Apostles of Modernity

Apostles of Modernity
University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln and London

American Writers in the Age of Development
Guy Reynolds
:oo8 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Chapter ; has been revised from Sketches of Spain: Richard Wrights
Pagan Spain & African-American Representations of the Hispanic,
Journal of American Studies (:ooo): 8;o:. 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.
isix q;8-o-8o:-:;;-; (cloth : alk. paper)
:. American literature:oth centuryHistory and criticism.
:. Internationalism in literature. . American literature
Foreign inuences. . Literature and societyUnited States
History:oth century. . Foreign countries in literature. I. Title.
is:;.i8 :oo8 8:.oq8dc:: :oo;oq8
Set in Bulmer MT by Bob Reitz.
Designed by Ashley Muehlbauer.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
:. The American Writer and Development: Contexts of
Cultural Internationalism :
:. The Skin Game: Du Bois, Wright, Malcolm X, Baldwin :;
. You were in on the last days of Morocco: Paul Bowles and
the End of Empire
. Sinophilia: China and the Writers 8:
. Nonalignment and Writing: Rich Lands and Poor :o
6. Stone Ages: Peter Matthiessen and Susan Sontag in
Latin America and Asia ::;
;. African American Representations of the Hispanic:
Remaking Europe :
8. Ugly Americans and Vanishing Europeans: American
Presence, European Decolonization :;
q. These great new times: Cosmopolitanism and
Contemporary Writing :qq
Notes ::
Index :;
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 Kents 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 NebraskaLincoln Linda Pratt was the manuscripts
rst 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
books nal draft.
As always, I want to thank Caroline Anton-Smith, Zac Reynolds, Jamie
Reynolds, and Izzy Reynolds for offering not just encouragement but
distraction.
Idly, I picked up the evenings newspaper that lay folded near me
upon a table and began thumbing through it. Then I was staring
at a news item that bafed 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 Philip-
pines, Ethiopia, Gold Coast, etc. My God! I began a rapid calcu-
lation 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 fty 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 sacrice and suffering had been daily companions. . . . And
the populations of almost all the nations listed were deeply religious.
The American Writer and Development
Contexts of Cultural Internationalism
1
2 The American Writer and Development

This was a meeting of almost all of the human race living in the main
geopolitical center of gravity of the earth.
1
Richard Wrights 1955 epiphany led him to attend the Bandung Confer-
ence, and to write The Color Curtain.
2
But other Americans, not least
John F. Kennedy, remained ignorant of Wrights geopolitical center
of gravity. When Washington Post editor Phil Graham gave a copy of
Germaine Tillions Algeria to Kennedy in 1958, he noted that under-
developed 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 specic ideas on Algeria. But I send it for another reason. In her
analysis of under-developed areas in general, I think she has great wis-
dom about a major problem of our immediate future.
3
Grahams wife, Katharine, noted, I know of almost no one in the
First World who was then thinking about the Third World and the im-
portance of development.
4
Her comment suffers from hyperbole, but
one takes the point. Later, after her husbands death, Katharine Graham
assumed the management of the Washington Post, and in the 1970s she
tried to revive Phil Grahams commitment. She sat on the Brandt Com-
mission 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 commissions global vision. She noted, Bob McNa-
mara, 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
commissions 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 for-
midable 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 Kennedys unease during
The American Writer and Development 3
the Cuban missile crisis, and the book also contains graphic testimony
to the crisis of condence 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 Grahams 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 so-
cial 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 our-
selves with, the cultures of Asia and Africawith 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 Grahams com-
mentary on JFK by exploring American representations of the develop-
ing world in the aftermath of the Second World War. Richard Wrights
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, primitiv-
ism, 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 gure in postwar literary internationalism, but he
was not the only gure to explore what seemed to be new territory. His
work entered into dialogue with other African American international-
ists, notably the W. E. B. Du Bois of Color and Democracy: Colonies and
Peace (1945). James Baldwin, in his 1961 essay, The New Lost Genera-
tion, 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
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 Bowless work as a conicted but funda-
mentally serious meditation on Western readings of Islam and North
Africa. In The Spiders House (1955) Bowles addressed the topic that
Graham said remained outside Washingtons political culture: the un-
der-developed world (the novel is set when Moroccan nationalists rise
up against the French). But it was not just the mavericks mapping a non-
European literary space. Pearl S. Buck had won the Nobel Prize largely
on account of ctions and travel writing set in China. Her two major
nonction 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 Pacic 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 gures
had begun to create distinctive representations of Wrights geopoliti-
cal center of gravity. James Baldwins No Name in the Street (1972),
Saul Bellows Henderson the Rain King (1959), John Dos Passoss Bra-
zil on the Move (1963), Peter Matthiessens The Cloud Forest (1961), and
Under the Mountain Wall (1962): across ction, reportage, and political
commentary an American version of the under-developed world was
appearing. Once one begins to look, textsand episodes and scenarios
embedded within themreveal a fascination with changing patterns
of cultural internationalism. One of the rst American accounts of the
Islamic pilgrimage, the hajj, appears embedded within The Autobiogra-
phy of Malcolm X (1965). For a younger generation of writers, the rst
foreign trip beyond Paris or London was a highly signicant moment.
Susan Sontags Trip to Hanoi (1968) suggested a work of protest lit-
erature, but was in fact an extended meditation on the psychological
transformation effected by ones rst contact with a non-Western cul-
ture. Writers emergent during modernisms heyday spent the last years
of their careers struggling to respond to a changed environment. Inter-
nationalists by instinct, they could sense the worlds contours shifting.
Ernest Hemingway spent much of the mid-1950s working on a lengthy
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 geneal-
ogy 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 Lederers infamous
bestseller, The Ugly American (1958), and a Carnegie Report on for-
eign 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 reected 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 (Matthies-
sen), 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 rst 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 mani-
festly 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 nd 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
Baldwins 1972 travelogue, No Name in the Street, one might nd jour-
neys through Paris and the Deep South, reections on the Vietnam War
and Algerian conict. One point is immediately apparent: this was an
era when literary Americans were moving toward more and more var-
ied 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 nal chapter) where the geographi-
cal net of a novel might stretch from the U.S. Heartland to the ravaged
slums of Beirut. In Richard Powerss Plowing the Dark (2000) and Don
DeLillos 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 sweep-
ing banality to say so much as to say nothing at all. But many recent
commentators, especially those writing after 9/11, and particularly Eu-
ropeans, concur with Katherine Grahams gloomy analysis: putative
ignorance in the United States of the non-Western world has become
a major topic for pundits, journalists, and analystsall those clichs
about the man from Peoria not knowing Mexico lies to the South.
10
This study seeks to explore beyond these clichs 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 Americas 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 West-
ern 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 liter-
ary internationalism, and to stress the distinctive historical formation of
representations of abroad, especially the world forged by decoloniza-
tion, accelerating globalization, and Americas widening inuence. My
aim has been, above all, to demarcate and then understand these rep-
resentations in a historically specic and nationally distinctive setting,
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 acces-
sion to a decisive global position was in the rst place a military-ideo-
logical one: the cold war. What Stephen Ambrose termed the rise to
globalism was preeminently, in this analysis, a shift framed by the Na-
tional Security Council and the Pentagon. Tellingly, Ambrose presents
an overture to his classic account by listing the United Statess 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 fty na-
tions, over a million soldiers, airmen, and soldiers stationed in more
than 100 countries, and an offensive capability sufcient to destroy
the world many times over. It had used military force to intervene
in Indochina, Lebanon, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Cen-
tral 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, Americas national security
was constantly in jeopardy.
12
If this is not an empire in name, then it certainly looks like one in prac-
tice. Ambroses brute gures are testament to American power. What
is particularly telling is the nal sentence: Americas national secu-
rity 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-
taries by a reading of cold war culture that stresses such key motifs as
Eisenhowers 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 para-
digmatic readings of the late 1940s through to the mid-1960s around
the image of the atom bombs shadow.
13
And indeed, when we go back
to some of the primary texts of the periodtexts that diagnosed the
cultures dominant vectorsthe emphasis on national security is para-
mount.
For example, Partisan Review 22 (1955) featured a crucial and il-
luminating essay coauthored by David Riesman and Nathan Glazer,
The Intellectuals and the Discontented Classes. This essay is a so-
cial-psychological snapshot of the mid-1950s liberal mindset. Riesman
and Glazer tried to put their ngers 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 inuential commentators recognized that
cold war imperatives might produce a dangerously militarized society.
C. Wright Millss 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 sug-
gested that a cadre of experts from the armed services shaped Americas
understanding of the wider world: In America, diplomacy has never
been successfully cultivated as a learned art by trained and capable pro-
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 Depart-
ment in the wake of Senator Joe McCarthys attacks on the diplomatic
establishment. Mills identied three factors acting to undermine tradi-
tional diplomacy within the U.S. government: The relative weakness
of the professional diplomatic servicethere was little sense of career
structure, and many ambassadorships (as they had been throughout the
nations 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 personnelthe impact
of McCarthyism; and nally, 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 ad-
equately assessed by a civilian. British theory and experience denies
both these propositions.
17
Millss 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 milita-
rized, 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 lled, at the very least, the
role of diplomat-traveler, engaging with and interpreting foreign cul-
tures for an American readership. Cold war literary culture, that is, had
an international and transnational dimension often overlooked in com-
mentaries centered on the Bomb and the domestic American scene.
It is here we nd Wright, Baldwin, Matthiessen, and Bowleswriters
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
or the writer, pursuing what Mills argued was the civilian track of
engagement with foreign cultures. McCarthy had shaken the State De-
partment tree to dispose of supposed fellow-travelers; but in North Af-
rica and Asia there remained Americans (a good number of them from
exactly the Ivy League backgrounds one would nd in the State De-
partment) pursuing quixotic forms of literary diplomacy. And one of
the periods many ironies is that Richard Wright, an ex-Marxist under
surveillance for some of the time by J. Edgar Hoovers fbi, should, in
his manifold attempts to interpret foreign cultures, have remained true
to the ideals of traditional diplomacy.
Modernization and Development
Can we identify a common intellectual structure or a shared conceptual
framework conguring the disparate genres of travel writing, ction,
and reportage? Is there a common discourse articulating relations be-
tween 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 structur-
ing model to frame and interpret the non-Western world. A number
of Americas 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. Galbraiths 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 devel-
opment. 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
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 es-
tablished a corpus of texts. In 1962 Max Lerner, author of America as
Civilization (and then in his liberal-leftist phase), published The Age
of Overkilla study with an extended account of The Undeveloped
World. Lerners bibliography is a good illustration of how far Ameri-
can intellectuals had traveled in this period. Now there was an exten-
sive 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, gures such as Lerner himself,
who set the debate about the place of the United States in the changing
geopolitical order. He cited Daniel Lerners The Passing of Traditional
Society (1958), a text I will shortly turn to, as a fundamental theoretical
text in this area, alongside Everett E. Hagens study, conducted at mit,
On the Theory of Social Change (1962). Other texts in a long bibliog-
raphy included Vera M. Deans The Nature of the Non-Western World
(1957); Barbara Wards The Rich Nations and the Poor Nations (1962);
A. O. Hirschmanns 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. Millikans and D. L. Blackmers 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 Americas role in the world (and the worlds role
in America) was becoming steadily more important. From his read-
ing 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 preoccupa-
tions: The Identity Revolutions; Modernization: The Leap into
the Stormy Present; Two Designs for Growth. Lerners text dem-
onstrates that Richard Wrights 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 re-
ferred, 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 mod-
ern in Asia and Africa.
20
The aim was to foster development through
growth (a central term in this era); American development theory was
rmly grounded in liberal economics. Lerner had identied 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 gures, their ideas, and the
periods 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 intellectu-
als established conceptual systems to explain themselves as agents in an
increasingly post-European world.
Development theory or developmentalism is a postimperial para-
digm 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 Westernnow Americanpolitical
hegemony is masked within arguments about the historical inevitabil-
ity of such progress. Such paradigms for understanding the develop-
ing 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 Lerners 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-
structed arguments about progress and development where parallels
were insistently drawn between current decolonization and Americas
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 mid-
century liberal thought becomes explicit. Yet something more basic
than economic exploitation prepared the harvest of hate and revolu-
tion, he wrote. It was the denial of identity. And: Whether the colo-
nial masters viewed the natives as children or as savages, or quite simply
as theyundifferentiated members of a group outside the palethey
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 developments claims into their counterarguments. In 1958 George
Kennan, author of the notorious X article for Foreign Affairs that had
established some of the cold wars inaugural theoretical positions, gave
a series of lectures for the bbc. These talks (also published, in part, in
Harpers Magazine that year) formed Russia, the Atom and the West, a
book dismissive of developments claims. Kennan addressed an Anglo-
American 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 require-
ment; 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; oth-
erwise we will take it from the Russians, whose experience and meth-
ods 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
neoconservative). He dryly admitted he could not fully share the ba-
sic 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 engage-
ment with the international scene. Irving Horowitzs Three Worlds of
Development: The Theory and Practice of International Stratica-
tion (1966) is one of the classic works of this genre of internationalist
social studies. Horowitzs 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 sys-
tematic 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
gure, the developing man who emerges as the non-Western world
steadily begins the ascent towards modernity. Drawing on eldwork 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 model-
ing of development theory is the Americanization of a French term
(tiers monde)to become the foundation of a managerialist paradigm:
stages or worlds of progress. Horowitzs 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 equiva-
lent 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 explic-
itly 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 Johnsons 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, Rostows theory of development
qualied him as an authority on Southeast Asia, establishing develop-
ment theorists entrance to the real world of policy. David Halberstam
noted Rostows fascination with the liberating and progressive force of
technological modernity. Walt Rostow . . . thought the old Administra-
tion 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 Rostows work. At its argumentative core, de-
velopment theory, with its ladder of stages of economic growth, is an
internationalized and late twentieth-century version of eighteenth-and
nineteenth-century Stadialism. Stadialism is the name given to the
nexus of (Scottish) Enlightenment concepts that helped to shape the
emergent Americas models of historical progress and societal evolu-
tion. Cultural historians trace Stadialism back to eighteenth-century
Edinburgh, as in Susan Mannings identication of a Scottish Enlight-
enment model of stadialist history whereby all societies, like individu-
als, pass through identical stages of developments between infancy and
maturity. Societies evolved from a savage stage through the barbar-
ian 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 stagesfrom 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 Coopers historical ctions to Thomas Coles
series of paintings, The Course of Empire, nineteenth-century Ameri-
cans envisaged distinctive representations of the relations between
civilization and savagism, and they embedded their images or nar-
ratives 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 avor 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 ev-
ery human achievement and contrivance, are subject to endless variety
and progression. The progression from the primitive community to city-
state, empire, nation, and modern super-state is obvious.
