 213, 217, 254n20 white supremacy, 47–48, 87–88, 93 Whyte, William H., 188 Wilkie, Wendell, 23 Wilson, Edmund, 117 Wilson, Sloan, 14 Wilson, Woodrow, 24, 84, 122, 123 Worlds of Color (Du Bois), 87–88 The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon), 38–39 Wright, Richard, 34–40; and American ideology, 166–67; and Bandung conference, 1–2, 104, 172, 177; and capitalism, 36–38, 42; Catholicism in writings of, 162, 163–64, 168; cold-war politics in writings of, 168; colonial system in writings of, 37–38; and Communism, 34–35, 113, 173, 229n23; contrast of, to post-9/11 writers, 202; and decolonization, 146; and detribalization, 41, 42; and difference, 169–70; and Don DeLillo, 213; and empire, 171; and engagement, 105–6, 179; as ex-leftist, 34–35, 113, 229n23; and exploration and encounter, 156; fbi surveillance of, 91; and flamenco, 153; geopolitical development in writings of, 42; and globalism, 41; and globalization, 161; and Gold Coast, 37–38; and gradual transformations, 122–23; and haiku, 161; and hybridism, 41–42; and imperialism, 171; and Indonesia, 108–9; and industrialization, 45–46,

171; and interference, 106–7; and internationalism, 128, 221; and Islam, 105, 109, 110–11, 113; and James Baldwin, 53; and John Dos Passos, 119; and Kwame Nkrumah, 39–40, 230n32; and Langston Hughes, 159–60; materialist-economic analysis in writings of, 108; on militarization, 250n18; and Native Americans, 162, 170; and nonalignment, 105–6; and Otherness, 35–36, 152, 160–64, 170, 172, 173; outsiders in writings of, 34–35; as participant-observer, 112; and Pearl S. Buck, 93, 102; and Peter Matthiessen, 132; and politics, 241n32; postcolonial thought in writings of, 38; and Protestants, 167–69; psychological analysis in writings of, 108; race and racism in writings of, 124–25, 170–73; and religion, 109, 168, 176–77; and social analysis, 112–13, 239n13; and sociology, 112, 166; and Susan Sontag, 150; time in writings of, 106; travels of, 104–5; and travel writing, 3, 9, 35, 45, 161, 165; and universalism, 24; and W. E. B. Du Bois, 46; and Westernization, 108, 124, 172 —Works: Black Power, 3, 12, 34–36, 39, 41, 44–46, 106–7, 108, 112, 115, 157–58, 173; The Color Curtain, 2, 3, 12, 44, 88, 108–9, 111–15, 173; Pagan Spain, 3, 44, 51, 105, 154–57, 159, 160–70, 173, 247n26; 12 Million Black Voices, 165; White Man, Listen!, 171 Yamey, B. S., 11

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