31
America as Theory
The 1950s and 1960s saw the emergence of a distinct corpus of devel-
opment 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 evi-
dent in its title, was Daniel Lerners The Passing of Traditional Society:
Modernizing the Middle East (1958). Lerner created a midcentury Sta-
dialism adjusted to the post-Suez Middle East, fusing progressive ide-
ology and the methods of modern sociology. He identied distinctively
Western cultural forms (the media) as powerful engines to transform
traditional cultures. The book appeared in the same year that Phil Gra-
ham was trying to get JFK interested in Algeria (1958), and was one of
the rst important U.S. studies of the Middle East to be written after
it had become clear that this Anglo-French sphere of inuence 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 Shahs place on the throne; the
1956 Suez asco signaled the passing not of traditional Arab society
but of the Europeans. And in January 1957 Eisenhower asked Con-
gress 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 sociologys quantitative methods (interviews,
surveys, opinion polls), shaped by a keen awareness of the media, to ar-
gue that Middle Eastern societies were in the throes of massive cultural
change. The media (lm, television, newspapers) fostered a new par-
ticipant style of society where traditional passivity gave way to mod-
ern forms of involvement and activism. He identied different groups
within these traditional societies, most specically the transitionals
responsive to the West and modernity. In an incisive introduction to
the book, David Riesman (himself a major gure in American cultural
commentary, and author of the seminal 1950 text The Lonely Crowd)
identied a key to this transition: the spread of the idea(l) of America as
symbol and agent of progress.
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 naivet, 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 lm.
34
This is characteristic of Riesmans clairvoyant intelligence. As a stu-
dent of U.S. modernity, Riesman immediately sees that his colleague
Lerner has identied a Middle Eastern modernity itself dependent on
seductive images of the United States. In a tellingly perspicacious mo-
ment, 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 cultures 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 Riesmans introduction is that while acknowledging Lerners
focus on the interplay between contemporary ideology and the pass-
ing of traditional Arab culture, Riesman remains presciently skeptical
about whether that interplay will lead to an ascent up the developmen-
tal ladder. In a further and almost certainly accidental moment of in-
sight, Riesmans 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
emissary . . . a lower sort of apostle, is the recurrent dream of those
who journey into Conrads uttermost ends of the earth, be they Eu-
ropean 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 tech-
nology 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 gures in a va-
riety of societies (Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iran)those
locals who are becoming modern or Westernized. He frames these
gures with the paraphernalia of quantitative sociology: charts, tables,
and statistics. At the same time, Lerner founds his eldwork on a large
amount of one-to-one interviews with a wide range of Middle Eastern-
ers. Through these interviews he creates arguments about the texture
of traditional Islamic societies. Specically, 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 pre-
cisely to narrow the gap between bottom and top, to create a substantial
middle sectorto increase the number of Transitionals who compose
the living reality of transition.
36
Lerners text is a landmark in studies of the Islamic, postcolonial
world. As he acknowledged, societies in transition would need to nd 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 thinklike 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-glorication as a gap opened up between
the intellectual commitment to modernity and a residual allegiance to
traditional Islam. One of Lerners most reective 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:
The failure to create an appropriate new symbolism, in a rapidly
changing society, produces an historical deformitya psychocul-
tural gap between words and deeds that widens through time and
develops, ultimately, an explosive charge. If the new words are miss-
ing that efciently relate changing lifeways to changing values, then
events tend to take their meaning from traditional symbolismand
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 cir-
culated 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 Saids Orien-
talism (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 mid-
century American social scientists such as Riesman, McLuhan, Park,
Lerner, Stonequist, and Myrdal. This is a self capable of transition be-
tween 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, quantied, and interpreted.
A critique of Lerner runs as follows. First, the regularizing methods of
sociological analysis smoothed out individual differences, building par-
ticular human stories into scientic paradigms. And, without doubt,
the creation of a transitional Syrian or Iranian was an act of naming
by the Western viewer, Lerner. Second, Lerners development theory
was founded on the thoroughly Enlightenment belief that technology
enacts progressive change. Technology (phones, television, and lm)
spreads the gospel of modern, Western civilizationyet this was a book
written shortly after Nazi death camps demonstrated a less cheering ap-
plication of technology.
38
Furthermore, Lerners paradigm understood
cultures in terms of the traditional and the modern, with a phase of tran-
sition 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 changeone era of history will succeed its predecessor,
in a steady cultural movement onwards. Third, Lerners development
theory barely addressed colonialism. Though much of his thinking
must have been done at the time of Suez, a conspicuous lacuna was sus-
tained engagement with colonialisms aftershocks. He was dismissive of
Arab nationalism and its antagonism toward empire. Of Nassers poli-
cies in Egypt, he commented that seeking to compensate the fantasy
life for damages inicted 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.
Empires 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 Reynoldss recent comment: The par-
tition of two British possessionsIndia and Palestinein 19471948
created fault lines in South Asia and the Middle East that would outlast
Europes cold war divide.
40
Yet Lerners 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 cul-
tural force; the Middle Easts transition is a movement toward secular
modernity.
A nice irony of the 1950s and 1960s intellectual zeitgeist is that al-
though a great deal of effort was being made to resist Marxist inuences
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 develop-
ment, or the faith in progress, or the search for secularism within Islamic
cultures, or the recurrent deployment of terms such as transition?
The liberal consensus of the postwar period had its own international-
ist ideologya developmental model that adapted a Marxist sense of
historical inevitability to the emergent global liberalism of the Ameri-
can century identied in Henry Luces 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 cen-
tury 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 Wests
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 lled the ideological space left by
colonialism. It suggested ways to imagine Americas place in a radically
altered postwar environment. Development was recognizably West-
ern in its basic Enlightenment dynamic, but smoothed away the sheer
supremacism that many Americans (not least gures such as FDR)
loathed in the European colonial model. Development theory also of-
fered a synoptic, technocratic model of geopolitics. Both postcolonial
and broadly progressive, development theory offered a systems analy-
sis model of international affairs. It would supersede in its logic and
predictive capability earlier U.S. models of foreign policy that some his-
torians have characterized as marked by inconsistency and a certain ir-
rationality.
41
Development also offered a model of political economy to
set against the internationalist claims of the Eastern bloc: liberal devel-
opment replaces international socialism. James E. Cronin observes that
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 mod-
ern 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 capi-
talism 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) nonethe-
less claimed universalism.
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 in-
ternationalized 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 Willkies One World (1943).
Willkie, the Republican presidential candidate in 1940, envisaged an
emergent sense of global solidarityone world. His book was widely
translated and became a bestseller with 4.5 million copies sold.
43
Vari-
ous 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, Clar-
ence Streit, and the United World Federalists.
44
These gures emerged
from what Akira Iriye, in one of the very few studies of the intellec-
tual 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
community and cross-cultural contact. Iriye theorizes that in spite of
the twentieth centurys nationalist ideologies, state rivalries, and sheer
racism, a global consciousness evolved. The establishment of such or-
ganizations as unesco is one testament to a rising tide of international-
ism.
45
Reynolds, Riesman and Glazer, and Iriye all identied a speci-
cally American form of universalism that briey owered 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, north-
ern 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 Wilsons global
idealism; the Second World War, and the eventual Allied triumph, of-
fered a Second Chance to assert a worldwide liberal order. Its also
worth noting that the Woodrow Wilson Foundation produced in 1944
a pamphlet entitled Our Second Chance, where Wilsons 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 Wilsons grand project to forestall
yet further conict.
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 gures such as Richard Wright and Pearl S. Buck: the attentiveness to
the foreign, especially the foreign terrain of Africa and Asia, the liberal-
ism, the attempt to transcend military antinomies. But it is difcult not
to sense that the relative marginality of these gures as thinkers about
globalism is in some ways the result of liberal internationalisms 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
The chapters in this study form an interlocking synoptic account of
postwar internationalism. Throughout, we see American writers rep-
resenting 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 Bowless unduly neglected study of mystic Islam and decoloni-
zation, The Spiders House. In the fourth chapter, the web is widened
further, to incorporate Pearl Buck and what has been termed the sen-
timental imperialism of U.S. commitments in East Asia; that chapter
concentrates on Bucks 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 Wrights The Color Curtain and texts by Gunnar Myrdal and
John Dos Passos. The sixth chapter then investigates U.S. travel writ-
ing 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 gures such as Malinowski and Lvi-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 pres-
ence is encountered and often remade, either through Wrights ironic
revisioning of Spain (chapter 7) or through the insertion of American
agentsapostles of modernityinto regions now undergoing decolo-
nization and the vanishing of the Europeans. My eighth chapter un-
covers these motifs in Burdick and Lederers iconic ction, The Ugly
American, and places alongside that book other ugly Americans from
works by Ernest Hemingway and Saul Bellow. And in a nal essay, I
carry the argument forward into the 1990s and the twenty-rst century,
in an account of how Richard Powers and Don DeLillo have recong-
ured foreign affairs and the gure of the American cosmopolitan. My
concern throughout has been to respond to the global multiplicity of
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 Xs late talks on American power, Sontags Trip to
Hanoi and Don De Lillos 9/11 elegy, In the Ruins of the Future.
Few Americans have looked at an Asian or African country without

reecting (and commenting) on the favorable effect a little American
ambition would have. John Kenneth Galbraith, Economic Devel-
opment (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 exploi-
tation 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 res before the First World War; the European con-
ict represented the return of international rivalries to the metropolitan
center. Although he would later inect this analysis, Du Bois remained
a keen advocate of a materialist internationalism that saw colonial ex-
pansion 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. Exam-
ining Du Bois, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin intertextually, one
sees how literary internationalism evolves across and between writers,
The Skin Game
Du Bois, Wright, Malcolm X, Baldwin
2
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
dened as inferior those races such as Arabs, Africans, East Indians,
and African Americans who were unable to free themselves from colo-
nial 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 con-
tinued to develop his materialist globalism. In The Realities in Africa:
European Prot or Negro Development (1943) he declared that the
primary reality of imperialism in Africa today is economic (note Du
Boiss very specic usage of the term Negro Development to oppose
European Prot). Its worth quoting an extended passage of this in-
ternationalist critique:
The fact is that so far as government investment is concerned, the
money which Great Britain, France, Portugal and Germany as gov-
ernments 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
The Skin Game 29
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 coun-
try are sold at monopoly prices. The prots 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 im-
mense. That, very briey, 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 govern-
ment was expanding imperially while campaigning against slavery. Du
Bois identies 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 protable
investment.
5
So the Western government creates networks (of politi-
cal 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 Boiss account of the Second World Wars origins extended
these arguments. Now colonialist conict shifted to Asia, to competi-
tion for new resources; and Japan entered the game. Running alongside
this critique, Du Bois developed a thesis emphasizing the formative im-
pact of race ideology on world politics. Prospect of a World without
Race Conict (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 paral-
lel to his trenchant materialist hypotheses, that is, Du Bois examined
racisms social psychology and ideological structures. The supertrag-
edy of the Holocaust and Anglo-American race philosophy showed
the way the world was going: The philosophy of biological race dif-
ferences 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-
30 The Skin Game
out Race Conict 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 systems deep
structures. His sense that postwar planning omitted an analysis of
race seems broadly correct. As the State Departments own minutes
demonstrate, government research was trained on Europe and East
Asia and remained broadly Eurocentric, even if the 1941 Atlantic Char-
ter had supported political self-determination on a global scale. Africa
merited a mere ve indexed references in the massive digest of wartime
preparations for the postconict world.
7
President Roosevelt might
have registered his opposition to British imperialism while visiting West
Africa in 1943, but his administrations planning implicitly accepted
European spheres of inuence 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 conicts that would eventually
erupt in Vietnam and the Middle East: The greatest and most danger-
ous 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 fac-
tor, Du Bois wove colonialism into his readings of the post-1945 situation
(while gures such as Daniel Lerner read out colonialisms 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 Boiss career, and his early experience of late Vic-
torian and Edwardian Europe, were signicant; European empires pro-
vided the rst and formative grounding for his global analysis. Europe
remained central to his thought, even when the United Statess rise to
globalism was helping to de-center the continents power.
The Skin Game 31
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 interna-
tional order. Du Bois then assaulted the system fashioned by the allies,
repeatedly attacking Anglo-American internationalism because it paid
insufcient attention to the colonial heritage. The postwar system, he
felt, was tacitly complicit with racist ideology. In his rst chapter, he
discussed the Dumbarton Oaks Conference of AugustOctober 1944,
which helped establish the United Nations. For Du Bois, Dumbarton
Oaks overlooked China and reinstated a white Euro-American hege-
mony: 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 effec-
tive assertion of this right will depend upon the long and difcult path
which the reorganization of China and the rebuilding of her culture
will surely demand.
11
He saw that with a Security Council member-
ship 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 conguration, 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 Chinas geopolitical sig-
nicance (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
worlds grip on global power. At hegemonys heart were colonies: Col-
onies 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 argumenta-
tive stance remained a conation of economic analysis and social psy-
chology, Du Bois now moved toward a cultural account of primitive
peoples: Perhaps the greatest disaster that the colonial system has
32 The Skin Game
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 culturethe fact that
in many respects these ways of living have solved social difculties bet-
ter than civilized lands have been able to do.
14
At such moments Du Bois foregrounds a form of cultural relativ-
ism to stake a claim for primitive culture over civilized lands. Cru-
cially, 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 colo-
nial 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 primitives innate
cultural value, but he remains rooted in what was a form of pre-postco-
lonial 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 Boiss 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 for-
mula 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 com-
parison between racism at home and racism abroad. The naacp posi-
tion, 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
The Skin Game 33
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 Boiss readings of the colony so as to
contextualize the development theory discussed in chapter 1. A counter-
tradition or counternarrative can be placed against mainstream develop-
ment 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 ofcial language of America as it moved
toward global center; the African American critique is the hecklers voice
that mistrusts this ofcial language of progress. This critique had its foun-
dation in Du Boiss early reections 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 in-
creasing integration of global cultures (of which empire was both symp-
tom 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 count-
less 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 rst 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-
34 The Skin Game
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 en-
ables an evaluation of how this one standard is deformed or neglected.
For Du Bois, this global integration of societies could only reveal empires
oppressions.
19
Wright in West Africa
Richard Wright developed this form of analysis in his 1950s travel writ-
ing. On the ground in West Africa at the moment of decolonization,
Wright used a similar compound of materialist analysis and social-psy-
chological readings of racism to cut through the rhetoric surrounding
empire. Du Boiss essays on colonialism, empire, and the postwar world
provide an immediate and telling context for Wrights major study of
Africa, Black Power (1954). Wright and Du Bois form a pair of interlock-
ing 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 Fanons work.
Nonetheless, Black Powernot to mention Wrights broader response
to Africaappeared to Du Bois himself to be less a critique of the West
than one of its authors recurrent betrayals of origin. Wright had known
Du Bois since the days of Native Son; but the two gures seemed to
move toward divergent positions regarding Africa. Du Bois disliked
Wrights 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 defend-
ing. Wright had betrayed the Left: I dont like Wright. The Commu-
nists of America started him on his career.
20
Wright has also had a bad reception among African critics, some
of whom share Du Boiss sense of betrayal. His refashioning of exis-
tentialism to create a philosophy of the outsider seemed to smack
too much of good old American individualism; and his willingness to
The Skin Game 35
imagine a black American identity suggested a racial identity sacriced
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 re-
mains attached psychologically and ideologically after he has dabbled
into communism and after his self-exile in Paris.
21
In Kwame Anthony
Appiahs 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 Com-
munist Party in the early 1940s. In contributing to Richard Crossmans
collection of essays on the failure of Marxist Communism, The God
That Failed (1949), he then joined the vital center of the anticommu-
nist and postcommunist liberal consensus occupied by gures 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 con-
siderable work of modied Marxist analysis.
In Black Power a midcentury American internationalist, now dis-
tanced from the Communist Party but shaped by Marxism, tests theory
against history. Wrights travels in Spain, Africa, and Indonesia pro-
duced books where the personal encounter between the black Ameri-
can 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 trav-
eler directly encounters otherness. Wright grounds an economic and
political critique in a humanists receptivity to personal encounter and
conversation; the text foregrounds particularized and detailed but theo-
retically 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,
36 The Skin Game
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, ashlights, combs,
nail les, talcum powder, locks, and cheaply framed photos of Holly-
wood movie stars. . . . I was astonished to nd 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 markets teeming textures. But look at how the scene
closes, with a question (Was it a lack of capital?) about the markets
formation. In West Africa a raw, unmediated capitalism appears. The
problem is not that Africa is insufciently capitalist but that its capi-
talism is too chaotic; Wrights admiration for a planned Soviet-style
economy is mirrored by evident distaste when faced by frantic ex-
change: Everything is on sale: chickens, sheep, cows, and goats; cheap
European goodsrazor blades, beds, black iron pots three feet in di-
ameternestle 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 Wrights analysis turns on the continents anarchic
hypercapitalism. Wright remained enough of a leftist to call for govern-
ment 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 capital-
ism does. Human intercourse is a frenzy of buying and selling; every-
thing has a price; foresight and regularity are sacriced to immediate
nancial reward. These street scenes imply there is something typically
African in these markets but also that this is a highly distinctive for-
The Skin Game 37
mation of capitalism created by British imperialism.
25
At the cultures
base he discovers a market produced, in fact, by imperialisms deforma-
tions. The processes of economic circulation within the colonial system
have led to this madness:
26
Perhaps it can be partly explained by the manner in which British
rms ship their products to the Gold Coast. The British exporting
rm generally deals through a certain one rm; that rm in turn sells
to another, and that rm to yet another. . . . An African mammy
nally 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 prot to each
hand through which it passes. One made a prot by selling a piece of
a piece of a piece of cloth, which he considered one of the most pa-
thetic sights of the Gold Coast (112). Faced with an imperial economic
hegemony, the individual African can only make a prot by breaking
into the logistical chain and dividing up the few goods available. There
is barely a productive base to the economy; instead, commercial circu-
lation and exchange have become parodies of themselves, as goods are
chopped into tinier and tinier pieces for each vendor to take a share.
Its 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 nally shows that
colonialisms degradations have penetrated further to become woven
into the post-colonys social psychology. Wright is at his most Fanon-
like when he evaluates the colonized subjects 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 signicance to the lives of these people. And so, today
38 The Skin Game
the ruins of their former culture, no matter how cruel and barbarous it
may seem to us, are reected 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 ght 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 decolo-
nization of the mind, but the paragraph ends instead with a pessimistic
sense that even with decolonization, the real war was over and lost for-
ever! (153) Wrights sensitivity to historys shaping power here backs
him into an acceptance of psychosocial determinism. Nonetheless, for a
writer grounded in traditionally materialist analysis with political econ-
omy at its center, this paragraph breaks new ground by adding mordant
psychological critique to the lexicon. While development theory pos-
ited 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 colonialisms
radioactive half-life. Commentators such as Daniel Lerner posited a dif-
cult but ultimately successful passing into modernity, but Wright
moved toward the conclusion that the real war was over and lost for-
ever because colonialism had become internalized.
In its synthesis of denunciatory anticolonialism and a postcolonial
account of psychological depredation, Wrights analysis was moving
in parallel to the work of Frantz Fanon. Fanons Les Damns 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 Car-
michael 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 Wrights text to the circulation of Fanons
The Skin Game 39
ideas in America. Ironically, though, Fanon and Wright had both spo-
ken at the 1956 Paris Congress of Black Writers and Artists where,
in the words of one biographer, Fanons 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 commenta-
tor has identied 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 fam-
ily 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 anticolonialismeven if (and this is the fundamental dif-
ference between Wright and Fanon) Black Power failed nally 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 mans regard for Ghanas Kwame
Nkrumah. For Du Bois, Nkrumah was the authentic African Marx-
ist and empires foe; for Wright, Nkrumah was the supreme pragma-
tist 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 es-
tablishment accounts of the Ghanaian prime minister and president.
The leaders plans for the rapid modernization of his country made
Nkrumah a thorn in the U.S. side, observes Michael Hunt. John Ken-
nedy complained that he was unnecessarily difcult despite American
patience and economic assistance, while the U.S. ambassador in Accra
offered the president a thumbnail sketch as a badly confused and im-
mature person.
33
The foreign policy establishment was alarmed by
Nkrumahs modernization project, and in calling him immature ef-
40 The Skin Game
fectively accused him of being insufciently developed as a person-
ality (as so often in these arguments, languages of social and psycho-
logical development cross and merge). Nkrumahs own analyses of the
African political economy, notably Neo-Colonialism (1965), were any-
thing 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 atly assertive denition 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 under-
stand development (as ideology and historical process) as it unfolded
at the moment of decolonization. Black Power is a study of develop-
ment in action, and also a close reading of Nkrumahs project. In or-
der to interpret development as it unfolds in the present, Wright has
to reach back into the history of colony and empire. Here, Wrights
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 ourish, including that of resis-
tance 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 as-
sumption that stood in the way of their seeing what was actually tak-
ing 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 Pas-
soss Brazil on the Move), Africa was moving (289). At his subtlest,
Wright had a ne sense of historical change: an awareness that led
him to pinpoint the crux where the permanence of a political forma-
tion is being melted down into its opposite.
The Skin Game 41
Marginal Man
To operate their mines, their timber concessions, and their mills, the
British had regimented African tribal life around new social and eco-
nomic poles, and the exhortation of the missionaries had slowly de-
stroyed the Africans faith in his own religion and customs, thereby cre-
ating 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, post-
colonial subject: detribalized, but uncertain of the path toward mo-
dernity. Poised on the cusp of political change, Africans ask how the de-
cisive movement into their own modernity will occur: But could this
liquid emotion be harnessed to modern techniques? (65). Liquid, not
xed: 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 signicance 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 con-
text. Stonequist, who worked alongside Robert Park at the University of
Chicago, wrote The Marginal Man (1937), a social-psychological study
of race and Culture Conict, 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; exploita-
tion sharpens the ensuing restlessness into discontent; missionary edu-
cation 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 hybrid-
ism, cosmopolitanism, and globalizationtopics often seen as the sig-
natures of late twentieth-century postmodern and postcolonial theory.
42 The Skin Game
Stonequists chapter headings anticipate contemporary preoccupa-
tions: 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 rst reading seem a curious claim, if we associate marginality with
insignicance. 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 per-
sonality. The marginal person was likely to be more alert, critical, in-
telligent, 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
Parks introduction to The Marginal Man fused insights from an-
thropology, sociology, and psychology into an account of identity and
community in the age of globalization. He stressed the markets sig-
nicance, 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 intel-
lectual life has prospered and local tribal cultures have been progres-
sively 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 market-
driven. This, in miniature, encapsulates a distinctively liberal, progres-
sive model of geopolitical development.
There is a pattern of argument that recurs in these midcentury anal-
yses 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 Wests electrifying
The Skin Game 43
impact on the globe as the driver for revolutions within other societies
and, most importantly, within the non-Western subject. He was fasci-
nated by this Westernized newness as it manifested itself in other so-
cieties, other selves. His analysiss foundation was an early model of
globalization theory. Migration is now a world-wide condition; cul-
ture 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 non-
Western self undergoes transition upwards and adjustment towards
the West. The process is uid but the transitions overall direction is
evident; the West does not adjust to the rest. Stonequist remains con-
vinced of the Wests supremacy. He argued for a pragmatic recognition
of the Wests 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 summa-
rized his friends 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 inter-
penetration of peoples and a fusion of cultures. Incidentally it has
produced, at certain times and under certain conditions, a person-
ality 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
44 The Skin Game
[i.e., the African] restricted to the traditional pathways of his ancestors:
new opportunities and experiences in conict with older compulsions
function to detribalize and individualize his attitudes and behavior.
42
Stonequists text drove inexorably toward midcentury global progres-
sivism. 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 con-
ditioned 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 conicts in new directions so that racial and national senti-
ments will automatically weaken.
43
Its out of the meeting between so-
cial theory and the travelers 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 Powers sentences end in question marks or
in those discontinuities and ellipses that repeatedly punctuate Wrights
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 writers 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
toas 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 dis-
continuous and experimental works on Africa. In a recent inuential ac-
count of writing and ethnography, James Clifford identies the fruitful in-
teraction 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
The Skin Game 45
established ethnographic discourses. As writers brought collage and jux-
taposition 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 con-
tinuous, describable empirically or through induction.
44
In a study of
Michel Leiriss LAfrique Fantme (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 in-
completion 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, s-
sured by ellipses, shifts in perspectives, unanswered questions, contra-
dictions, and riddles. So is Black Power an American version of Leiriss
ethnographic surrealism? Perhaps. But one might also see Black Power
as an instance, a very American instance, of a different form: a prag-
matist ethnography. In place of the discursive demarche into a new
territory of writing, the pragmatist traveler enters a series of encoun-
ters where preconceptions are tested and reformulated. The writing of
the encounter is open-ended and exible (hence the interruptions and
ellipses that mark Wrights paragraphs), but also democratic and ac-
cessible (Wrights 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 com-
plexities. Travel becomes a pragmatic act where theory and experience
combine and recombine to produce exible, 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
Wrights pragmatism. He remains convinced that Africa must industri-
alizefast. Wrights own life-story, with its move from Southern poverty
to industrial Chicago, underwrote his sense that progress equaled in-
dustry. Wright thinks of himself in terms of where he is on the scale of
46 The Skin Game
development; one hears in these declarations a man who escaped from
Mississippis 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 identied by Stonequist, West-
ern and industrialized but also (because detribalized in his own
idiosyncratic way) disinherited. Stonequists language of psychologi-
cal transition and social evolution became the way for Wright to imagine
his own life. From that experience he took the lesson that industrializa-
tion was the driver of economic and political development. This is one
biographical explanation for Black Powers almost fetishistic interest in
seeking out signs of industry. Again one notes the rmly materialist cast
of Wrights 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 in-
dustrialize quickly; but a salutary disappointment occurs when Wright
recognizes the Gold Coasts intimidating climactic conditionsit will,
quite simply, be impossible to transplant a progressive Western indus-
trial model into this heat and stiing 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 Wrights liberalism or his political apostasy often
concentrate (as we saw in Sekyi-Otus critique) on somewhat invidious
comparisons between one gure 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 scholars jobs; but
discriminations might at times obscure or suppress the very real intel-
lectual communality and shared argumentation within a nexus of writ-
ers. One of my contentions in this chapter is that there was a strongly
genealogical linkage between gures 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 gures
The Skin Game 47
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 confer-
ral of intellectual authority.
Malcolm X and James Baldwin as Tourists
It is therefore telling that Malcolm Xs internationalism, as he devel-
oped it in the conversations with Alex Haley that formed The Autobiog-
raphy 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 anticolo-
nial struggle (notably, Gandhis 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 supe-
riority (and Wright wrote back to this notion by representing Catholic
Spain as pagan in its primeval spiritualism). Malcolm also saw the as-
sociation 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 oppor-
tunist who religiously . . . branded heathen and pagan labels upon
ancient non-white cultures and civilizations.
46
Malcolms excoriation
of white power saw empire as a compound of sheer racism, material-
ist exploitation, and brutal internationalist Realpolitik. At such points
Malcolm inected and heightened argumentative positions established
by Du Bois and Wright. He shared Wrights 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, Malcolms attentiveness to Chinas signicance echoes
Du Boiss interest in Asia; he sensed that white powers relentless drive
would focus on China, and that China would become the site of in-
creasing dread within the Western imagination. The Chinese, in fact,
were now the center of the collective white mans fear and tension.
48
48 The Skin Game
The richness of the African American counternarrative lay in its
potential for rewriting from within. Each gure afrms the validity of
Du Boiss originating paradigm by inecting the analysis, modifying
it in the light of new developments. Malcolm X modied 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 develop-
ing nations unreasonable demands. They were playing a game of griev-
ance 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
linesan alliance among the non-white nations. Americas U.N. Am-
bassador Adlai Stevenson complained not long ago that in the United
Nations a skin game was being played. He was right. He was facing re-
ality. A skin game is being played. But Ambassador Stevenson sounded
like Jesse James accusing the marshal of carrying a gun. Because who in
the worlds history ever has played a worse skin game than the white
man?
49
This is Malcolm speaking back, not writing back: the decon-
structive snap of the allegation reverses and mocks the original point.
Its power rests in the immediate, performative nature of the accusation,
and in Malcolms 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 faiths color-
blindness. 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 reections on for-
eign affairs also sound at times like the reections of a classic cultural
internationalist. Though his diary account of the trips to Africa went
missing after his death, its 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 Malcolms recogni-
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 Malcolms ideology. Some of the
Autobiographys most excited sentences center on travel and its de-
lights. There is an almost nave 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 re-
fashion himself as a liberal internationalist. For this, surely, is what he
is becoming: pluralist, cosmopolitan, prepared to be surprised and re-
made by the experience of travel.
As Malcolms mockery of Adlai Stevenson made clear, one Afri-
can American argument against the international system was that it
amounted to nothing more than globalized racism. Its important not
to underestimate the sheer longevity and foundational signicance 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 interna-
tionalized racism is the discourses 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 conict (195462) and reected on the fate of French
colonialism, Vietnam, and the ongoing Civil Rights struggle. His peri-
patetic journeys were tied together by Malcolms skin game. Baldwin
underwrote his scalding commentary, a loose-limbed interweaving of
essays on common themes, with an awareness of linkages between vari-
ous kinds of colony. Written in the latter stages of the Vietnam conict,
No Name in the Street attacks the domestic deformations created by
the battle for Algiers and turns back to the position of African Ameri-
cans in the United States. This is comparative, internationalist work.
Baldwins expatriate life (repeatedly seen in the hotel rooms, speaking
50 The Skin Game
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 Repub-
lic; 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 rst 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 (Bald-
win as a participant-observer in the European eld), he sensed that the
French had internalized empires 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 empirefor 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 economys margin: the Algerians
with their peanuts and rugs. History has moved on from Black Power:
corrosive, bitter postimperial anger infects the police. While Wright ex-
plored 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 revi-
sion of the individual identity in the metropolitan culture.
54
No Name in the Street interweaves memoir, travelogue, political com-
mentary, and prophecy into a compelling account of various streets in
Europe and America. In Baldwins transatlantic account, the street is in-
The Skin Game 51
creasingly a place where police coercion, white supremacism, and post-
imperial angst collude to create a vicious racism. The title, derived from
the book of Job, is melodramatic, but Baldwin sees midcentury trans-
atlantic 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, volu (evolved or developed): Le noir Amri-
cain est trs volu, 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 exhibit-
ing that language for ironic effect: What has passed for dialogue has
usually involved one of our niggers, or, say, an volu from Dakar. The
evolved, or civilized one is almost always somewhere educated by, and
for, France (38182). But on the streets of Paris, or of Watts, the devel-
opmental index (of becoming volu) matters less than simple differ-
ence: of being dark-skinned, the subject of suspicion, and worse. Bald-
win also worked with Wrights 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 Wests ingrained
racism, its ercest critic. Four hundred years in the West had certainly
turned me into a Westernerthere 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 West-
erner who has not been bleached. Without having to state explicitly
that this is the internal colony, he represents a parched and impover-
ished landscape that appears consciously African in its desolation.
The land seems nearly to weep beneath the burden of this civiliza-
tions unnameable excrescences. The people and the children wan-
der 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-
52 The Skin Game
tles, earrings ashing 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 reect 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 Pratts formula-
tion: 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 conict.
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 buy-
ing 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 signicances. Baldwins ickering, staccato im-
ages represent one way to create an American street where the markets
traced by Wright and Baldwin himself have become a blurred, helter-
skelter consumerism seen from the windows of a car or train. Writing
about Paris a decade earlier, Baldwin had located contact as the cen-
ter of expatriate experienceand 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 hu-
man 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 nds 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 trans-
mutes into a phantasmagoric, nomadic consumerism.
In Baldwins writing contact is the essence of travel, and at its best
The Skin Game 53
such contact seems to become amalgamated with a sense of erotic or
romantic possibility as one moves across cultures. But the world is be-
coming less welcoming in those terms in No Name in the Street. Bald-
win nds that in his hometown, New York, human contact was en-
dangered 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 be-
ing 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 congu-
rations of unease (at best) or terror (at worst) are less important in Bald-
win than the general, sobering curve of human expectation downwards:
from human connection to fear and violence.
Baldwins analysis is an evolutionary advance upon, or an adaptation
of, Richard Wrights critique of the colony. Baldwin preserves Wrights
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 colonialisms impact on the self. Baldwins
writing can be read in an archaeological way, as its discursive layers re-
veal the intellectual movement through a series of positions: the urban
evangelist; the neo-Marxist; the liberal; the existential analyst of the in-
dividual response to oppression. The irony of Baldwins 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
inections and connotations. Du Bois, Wright, and Baldwin showed
that the international theme in their analysis of the color line in Amer-
ica could also, in and of itself, be a powerful tool for an examination of
state power, imperialism, colonialism, and racism.
The fascination and importance of Paul Bowless work lies in its catho-
lic encompassing of a range of discourses that frame the encounter be-
tween 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. Bowless career was instead a varied work-
in-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 Spiders House, Bowles dis-
cussed the politics of writing and his reading of the postcolonial mo-
ment in Morocco. Long resident in North Africa, Bowles explicitly
addressed the politics of decolonization and the end of the French pro-
tectorate: For more than two decades I had been waiting to see the end
of French rule in Morocco.
2
Bowless 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
You were in on the last days of Morocco
Paul Bowles and the End of Empire
3
56 You were in on the last days
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 gured 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 Bowless recognition of the modernity of the nationalist move-
ment as an accident. Bowless 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 transforma-
tion (all quotations from the preface, no page reference).
3
The Spiders 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 Spiders 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 him-
self takes on the role of Stenham.
4
Bischoff agrantly neglects the usual
interpretative injunction to keep author and character clearly separated.
But the preface to The Spiders House suggests that Bischoff is right:
there is indeed a strong correspondence between author and character.
Stenhams meditations are often congruent with Bowless own state-
ments on Morocco and the West. In a conversation with Millicent Dil-
lon, Bowles acknowledged that Stenhams loss of faith in Marxism par-
alleled his own political disillusionment. Indeed, Dillon insisted in their
dialogue, in many ways Stenhams 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 mo-
dernity or progress. And like Stenham, Bowles seems at rst to be a clas-
sic Orientalist, although one at pains to develop a highly idiosyncratic
vision of what he as a Westerner makes of Maghrebi culture.
You were in on the last days 57
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 inten-
tion 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 Spiders
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 texta novel the author himself handles at a distance, us-
ing 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 Sten-
ham, it was a political thing, and politics exist only on paper (10).
Stenhams interests mainly focus on the look and feel of Fez, its bril-
liantly archaic architecture, and on the distinctiveness of the Moroc-
can people. Stenhams 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 in-
sightful reading of Morocco; Bowles represents the expatriate experi-
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 reects: 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 mans 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 Sten-
ham 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 novels early stages by a form
of epistemological competition between the novels characters as to who
has understood more of this strange place. The end of the French pro-
tectorate 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 wasor
isinevitably 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 Bowless version of a typical gure in the lit-
erature of colonization: the Westerner who legitimizes the colony as nec-
essary agent of modernization and progress. One of the earliest American
texts about Morocco, Edith Whartons In Morocco (1920), had occupied
just such an ideological position, offering in Frederick Wegeners words
an unabashedly partisan testament to the virtues of the French protec-
torate.
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 condi-
tion (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 inuence as a necessary agent to advance
North Africa into modernity. Anticolonial nationalists would have their
own version of transition and would position autonomous postcolonial
governments are the motors for such change. Thus this argument about
understanding a putatively essential national identity has become a
subtle debate about politics. Bowless use of the term transition draws
this background ideology into the text, allowing The Spiders House to
engage with the postcolonial moment in Morocco, even though the text
is ostensibly foregrounding the more mundane detail of the everyday re-
lationships 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 nd 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 refer-
ence). This comment complements Bowless 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 achieve-
ments of the West. Elghandor felt that Bowless ctionalized 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 Moroccos best interests. Bowless reply deployed hybridism
as a reason to reject the Westernization project: The result would be
that people would be neither Moroccan nor Europeanin between. He
continued, Thats not a very good situation. Theyre not sure which
culture they really belong to. Its 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. Im a tourist, he noted. A tourist never becomes part
of a society hes visiting. So I know that Im an American, but I dont like
America. I never go there. I havent been there in 26 years, and I hope
never to go again. Thats enough. I mean I was born in New York and
brought up there, and the city has gone completely to pieces. It would
be better if it didnt exist at all, and a nice atom bomb would nish 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 posi-
tions. There is the jaunty, brazen offensiveness; the somewhat self-regard-
ing 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. Dur-
ing 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 refuta-
tion: 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 nancial benets of expatriatism.
13
Stenham embodies this struggle, and The Spiders House elds ex-
tended debates about how Westerners relate to and represent the non-
Western world. In Bowless ctions of North Africa the mystery, enigma,
and strangeness of the Maghreb are exhaustively foregrounded, as if to
offset the objection (clearly preying on Bowless mind) that wealth po-
sitions the expatriate writer as nothing more than a privileged tourist.
Again we notice how Gellners acute period of the crisis in Morocco
becomes for Bowles an individualized crisis about the American writer-
expatriates authenticity. One of Stenhams defensive strategies is to
characterize himself as an ascetic; he is a man for whom travels 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 dilettantisma rich
mans 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 isnt a gourmet or a he-
donist; but neither is he positioned within the political spectrum cre-
ated 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 sympa-
thize were those who remained outside the struggle: the Berber peas-
ants, 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 Stenhams
politics of disengagement. In 1930 the French had issued the Dahir
Berbre, a decree that regulated the pacied Berber territories; Ernest
Gellner notes: Its essence was to offer these areas the option of remain-
ing 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 states Islamic law. Gellner crisply summarizes the Berber
decrees impact on anticolonial nationalism: It equally offended emer-
gent modern nationalist feeling by exemplifying a policy of divide and
rule, and attempting to alienate the Berbers from the rest of Morocco.
Stenhams comment, in other words, is historically inaccurate: the Ber-
bers were bound up with the politics of French colonization, and in
truth they symbolized the tensions between French rule and native re-
ligious law. What Gellner will elsewhere call the ice box surrounding
the Berbersthe French political decreeproduced the isolation Sten-
ham 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 national-
ist 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 scrip-
turalist, Allal Al-Fassi, launched, in the name of an insulted Islam, the
rst mass movement for independencethe aforementioned National
Action Bloc. Protests and demonstrations quickly spread through the
country. Geertz characterizes the period as the high tide of scriptur-
alist 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 thisStenhams or Bowless? Has Bowless char-
acterization let him down? Or has the author of what is at heart a work
of ctionalized political history failed to do his homework? Again, it
seems highly unlikely that Bowles himself was ignorant of his adopted
countrys 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 nished, I found that I had written a po-
litical book which deplored the attitudes of both the French and the
Moroccans. Much later Allal el Fassi, the father of Moroccan national-
ism, 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 Geertzs commentary, above,
and in my ensuing discussion). So the novel presents an extraordinary
interpretive conundrum, where the text gains approval from a major
political gure 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 perti-
nent because, as John P. Entelis argues, Al-Fassi was associated with a
specic ideological position. He was one of the traditionalists who
called for a reafrmation of national, cultural, and religious integrity
in the face of Western colonial domination. Hence this group of anti-
colonialists celebrated Islamic heritage and Arabism, and dened the
colonial situation in essentially spiritual and cultural terms.
16
His en-
dorsement of The Spiders 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
Bowless narrative?
Stenhams dilemma is that Moroccan politics ow into his elabo-
rately 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, Moroccos 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.
Stenhams magical, mystical place becomes contaminated by the bacil-
lus 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 Moroccos recent past, and
particularly to the independence struggle. The political subtext of The
Spiders House develops a reading of premodern Moroccos purity,
a reading founded on Bowless 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 in-
violate 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 chap-
ter 18 Stenham and the novels female protagonist, Polly Burroughs,
discuss Moroccos primitivism. He develops a theory of Islamic envi-
ronment by noting that Moroccans need a sense of refuge and prefer to
sit within enclosed spaces. For Stenham, this is because they nd the
whole world outside is hostile and dangerous (186). They cant be
that primitive, she objected (186). For Stenham, a man fond of the me-
dina, of enclosed courtyards and of the separate legal-cultural space of
Berber life, a yearning for enclosure and refuge reects an admirable
desire for sanctuary or purity. The other point about such places is
that they incarnate physical, geographical resistance to the hybridiza-
tion Bowles castigated in his 1994 interview. These spaces are resistant
and nonpermeable. Polly laments that there isnt even a window in the
room: Wouldnt you think that with this fantastic view outside theyd
have at least some sort of peep-hole, instead of shutting themselves into
a cell this way? (186). Its precisely this impermeability that fascinates
Stenham, incarnating his ideals of the inviolate. It seems to me very tell-
ing that at this point, after reecting on the windowless room, Stenham
makes his most outspoken defense of the pure country: When I
rst came here it was a pure country. There was music and dancing
and magic every day in the streets. Now its nished, 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! (18788). Morocco is the ultimate
pure country for Stenhaman anthropologists paradise, what with
its magic every day in the streets. His comment is, for him, unusu-
ally passionate: a cri de coeur about cultural loss. Modernity taints the
magical society. European inuence is regrettable because it destroys
the intact ancient society, a simple cultures admirably regressive au-
thenticity. 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 anthropo-
logical eldwork.
17
Stenham becomes the anthropologist in extremis,
a Westerner who wants to dwell forever in a foreign closed space, the
viewer transxed (in Saids phrase) by the Orients paradigmatic fos-
silization.
18
Bowless North African ctions, with their quasi-anthropologi-
cal discourse and recurrent fascination with the primitive and ritual-
istic, enter into dialogue with a group of anthropologists whose work
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 cri-
tiques Bowless 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 premod-
ern 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 develop-
ment 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 nd a coun-
try bordered by the French colony of Algeria that was an insulated
society.
19
Bowless 1975 comment on Tangier echoes Gellners sense
of insulation. Its changed less than the rest of the world, he told Dan-
iel Halpern, Its a pocket outside the mainstream. After youve been
over to Europe, for instance, for a few days or a few weeks, and you
come back here, you immediately feel youve left the stream, that noth-
ing is going to happen here.
20
A central dialectic in Bowless work is between this sense of Mo-
rocco 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, Bowless historical representation is complex and
layered. One place to nd these traces is in the inadvertent, scene-set-
ting descriptions of Moroccan life that pepper the text. Bowless de-
lineations of these shops and markets and cafes create the texts politi-
cal unconscious. Though Stenham argued for the purity of an earlier
civilization, the street scenes develop images of a society in transition.
Rather than monolithic representations of Morocco, glancing images of
the street culture reveal pluralism and hybriditya mosaic:
He watched the people crowding onto the bus: a Berber in a saffron-
colored 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, con-
sidered almost seditious, by the Moslems), an Arab woman wearing
a haik, in whom Amar thought he discerned a prostitute from the
quartier rserv, 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, re-
ligious and linguistic difference. Its a vivid scene, full of color and life; but
more importantly, it is marked by variegationMorocco 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 de-
scendants of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain). Moroccos 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 inuence 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 Spiders House develops two discourses to read Morocco. On the
one hand, overt and relatively straightforward discussions between the
Western expatriates about what the meaning of Morocco might be.
Hence Stenhams claims for the magic of the old Fez; thus Mosss sym-
pathy 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 power-
ful 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 discoursewhat I want to call an encoded annotation of
typical Fez scenesis 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 histori-
cal 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 rst images of Coca-Col-
onization in American ction. The iconography is precise: the back-
ground 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 Westernizationthe economic im-
perialism of the United States. Sandbags surround the caf, but direct
French colonialism will be supplanted by a powerful if apparently less
overt form of Western hegemony. At such moments The Spiders 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
beneath (303). Note the neatness of Bowless 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 girls bare esh 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
Bowless scene setting seems to conrm the acerbic diagnosis made
by one of the nationalists. The recognition that the postcolonial mo-
ment 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 texts myriad de-
scriptions of the American scene seem to imply. Stenham earlier imag-
ined 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 serpents
eye (21718). There are two images of the serpent superimposed upon
one another. Stenhams thought, rendered in the free indirect discourse
that is the novels 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 nar-
rative rhyme as the image is repeated at two stages in the text. The
image is also transformed or inected; 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 clich. Bowles has located a linguistic embodiment of a larger
historical transition in Moroccan development. For Stenham, a ction-
alized Orientalist, the countrys exoticism nds a verbal equivalent in
an uninected 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 novels dynamism. Stenham might be the principal gure in The
Spiders House, but considerable portions of the narrative are dedicated
to this young Islamic mystic. The daring representational dilemma at
the novels center is this: how can I represent, and more specically 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
gure, 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 gure or marginal
man who sits on the border between tradition and modernity. Instead
he represents one of Bowless recurrent attempts to imagine what forms
traditionspecically religious traditionmight take in a world pass-
ing into modernity. He is the son of Si Driss; his family are Chorfa, de-
scendants of the prophet; his domestic life is marked by his fathers
erce insistence on teaching him the laws of their religion (19). The
family is apolitical, its concerns private and mystical rather than secu-
lar-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 worlds sight, and
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 medita-
tions turn on mysticism and on healing powers. But Bowles also de-
ploys Amar to explore the politics of Moroccan decolonization. Amar,
embodiment of mystical Islam, is a political naf, 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 supercially simple character, a
naf through whose picaresque adventures the author reveals a societys
deep structures. Amars 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, vision-
ary language: He wanted to see the ames 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 be-
tween 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 reects on the na-
tionalist 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). Bowless very neat geographical formula en-
capsulates the novels division between political and religious ideolo-
gies within Barbary Islambetween 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
in those primitive belief systems that denoted seductive otherness.
Amar is a character structured and informed by Bowless fascination
with early twentieth-century anthropological theory, especially ideas
of primitivism and the workings of the native mind. As a ctional
creation, he reveals a great deal about the intellectual context that in-
formed Bowless thinking about Islam and North Africa. Millicent
Dillons memoir, You Are Not I, records that Bowles had in 1945 accom-
panied his editorship of the surrealist magazine View with reading in
anthropology, including Lvi-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 Lvy-Bruhl. As Dillon writes, Lvy-Bruhls
work dealt primarily with the concepts and thought processes of vari-
ous primitive cultures.
23
The proven connection between Bowles and
an anthropologist seems especially pertinent. One can conjecture that
Bowles read Lvy-Bruhls classic early works, books he probably knew
in the original French or in the English translations that appeared in
the 1920s. Lvy-Bruhls Les Fonctions Mentales dans les Socits infri-
eures of 1910 had been translated into English as the brutally titled How
Natives Think (1926). Bowles probably also knew La Mentalit primi-
tive (1922; Primitive Mentality in the English translation of 1923). The
foundation of Lvy-Bruhls 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 in-
animate worlds. Lvy-Bruhls sense of a primitive, mystical mind in-
forms Bowless creation of Amars 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, Lvy-Bruhl renounced his concept of the pre-
logical character of the primitive mind; but Bowles seems to have main-
tained a steady interest in this anthropological-psychological model of
mysticism.
26
Millicent Dillon gives an account of how this way of think-
ing enabled the young Bowles to overcome his sense that his under-
standing of the world was inadequate for a ction 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 ow through his
hand to the pen.
27
In his idiosyncratic response to Lvy-Bruhl, Bowles
used the prelogical mind to explore the kind of unconscious or auto-
matic 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 modernisms edges.
But mysticism had a politicized signicance within the context of
Moroccan history. The Saints of Morocco were Islamic mystics who
played a signicant role in articulating resistance to the French. Clifford
Geertzs 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 dened Moroccan Islam, Is-
lam in Barbary, as basically the Islam of saint worship and moral se-
verity, magical power and aggressive piety.
28
Geertzs denition of the
marabout sheds a good deal of light on Bowless characterization of his
young protagonist, Amar. Marabout is a French rendering of the Ara-
bic murbit, which in turn derives from a root meaning to tie, bind, fas-
ten, attach, hitch, moor. A murbit 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
Geertzs reading of Maghrebi Islam places these marabouts
at the center of the culture: These men are metaphors.
30
Geertzs emphasis on the marabout was developed by later Ameri-
can anthropologists, notably Dale Eickelman in his Moroccan Islam:
Tradition and Society in a Pilgrimage Center (1976). His denition of
the marabout supplies an insightful glossary to The Spiders 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
Gods grace (baraka) to their clients. And furthermore, on the basis
of this conception, marabouts in the past have played key religious, po-
litical, and economic roles in North African society, particularly in Mo-
rocco.
31
It is worth dwelling on these accounts because they provide
a paradigm for reading The Spiders House. Anthropological character-
izations of Morocco as an intensely religious realm, where mystical mar-
abouts fostered a politics of resistance, nd an echo in Bowless ction.
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 spiritualitys resistance of European power.
Geertz eventually claimed that the colonial imperative never breached
the Moroccan self, safely cocooned in spiritual otherness. If the co-
lonial confrontation was spiritual: a clash of selves, then the colo-
nized, 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 aware-
ness 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 Spiders
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 Sten-
ham out of dependency. And yet in concrete exemplication of Geertzs
paradox, economic powerlessness sits alongside a vibrantly distinctive
spiritual individuality.
At this point a further paradox arisesand again the writings of
anthropologists and the expatriate novelists work reect back on one
another, providing mutual illumination. It is extremely difcult to dis-
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 histor-
ical phenomenon, and more an antiprogressive ction about magic and
mysticism. Certainly, Stenhams interest in Amar emerges from this dy-
namic. 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 rep-
resents 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 ev-
ery occasion, at every moment (336). Thus Stenham is fascinated with
Amar because he yearns to locate the place of purity.
Purity, in Bowless work, is usually bound together with an apoca-
lyptic sense of destruction. In The Spiders House Amars 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 exhor-
tation 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 Bowless nostalgic desire to restore an earlier stage of Mo-
roccan 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 Spiders House thus offers a contorted representational
logic, where destruction is the other side of the coin to Stenhams nos-
talgic restorationism. In this sense, the gure of Amar, however other
he might seem at rst, is in fact ultimately part and parcel of Bowless
Orientalism.
Bowless problem in this novel is that his characters are bound to-
gether by a yearning for the pure and the ideal, even though (as the
novels encoded annotations demonstrate), the text also recognizes
that historical actualities are far from pure. The result is an uneasy
encounter between idealisms (Amars mysticism; Stenhams 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 Stenhams disengage-
ment. 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 car-
ried the French money that Stenham gave him); but he remains (like
the American) an observer of activist politics rather than a participant.
In the novels nal and unsatisfactory chapter, Amar goes in search of
Stenham and Polly, only to watch them depart the increasingly danger-
ous town. Amar is then pictured as Stenhams 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 pregures 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 Bowless idiosyncratic narratives/translations: A Life Full of
Holes (1964) and For Bread Alone (1973).
34
The potential for a search-
ing 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 improve-
ment and advancement; through a friendshipoften sexualwith a
European or American, the young Maghrebi youth nds material and
social advancement.
35
The conclusion of The Spiders House also focuses on the signi-
cance 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
back to the mysticism of the maraboutic heyday; Stenham is the disci-
ple of medieval Fez. The Western aesthete can offer protection (money,
employmentforms of paternalism) to a Moroccan who incarnates tra-
ditional, 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 Stenhams relationship with Amar is -
nally cast as a symbiosis between the protector and the one who wills
his own protection. Although Bowless 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 Lvy-Bruhl) might now be seen, in Saidian terms, as Orien-
talist: disinterested anthropology had an ideological function, helping
to enforce ideas of a culture in need of Western protection.
Le Maroc disparu
Bowless representation of Morocco parallels anthropological work on
the Maghreba body of work equally concerned with Islamic mysti-
cism, 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 Geertzs students, Dale Eickelman, identied
the French ethnographic project that argued Moroccan society had
become frozen at an early stage of historical development. This na-
tion 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 fteenth century to the sev-
enteenth) had prevented Morocco from moving on. The subsequent
arresting of cultural development legitimated the actions of the co-
lons, who now envisaged themselves as protectors of an archaic world
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 Mo-
rocco. French colonial theory sometimes presented North Africa as
static from the exit of the Romans to the establishment of French con-
trol.
36
And just as Bowles had alighted on Lvy-Bruhl as his chosen
theorist to articulate ideas of primitivism and mysticism, so the archi-
tects of French colonial policy also deployed his work to justify their
own commitment to an unchanging Morocco. Eickelman suggests that
Lvy-Bruhls primitive mentality was avidly picked up by colonial
specialists on Morocco as a way of theoretically justifying their assump-
tion that Islam had such a grip on society that the minds of Moroc-
cans were collectively stocked with a xed set of images impermeable
to modication or change.
37
Eickelmans point enables us to see that Bowless immersion in Lvy-
Bruhls work, which Bowles envisaged as an escape from notions of lit-
erary realism, in fact recapitulated French colonial theory. He wanted to
position Lvy-Bruhl alongside the surrealists, to articulate a new theory
of primitive mind; but for French scholars and administrators Lvy-
Bruhl provided academic legitimacy for their colonial work. Thus, in
The Spiders House we see an author (almost in spite of himself, as he
admits in the novels 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 ritualseven
as modernity marches on and colonial economies stagnate. For Soy-
inka, Tarzanism is the pseudo-tradition.
38
Reading Soyinkas cri-
tique back into Bowless texts suggests that Soyinkas 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 modied French Oriental-
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-rst century
reader is the condence and assertive brio with which Bowles inserted
his models of primitivism into American expatriate ctions. Lvy-
Bruhls title, How Natives Think, conveys a similar tone of mastery that
now seems theoretically misguided, if not nave. 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 Spiders House a new discourse
emerged in the American writing of the Maghreb, notably in Paul
Rabinows Reections on Fieldwork in Morocco (1977). Rabinows tenta-
tive, relativist, and ironic anthropology replaces classic ethnographys
force majeure with self-aware hesitancy. His highly personal and delib-
erately informal account (reections, not the formal eldwork itself )
is a journey into nesciencenot knowing, or recognizing the limits of
ones knowledge. Clearly grounded in earlier modes of ethnography
(he begins with references to Lvi-Strauss and Geertz), Rabinow also
deploys that language of social change I explored in my rst chapter.
Early on we meet Ibrahim, a person who had blended what social sci-
entists refer to as tradition and modernity.
39
As the phrasing suggests,
Rabinows foregrounds a heightened self-reexiveness where ones
own intellectual methodology is continually questioned. Like the Rich-
ard Wright of The Color Curtain or Black Power, Rabinow is drawn to
gures 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
feeling of barely grasped meanings which had been my constant com-
panion in Morocco (148). In conclusion, he called for a very particu-
larized, historicized sense of cultural difference: Our Otherness was
not an ineffable essence, but rather the sum of difference historical ex-
periences . . . 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).
Bowless 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 nal impression left by The Spiders House is less one of a writer
critically loyal to his symbols than unwittingly loyal to symbols gen-
erated by those anthropologists Rabinow moved beyond in the 1970s.
Bowless ctions 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. Simulta-
neously, 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 Bowless registering of the competing and often contra-
dictory cultural vectors within a moment of intellectual transition. The
Spiders 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 Ameri-
can 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 politi-
cal-intellectual formation: that enmeshed structure of colonialism and
ethnography of which Stenham is, perhaps, one of the last ctional rep-
resentations.
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 at
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 con-
sciousness, 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 de-
feat 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
Sinophilia
China and the Writers
4
82 Sinophilia
In Philip Dicks 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 re-
maining 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 Al-
lies over the Nazis and, in a further twist, the Chinese nationalists vic-
tory under Chiang Kai-shek rather than Maos triumph and the loss of
China. Dicks imagined China is one typical U.S. vision of that coun-
try: China as a huge market, modernized under American commercial
tutelage. The imagined nationalist victory, and the resulting ood of
American technicians, is a good example of Dicks ability to identify the
cultures subliminal preoccupations. Elsewhere, Dicks ction features
representations of another China, an avenging militaristic state that
will eventually become a nemesis.
2
But it is this image, a counterfan-
tasy where Chinese patriots have Americanized their entire nation, that
typies one major twentieth-century representation of the Asian Other:
the dream of China as a vast project for Western modernization.
These two Chinasthe market and the nemesiscirculate through
postwar culture, engendering a constellation of representations in c-
tion, memoir, and political journalism.
3
To this day, as even a cursory
survey of foreign policy writing amply demonstrates, the dialectic has
a central signicance to commentary on the United Statess place in
the globe. Joseph Nye Jr. argues that Chinas 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 ne-
mesis. 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 preindus-
trial societies while promoting great power cooperation.
6
China be-
Sinophilia 83
came a focus for the American ideology of development. With Gods
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 imperi-
alism arose from a sense that American civilizations historical signi-
cance would be marked by Westward expansion across the American
continent, into the Pacic, 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 assump-
tions 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 diplo-
mat and analyst George Kennan looked back from the early 1980s upon
his countrys 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, benefac-
tors, and teachers of a people seen as less fortunate, and less advanced,
than ourselves.
9
Within this sentimental nexus the missionary was central. Evange-
lism 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 societ-
ies.
10
So they were, like so many of the real-life and imagined expatri-
ates 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-
84 Sinophilia
lationship, when looked at from the Chinese side, was essentially con-
tractualthus 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 ew
aircraft over Chinese cities to drop a leaet written by the philosopher
and educationalist John Dewey. Dewey had lived and lectured in China
during a prolonged stay (191921); now, with his words translated into
Mandarin, he became part of the Pacic campaign against the Japanese.
Deweys address, written at the beginning of the American Century
that had recently been announced in Henry Luces Life magazine es-
say (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 na-
tions. 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; even-
tual victory will restore to China her old and proper leadership in all
that makes for the development of the human spirit. Deweys Mes-
sage 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 ag-
gression, and elsewhere freedom from European fascism; and after the
war, Communist totalitarianism. Second, the underpinning logic of de-
velopment: China embodies the development of the human spirit.
Third, there is the embedding of freedom and development within
a context of embattlement, conict, and threat. While Dewey preserves
a classic liberal internationalism that would have appealed to Wood-
row Wilson, its important to add that this idealism is now fused with
a realist notion of international politics that stresses conict and ag-
gression. Freedom and development achieve totemic centrality not
in the aftermath of conict (as Wilsons plans for the League of Nations
had done after the Great War), but in the middle, if not the beginning, of
Sinophilia 85
conict, the start of a war. And that conict has, also, a very specic 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 Luces account of The American Cen-
tury. Luces 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 Cen-
tury 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 emergedand will
emergein the current study. An early passage name-checks Clarence
Streit and the Union Now movement I discuss in my rst chapter.
Later chapters explicitly echo the argument made by Horace Kallen
about Americas cultural-technological centrality: America is already
the intellectual, scientic and artistic capital of the world. As an alert
journalist and clever editor, Luce created an essay that adroitly synthe-
sized 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 rst time in history one world (Luce adopted the fed-
eralists globalist rhetoric), the age had become to a signicant degree
an American Century. Even as he turned his attentions to the current
conict and Europe, it was the Asian market that emergedin one tell-
ing passageas the American future: Actually, in the decades to come
Asia will be worth to us exactly zeroor else it will be worth to us four,
ve, 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 de-
velopment of an Asian empire or through European lebensraum, a ma-
86 Sinophilia
jor pundit such as Luce could imagine economic growth in the Asian
market. Luce would play a major role in inserting China into the lexi-
con of American internationalism.
14
A decade or so later, in the wake of the loss of China the State De-
partment 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 Fair-
bank, 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 Problemagain one notes the deep personalizing of rela-
tions 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 Washingtons for-
eign policy errors, while constructing a thumbnail sketch of Chinas alter-
ity. That otherness rested on the countrys 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 Commu-
nists 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 representa-
tion of China after the Long March and the Maoist Revolutionto see
how authors (largely, Sinophiles) continued to commemorate, to ex-
plore, 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 Wherrys desire to lift Shanghai
up and up? For the American journalist, China was rich terrain. Edgar
Snow (who was, ironically enough given Senator Wherrys comment
about Shanghai and Kansas City, born in Kansas City in 1905), was
probably the foremost foreign correspondent to write about China dur-
ing the 1930s. Red Star over China (1938) inaugurated that chain of jour-
nalistic reportage that encompassed Agnes Smedleys works (notably,
Sinophilia 87
the 1943 text, Battle Hymn of China) and William Hintons account of
Maoist land reform, Fanshen (1967).
17
This is a telling and idiosyncratic
literary subgenre: memoirs, ctions, and autobiographies that detail the
American presence in China. The very heterogeneity and strange dis-
parity of writers who were interested in China is telling: there is some-
thing 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 guisesas mission, dream, market,
and ultimately nemesishas created for the United States a represen-
tational special relationship. What other nation has appealed to g-
ures 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 ts neatly into the development
eras sense of an expanding globe; and this is the trilogys most global
novel, as Du Boiss protagonist, Manuel Mansart, moves from American
politics toward a series of international encounters. Du Bois deployed
in a barely ctionalized 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 poli-
tics. 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 Chinas geopolitical signicance 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 rst visited China and
Japan during a long prewar tour (193637). In 1952 the State Depart-
ment 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 Peoples Republic. Finally, in 1959 he lectured in China,
88 Sinophilia
and then made a further journey in 1962. He had become embroiled
in a classic cold war struggle over free speech and travel (the writers
claim) and the necessities of national security (the states logic). The
State Department had decoded his fascination with China within the
matrix of cold war ideological conict; but there is plenty of evidence to
suggest that Du Bois was simply pursuing a lifelong interest in Asiaan
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 signicance of white
supremacy. In his 1920 globalist essay, The Souls of White Folk (pub-
lished 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 Boiss readers and watchers (and there would always be
plenty of watchers, surveying his moves)the white folk addressed
in the essaymight well have found what one might call the majoritar-
ian global logic of this essay somewhat disquieting, especially because
Du Bois annexes the progressive language of the American creed: up-
lift, 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
Sinophilia 89
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 na-
tions, 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 Boiss argument, with its attentiveness to democratic idealism and
human progress, but such logic turns to embrace the non-Western na-
tions 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 tex-
ture 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 todays developing nationsespecially China,
India, and Indonesiaand multinational companies from todays ad-
vanced nations will adapt their proles 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 gures. 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
Boiss at and once revolutionary statement that, indeed, the destinies
of this world will rest ultimately in the hands of darker nations.
Pearl Bucks 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
90 Sinophilia
from the missionary encounter with China to the hard facts of cold war
geopolitics. Has any twentieth-century writerparticularly any Ameri-
can woman writerachieved a more emphatic blend of fame and mar-
ginality 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 twenti-
eth-century Americas Nobel laureates for literature; but for many com-
mentators the award represented the ight 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 Conns recent, excellent biography, establishes a moment to reap-
praise her work in the context of literary internationalism.
23
Her sprawl-
ing body of work represents one of the most signicant internationalist
engagements by a contemporary author. As the daughter of missionar-
ies 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 gure in her blending of insider knowl-
edge of another culture, language skills, participant-observer sympathy,
and recurrent defensiveness about where, in the nal 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 activ-
ity in Chinaan impact that by family origin and marriage she was well
placed to evaluate. From the beginnings of her writing career she di-
rectly engaged with debate over the missions signicance. In the 1920s
magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, and Current History
published critical accounts of the missionaries.
24
Then Buck had her
say in the 1933 Harpers 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
Bucks career also demonstrates the perils of literary international-
ism 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
Sinophilia 91
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 Hoovers fbi had set up. Its les
included materials on Carl Sandburg, William Carlos Williams, John
Dos Passos, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Marianne Moore, Rob-
ert Frost, Richard Wright, and F. Scott Fitzgerald (paranoia leads to
catholic tastes); Buck also gured 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 larg-
est les: 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 led on
her activities in the early 1940s were connected to her attacks on racial
discrimination.
26
Although the fbi spent more time indexing materi-
als than actually registering her civil rights activities, the organizations
intentions remain chilling.
Bucks 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 conict and the onset of the cold war. Bucks 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 reected 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 condent of power enough to save
the world.
27
The war here is the Civil War; the American mission is
gured as national healing projected on a global scale. This progres-
sive mission carried Bucks family through the late nineteenth century
(when for the Bucks, the missions offered a benign alternative to Euro-
pean imperialism), the Boxer Rebellion and then on into the twentieth
century. But perhaps the most telling insight in Bucks work on China
was not only this sensitivity to missionary cultures (and their ideolo-
gies), 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
92 Sinophilia
no conception of the fact that they were in reality helping to light a
revolutionary re, the height of which we still have not seen, nor can
foresee (4). Studies of the encounters between Americans and China
have conrmed Bucks sense that the U.S. missionaries were important
agents in bringing change to the Middle Kingdom. Bucks 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 resi-
dent she nds herself less of a sojourner and more of a hybrid gure
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, eth-
ics and even religions had a powerful attractiveness to those who were
intelligent and sensitive.
28
So Bucks work recapitulates a major motif
of encounter narratives, as the incomer or settler or missionary nds
herself entranced, even seduced, by an exotic culture whose conver-
sion was her ostensible mission.
Bucks 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 Chinas historical continuum, steps for-
ward.
29
Out of her sense of the longue dure 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 situations deep histori-
cal 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 his-
torical analysis that in its broad conguration is a powerful precursor to
the later, professional historians account. Buck argued that the Boxer
Rebellion and anti-Western protests sparked off a succession of events,
culminating in Maos Long March. At the same time, she consistently
argued for the deep historical rootedness and continuity of China. She
sensed the countrys doubleness: ancient but recurrently racked with
political convulsions. And Buck also sensed that Western engagement
with China would ultimately create further cataclysmic change.
Sinophilia 93
Bucks memoir, shadowed as most of her postwar work is by her
nations 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
movements culture and ideology. As a girl, she saw herself as an Ameri-
can 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 Boiss commentaries on Africa)
than on a reexive hatred of discrimination. There is an afnity with
Richard Wright here, in that both writers foreground what they some-
times identify as an innately American dislike of oppression and racial
discrimination. Both gures can sound like civil rights activists with
a sense of internationalism. What I wanted to be rid of, Buck atly
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 conicts, rst 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 avoid-
ing the usual Western mistakes. My Several Worlds holds to this line,
and some of Bucks sentences took on a prophetic tone as she reected
in the early 1950s on how the United States might engage globally while
94 Sinophilia
avoiding earlier European mistakes. Its important that Buck sees the
meeting between Asia and the West as both a cultural encounter and
a racial ashpoint. 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 Europes 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,
Bucks hope that America might be exceptional in its dealings with
China encountered a disquieting realization that the nation would in-
evitably replicate the mistakes of white men.
China as Best Friend
In1972, at the end of her career and in her eightieth year, Buck published
China Past and Present, which summarized a lifetimes 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 difcult for Buck to remain in touch with old friends), but also by
Nixons rapprochement with China in February that year. Handsomely
illustrated with photographs by Magnum gures such as Cartier-Bres-
son, 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 child-
hood in China are underwritten by an inwardness with that foreign
culture that was beyond many Americans. Her attened, laconic com-
mentary in China Past and Present has a subdued authority based on a
lifetimes engagements with the country. At times Buck can even claim
that she has herself become, in certain ways, Chinesethat 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
Bucks work might now seem somewhat gauche or lacking in theoreti-
Sinophilia 95
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 Chi-
nese-trained mind: This instantly conveyed to my Chinese-trained
mind that the dinner had a purpose beyond mere honor (74). There is
imperiousnessand a lack of self-divisionat such moments: if Bucks
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 overcondent American equivalent to those
bluff British colonial ofcials who claimed a cultural force majeure in
their understanding of Asia or Africa. Missionary legacy leads to a stri-
dent lecture on Maos military strategy:
When the Communist revolution rose in China, I observed that the
Communists were following the exact guerrilla tactics that the rob-
bers of Shui Hu Chuan had used ve centuries and more before,
and so I began my work. I spent four years on this translation un-
der the illusion that if and when my American people were engaged
in an Asian warwhich even then seemed inevitable to methey
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)
Theres more than a trace of self-regard in Bucks 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 nd 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 tellingand rather
uniquecritiques of American presence in Asia. She notes the disrupt-
96 Sinophilia
ing effects of American troops throughout Asia as new families (half-
American) have arisen. In such paragraphs Bucks 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 coun-
tries 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-Ameri-
cans, 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 ramications 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 inter-
cultural 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 mate-
rial 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.
Bucks Sinophilia has a particular complexion and cast; she shows
little understanding of or sympathy for Maoism, for example. Her writ-
ing 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 ercely denounced postwar disengage-
ment 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
Sinophilia 97
traditionsand in Bucks case, her family historyof the missionaries.
The friendship began with the missionaries but then, in Bucks reading
of Chinese-U.S. relations, extends to form a more general, American
bond with that country. In the wake of Korea and Vietnam, mission-
ary 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. Bucks conservatism is
also tinged by that mild deference in the face of Chinas ancient civiliza-
tion seeming to have marked the missionary experience. She remains
convinced of Chinas cultural superiorityand 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 in-
telligence) that Buck vaunts as the center of Chinese identity (not Mao-
ism). 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, Bucks work some-
times 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 Americanas missionary or as Bohemian expatri-
atedened relationships with non-Westerners in either religious or
aesthetic terms. In each one catches the ironic sense that the Ameri-
can Century had paradoxically led to an Americanizing of the globe
(and a politicizing of the world) that undercut the established, seduc-
tive patterns of expatriate experience. Instead of being a missionary
or a writer-aesthete, the expatriate now has an identity that is rst and
foremost American; and such an identity increasingly carries a decisive
ideological charge.
31
As with some of Bowless comments on European
colonialisms depredations, Bucks 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
98 Sinophilia
that they had discovered it and therefore could and did lay claim to
it (100). At this crux Buck accepts the conventional American self-im-
age as a young, vigorous, proto-imperialist nation (an image that had
animated the rst U.S. advocates of imperial outreach), but she reverses
the thrust of these arguments, so that youth now equates to immaturity,
while Chinas ancient civilization is mature in its wisdom: Other na-
tions now know that we are impulsive, dramatic, and that we are still
very young and immature. We think of ourselves and act without con-
sidering 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 Bucks attempts to decode and
judge the Cultural Revolution. Alongside familiar Buck motifsthe
value of the missions, the long reach of Chinas historysat 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
Chinas annexation of Tibet as a symptom of an obsession with ter-
ritorial 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 magnicent civilization of their
own country (129). What she disliked about the Cultural Revolution
was the insularity it engendered. It is signicant that despite her acute
sensitivity to Chinese cultural distinctiveness, she rejected the Cul-
tural Revolutions 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 iso-
lationism. 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 signicant 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
Sinophilia 99
there time, and isolation is a dream: the fantasy of an isolated China,
evolving slowly within its own chronology, is just thata dream. I will
argue in the next chapter that authors such as Buck and Wright had
begun to reect 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 gure we dis-
cover 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 cosmopoli-
tan reection. She remained in her broad sensitivity to the interconnec-
tions and dialogues between cultures recognizably a writer shaped by
the progressivism, internationalism, and universalism that marked mid-
century travel and political writing. But we can also now see that this
midcentury ideology contained the seeds of a distinctive American cos-
mopolitanism: an inected liberal sense of mission, receptive to foreign
cultures but founded in progressive idealism. Nonetheless, this cosmo-
politanism also caused Buck difculties; the polarities and oppositions
that had echoed throughout her work nally threatened to fragment her
prose into irresolvable dichotomies. China Past and Present veers, er-
ratically at times, between Chinese condemnations of Western arro-
gance and missionary pleas for understanding of what the American
evangelists were up to. The writing becomes (understandably) breath-
less and jagged, as Buck swerves between the two cultural poles that
dominated her life. Bucks centrist and historicist arguments pleased
nobody. To the Chinese administration of the Cultural Revolution she
was insufciently 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 fram-
ing 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-
100 Sinophilia
Western cultures. She adopted a neo-Spenglerian reading of the Wests
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 Bucks prose becomes
increasingly plaintive and pleading, as she formulates an emotional en-
treaty to be allowed to go to her parents homeland (her father was bur-
ied there). The memoirs 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 deal-
ings with Asian cultures. Buck was investigated by the fbi for her po-
litical 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 vilication 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). Bucks 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 wars most pointed, poi-
gnant (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 nation-
alism on her own liberal terms. Buck is an intellectuala steadfast
enough declarationhappy to exist in a culture where intellectuals are
Sinophilia 101
not punished (though one wonders what she would really have made
of the fbis le had she been able to see it). She is free to develop my-
self. 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.
Bucks career presents a cosmopolitanism rooted in the American mis-
sion 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. Bucks writings remained (even at
the very end of her life) imbued with a sense of the dignity and purpose-
fulness 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 Bartolom de Las Casas launched his attacks on
Spanish exploitation of the Indies. In her own unlikely way, Buck be-
came an heir to this tradition of the missionary dissent. She attacked
contemporary ignorance about China; she could see the Western dis-
covery 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
politicsthe revolution. This left her in a profoundly ambiguous posi-
tion, 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
precold 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 po-
larized the world and the abrupt counterattack during the Korean War
102 Sinophilia
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 neces-
sary and overt signals of political allegiance in a cold war context. And
as with Wrights case, hers was to become a career where liberalism
took her from the cultures vital center to a position on its edge.
He was anti-Western, all right. And I wondered why Western na-

tions 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 t in now, being a
stranger to both worlds . . . ?
It is not difcult 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. Au-
gustines famous prayer, have often demanded decolonization, but then
added they do not want it quite yet.
1
Roosevelt had been famously dis-
missive 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),
Nonalignment and Writing
Rich Lands and Poor
5
104 Nonalignment and Writing
but the evolution of a fuller African policy was interrupted by cold war
realities that changed the tone of liberation. Richard Wrights journey
to the Bandung conference took place in this context.
It took until 1950, and a State Department reorganization that estab-
lished 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 colonialisms benign effects: It was claimed
that no part of Africa had ever developed into a civilization; the conti-
nent had been invaded by Western civilization and there was no point
in wringing ones hands about it. In John Foster Dulless 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 t the bill; a careful
transition to independence would enable the United Statess 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 dened freedom in terms of decolonization.
Tacit American support for European colonialism, coupled with do-
mestic racism, combined to limit the credibility of espousals of free-
dom. . . . 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
Wrights 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 recongured role in Asia and Africa. The result was the three travel
books that have usually been seen as minor parts of Wrights 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-
Nonalignment and Writing 105
through of some of the emergent political and cultural problems of the
postwar era. If anything, they were ahead of their time. But Wrights
split from the left has tended to dominate the reception of his work;
reexive spats about his allegiance to the Communist Party deect the
readers 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
gure such as Wright. But by a further historical irony, Wright had be-
come interested in the deep structures of the societies he visitedcul-
tural formations that would outlast the cold war but seemed relatively
marginal in the 1950s. In particular, Wright realized that race and reli-
gion 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, Wrights fascination with top-
ics such as tribalism, progress, and the enduring signicance 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 set-
tings that marked out the terrain for a writing of nonaligned interna-
tionalist engagement.
5
Nonalignment produced writing where develop-
ment theorys 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 conict of ideologies, and a (somewhat horried)
realization that religion remains a dominant motif in many cultures.
The underpinning dialectic of Wrights argument is the broad opposi-
tion 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 emergenceof
the sheer size of the Third World. As Wright said, this is now the
geopolitical center. Nonalignment then produces a pragmatic, open-
ended, questioning form of reportage; and its encompassing of travel
writing, political analysis, and polemic creates a certain fragmentation
in the text. Its worth recognizing, too, a recurrent fascination with be-
ing inside or outside. With its attentiveness to those outside of the
Western world, its insistent tropes of boundaries and borders, Wrights
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.
Wrights work from the 1950s had as its abiding subtext a sense of ur-
gency. The pressure was on; the decolonized masses demanded action.
In both The Color Curtain and Black Power Wright nished his medita-
tions with reections 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 tech-
nology of modernityhow long will it take these people to master me-
chanical processes, etc.
6
But in what Wright would call the Orient
this urgent desire for change emerged from postcolonial political aspi-
ration: 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 Wrights mapping of
the temporality of progress the technocratic West positions the decolo-
nized world as a pupil, a student learning modernity; but for Africans
and Asians more immediate, irrational desires for political advance-
ment 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 fty 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
interferenceor, in the model he advanced in Black Power, a contrary
model of decisive self-advancement through militarization. But he then
left the terms, conditions, and timescale of American interference un-
mapped. Wrights unmapping is the topography of our daily lives.
He understood decolonization as a world-historical event, a mo-
ment when the long-term currents of international politics reshaped
themselvesworlds 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-Occidentaliza-
tion within the paradigm of international political economy. As we saw
in chapter 2, the long reach of African American internationalist analy-
sis 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 Wrights
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 pres-
sure: When the day comes that Asian and African raw materials are
processed in Asia and Africa by labor whose needs are not as inated
as those of Western laborers, the supremacy of the Western world, eco-
nomic, cultural, and political, will have been broken once and for all on
this earth and a de-Occidentalization of mankind will have denitely 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 associ-
ated 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 nancial and commer-
cial relations which compounded the confusion in Asian and African
minds (73). In Jakarta in April 1955 he saw this commercial confusion
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 trademen, women, and children. (9394).
The result: depersonalization (75). Wright, then, remained rooted in
a materialist-economic analysis of the colony, but at its furthest argu-
mentative extension his paradigm enabled him to touch on that area
of analysisof personality and psychological traumathat became
Fanons 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 scientic knowledge, industrialism,
rationality, and self-critique, which taken together embodied progress.
Nevertheless, even if history was ultimately on the side of the West, re-
sistance to Westernization always caught Wrights attention. As with
his praise for Nkrumah in Black Power, Wrights reections in Color
Curtain led him toward gures who might embody or promote prog-
ress while marking out non-Western formations of modernity. Again,
open encounters and conversations with a range of Asian commenta-
tors 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 libera-
tion of the Asian mind (60), a comment foreshadowing more recent
observations by writers such as John Gray about that conicts histori-
cal signicance: By the rst decade of the twentieth century [Japan]
had a modern navy, which destroyed the Russian Imperial Fleet at the
Battle of Tsushimathe rst time a modern European power was de-
feated in war by an Asian people.
7
Such interpretative echoes (reread-
ings of Western supremacism; ironic recasting of global encounters)
signal the idiosyncratic prescience of The Color Curtain. Wright also
records his repeated meetings with Islam and Islamic agency: perhaps
for the rst time he encountered non-Westerners whose identity had
not been shaped in colonialisms crucible. The fascination of Indonesia
and Southeast Asian Islam lay for Wright in their cultural and psycho-
logical imperviousness to the Western missionaries. The Moslem per-
sonality, 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 fascinat-
ing for their unsettling identication of a totalitarian outlook:
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 loath-
some enemy.
He was totalitarian-minded, but without the buttress of modern
Communist or Fascist ideology; he did not need any, for his totali-
tarian outlook was born of his religious convictions. Allah was his
dictator. (6162)
In his Moslem interlocutor Wright discovers someone outside of the
West. He is precise in locating the interdependency of missionary activ-
ity and the Wests global impact: the Islamic self has not been subject
to the missionaries and is therefore in a very straightforward way, out-
side of the Western world. To be outside is to be objective about the
Westpresumably, that is, to recognize its ideology and power. But the
admiration that we sense in these linesfor Islam as a postcolonial form
of resistancethen mutates into something different. Wright, as we will
see in a later discussion of Pagan Spain, was alarmed by religious ideal-
ism (he saw it as a form of extremism); he had also moved toward a lib-
eralism that was profoundly mistrustful of totalitarian ideologies. And
like many literary intellectuals of the period, he had established to-
talitarian 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
enemy was totalitarianism (rst in the guise of Fascism; increasingly as
international Communism). Wright slides the term over to apply it to
Islamthe language of the classic midcentury liberal, but with a reli-
gious 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, gurative language and the broader discursive patterns of po-
litical 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 politi-
cal context has disintegrated. Even if the liberal consensus of the 1950s
is long gone, and Arthur Schlesingers vital center has vanished, that
political-cultural formation established a rhetoric for articulating ideo-
logical conicts that remains with us. The encounter with Islam could
with surprising ease be locked into this language of dictators and totali-
tarianism as early as the mid-1950s.
American representations of Islam had already begun to center on
gures outside of the Western world, decoded as implacably anti-
modern. Bowles had presented in The Spiders House the encounter
between the Westerner who wants to preserve an aesthetes Islamic
culture and the Moslem radical who dreams of apocalypse. Wright
was fascinated by what he saw as the religious totalitarianism of his in-
terlocutor and by the consciousness of those who stood outside the
missionarys reach. Its 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 Huntingtons well-trav-
eled 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
signicant. Both Bowles and Wright were fascinated by the interplay
between resistance, religious alterity, decolonization, and historical cul-
ture: the dening elements of Islam in these 1950s representations.
9
They probably had a keener sense of colonialism and its pervasive ef-
fects than many commentators; and in The Color Curtain and The Spi-
ders 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 de-
colonization 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.
American Time, Swedish Time
Wrights encounter with the developing world was framed by extended
intellectual dialogues with other writers, particularly gures in the po-
litical and social sciences.
10
In chapter 2, The Skin Game, I explored
Wrights adaptation of Everett Stonequists notion of the marginal
man. The Color Curtain opens up analogous dialogues with gures in
Wrights intellectual milieu. Wright knew a good number of academics,
moved in their circles, and along with his self-education through writ-
ers 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 de-
cisively on from these established or current modes of analysis.
Contrast, for example, The Color Curtains open-ended, explor-
atory form of reportage with other analyses of empire and its fall within
Wrights circle. George Padmores Africa: Britains Third Empire
(1949) is a case in point. Padmore was part of the intellectual constel-
lation described in many parts of this book: the Western, that is the
Anglo-Franco-American literary internationalism whose shifting coor-
dinates (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-African-
ism and an advocate of international Socialism, but his study is in fact
a more formal and conventional study of empires 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 in-
stitutional analysis. In contrast, Wrights texts are splintered and hybrid;
they shift restlessly between a highly subjective personal response and
an objective account clearly indebted to gures 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 autobiog-
raphy at the foundation of social analysis. Wrights recent biographer,
Hazel Rowley, notes: He was struck by the emphasis Chicago Sociol-
ogy placed on the life history approach to subjects like race. These so-
cial scientists valued autobiographical narratives told in the individuals
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 pio-
neered 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 revealinadvertently, perhapsattitudes and pre-
conceptions. Park was particularly interested in the interplay between
race, social change, and attitudinal recomposition; here was personality
as dynamic process.
13
All of Wrights 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 encoun-
ters 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 Le-
rner 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),
Wrights use of this method is resolutely atomistic. He wants to hear the
voices of Asian and African individuals, to take their personal testimo-
nies. 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 ana-
lytic 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 clichd 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, mi-
gration 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
Wrights humanistic appetite for encounter and conversation; but these
questionnaires had also led to the identication of a multiplicity of per-
sonality types caught between modernity and tradition, the East and
the West. As we saw in the rst chapter, Daniel Lerner synthesized his
cache of Middle Eastern life-stories to produced that composite gure,
the transitional. However, Wright adapted the same form of pragmatic
Chicago school investigation, while refusing to homogenize the various
gures he encountered into a monolithic type or character of cul-
tural transition. Instead, he found variety and difference in personality
formation: shadings, amalgams, contradictions.
Wright, that is, had pursued more complex representations of Is-
lamic identity where hybridity and a degree of internal self-division
were beginning to make for a layered or splintered sense of self; ac-
counts of a totalitarian self sit alongside nascent readings of plurality
and hybridity within the Islamic diaspora. It is this interpretative dual-
ism in The Color CurtainIslam as essentially totalitarian; Islamic
multiplicitythat gives this text its timeliness some fty years later.
16
What Wright had done was to take the emergent methods of social re-
search, and then refashion them to create a writing of what Ross Pos-
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 represen-
tation that simultaneously became political strategies of denaturaliza-
tion in a society where racist stereotypes reigned serenely as Nature.
Open margin is a useful term to bring to the interpretation of Wrights
travel works. The repeated discontinuities and ellipses, noted earlier in
discussion of Black Power, are equally signicant in Color Curtain: the
text pauses, tails off, moves abruptly in different directions. But there is
openness in Wrights 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 totalitar-
ian-minded Islamic youth has this quality of opennesssince it is
framed by meetings with other Indonesians whose cultural-political
formation has turned, in Wrights analysis, toward a less totalitarian
disposition. What is perhaps most important about the series of inter-
views 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 Wrights friend, the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal whose
work establishes powerful intertextual analogues with The Color Cur-
tain. Myrdalthe central interlocutor in Wrights dialogue about race
and globalismalso turned toward an internationalist reading of po-
litical 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 se-
ries 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 in-
cluded books by Konrad Adenauer, Erich Fromm and Paul Tillich; the
projects liberal universalism was underlined in a preface where Ruth
Nanda Anshen claimed that a World Age was now taking shape.
17
The conceptual t between this text and Wrights 1950s writings,
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 po-
litical economy in the developing world. How would societies develop
in a world moving from anticolonial struggle into decolonization and
then postcolonialism?
Myrdal shares Wrights sense that decolonization is a world-his-
torical 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 colonys political economy.
Myrdal is highly attentive to what he presents as an embedded mar-
ket, 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 develop-
ment (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 inequali-
ties. In advanced societies, what he terms spread effects help to miti-
gate 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 Awak-
ening into modernity, the aim is now to mimic these kinds of effect
in countries where development mechanisms had not existed before.
18
Myrdals foundational paradigm is, as one might expect, that of a north-
ern European social democrat.
Development theorys attractiveness to policymakers is evident: cre-
ate 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
theory. Economists such as John Kay increasingly dispute the theoreti-
cal foundations of take-off. Little attention was paid to economic his-
tory, he points out. All innovations and scientic 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 institutionsrms, industries or governments.
19
One
might add that Myrdals 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 decolonizationa variety that the academys
understandable but overstated concentration on Fanon tends to ob-
scure. 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 progressiv-
ism founded on government intervention and steady political agitation.
This rather Europeanto be more precise, Scandinavianmodel of
progress and uplift represents a distinctive model of internationalist
social democracy. Figures such as Myrdal and Wright, however, oper-
ated 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
consensus.
22
Myrdals was a conspicuously consensual form of devel-
opment; but cold war imperatives made the middle ground of neutral-
ity look quixotic, indulgent, or even dangerous. His careful mapping
of development is subtle, but it suffersperhaps irredeemablyby his
omission of these cold war realities: Myrdal gives the game away when
he atly admits that his study will not take account of the Soviet sphere.
He had attempted to reconstruct the World Age in terms of Scandi-
navian social democracy; but geopolitics would move in to break up
this carefully calibrated utopia. The world is not Sweden.
23
John Dos Passoss Internationalism
Literary representations of development and decolonization created a
quirky literary terrain. One might expect to nd Richard Wright think-
ing about race and economics in Africa; but John Dos Passoss entry
into the development debate necessitates an extended enquiry. Biogra-
phers 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 Carrs phrase.
24
To rehabilitateperhaps 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 Passoss new friends on the Right, notably William F.
Buckley Jr., editor of the National Review, and the response of the old,
midcentury left, exemplied by the gure of Edmund Wilson. Buckley
admired Dos Passoss trenchant anti-Communism, as well as his out-
spoken attacks on labor unions and the growth of federal government;
but in Wilsons eyes Dos Passos had become a silly, mouthy pundit. He
had forsaken modernist experiment and the craft of ction 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 FreedomWilson noted that his
old colleague now shared a platform with characters of strange politi-
cal 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.
Certainly, Dos Passoss public performance illustrates the perils for
a writer of allowing ones language to be shaped by a preestablished
political rhetoric: a trap for the left and the right. But his more consid-
ered and reective 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 critics desire not to engage with literary trans-
formations such as the reinvention of Dos Passos can become a form
of liberal willed ignorance: if we dont 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 Pas-
sos alongside Wright is to conduct a literary-historical autopsy on the
recent past.
26
Accepting that Dos Passos remained a major gure in the
culture right through into the 1960s, we might gain a clearer under-
standing of the specic congurations 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 Americas 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 develop-
ing world. He published his study shortly before a military coup dtat
(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
Wrights 1950s travel narratives and Pearl S. Bucks 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 lled with construction projects,
road building, the founding of new cities (Braslia), industrialization,
sanitation schemes, and so on. Dos Passos idealizes energy and enter-
prise. One clue to his movement toward conservative terrain lay in his
continual fascination with modernitys 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 gure of the heroic entre-
preneur. Dos Passoss 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 hemi-
sphere 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 founda-
tions 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 Braslia, the planned city founded by the
new Brazilian president, Dr. Kubitschekhimself 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 be-
comes an open advocate of internal colonization as a means to push a
country into progress. Brazil is on the move politically but also geo-
graphically; settlement is spreading west, into the Amazon basin and
the remote border terrains. One of the major gures at the start of the
text is Doctor Sayo, an enthusiast for this model of development, who
informs Dos Passos about the colnia:
Four years ago there was nothing. This was part of the federal gov-
ernments colonization plan. Colonization was not his specialty. Hes
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, Sayo 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 lled with this kind of pragmatic les-
sontips for the development of Latin America. His most enthusiastic
passages deal with Brazils new placessettlements 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 avor. 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 resur-
gence 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, zzing 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 ts neatly into a context created by JFKs Latin
American development policy, the Alliance for Progress. In response to
Castros regime, Kennedys New Frontier administration had sought to
develop a Latin American counterrevolution. This initiative, the Alli-
ance for Progress (March 13, 1961), provided development aid in return
for land reforms. The policy ultimately ran into difculties because de-
velopment based on land reform would undermine those very elites and
oligarchies that the United States depended upon. Dos Passoss text,
written early in the decade and before the Alliances failures became
obvious (by 1970 military rule had supplanted civilian administration
in thirteen Latin American countries), was an idealistic vision of devel-
opment 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 Passoss 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 cul-
tures, Dos Passos is just as enthusiastic in his search for the menand
they are always menwho can turn the Stone Age toward modernity.
Dos Passos, in other words, is an ardent apostle of developmentand
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 re-
mains 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 pro-
gressivism that, enmeshed with his increasingly anticommunist beliefs,
creates a form of neoconservative modernism. Gunnar Myrdal had cre-
ated 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 de-
velopment as the Atlantic coast: these are practical instances of Myrdals
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 Unnished Revolution:
The United States and the Developing World
The travel writings and policy analyses discussed in this chapter, writ-
ten between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s, share a preoccupation
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 Wrights 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 reect on a shift in historical
evolution. Operating in American time, the speed and energy of the
global movement into modernity had become paramount. Dos Pas-
soss Brazil on the Move represents one such application of U.S. his-
torical time to the non-Western world. Having created one of the rst
ctionalizations 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 interna-
tionalist 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 Whats Wrong with U.S. Foreign Policy?), published Un-
nished Revolution: America and the Third World.
33
Sulzberger sought
to reanimate Woodrow Wilsons belief in American internationalism as
a revolutionary force for democracy and political transformation. The
Unnished 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
Sulzbergers Self-Determination and Dos Passoss Selfgovern-
ment. The development argument had become very largely focused
on temporalityon 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,
accretive, gradual process of transition. But when an analyst such as
Sulzberger looked at the non-Western world through the prism of de-
velopment and modernity, a sweeping impatience, a yearning for the
completion of the unnished revolution, was apparent in his tropes
and images of historical progress. Much of Sulzbergers messianic text
now reads like a premonitory taste of what would become the neo-Con-
servative agenda of the mid-1990s.
Works such as Unnished Revolution or Brazil on the Move sug-
gested 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 world-
wide liberal revolution had begun its shift across the political spectrum.
Wilsons Revolution of Self-Determination, redux, began to offer a
specically American politics of renewal and transformation that could
be exported. Social and political progress, identied across the ideo-
logical 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 anotherand quickly.
The historian Akira Iriye has written about the cultural interna-
tionalism of postFirst 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 developmentparadigms that
usually privileged the United States as the exemplar of long-term his-
torical currents. Horace Kallens 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 Rob-
ert Park, too, was deeply embedded in an intellectual project that po-
sitioned 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,
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 it-
self against the American model. The progressive vision of the United
States as a paradigmatic world culture became crossbred with the cold
warriors sense of ideological struggle and national security. Nonethe-
less, Kallens or Parks arguments about the exemplary world nature
of U.S. society and its modernity remained persuasive, as Daniel Le-
rners technocratic Passing of Traditional Society amply demonstrates.
Its 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 conict. Frank Ninkovich has argued that the cold war eventu-
ally 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, reecting on the long-term historical signicance of the
West, felt that eventually the Wests impact would be justied. His fas-
cination with modernity, progress, and industrialism led him to accept
the necessity of the Western catalyst in terms of the historical longue
dure. Yet he was, like Myrdal, profoundly suspicious of what he saw
as the Wests 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 Wests short-term economic im-
pact 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 dis-
ruption of non-Western societies. The Color Curtain argued that this
compounding of racism and economic shock had led to what was in ef-
fect an assault on the traditions and cultural inheritance of the non-Eu-
ropean world. The development conundrum, crystallized in The Color
Curtain and Rich Lands and Poor, was how to reconcile the long-term
global signicance of Western modernity with its shattering short-term
impact upon traditional societies: a conundrum of ongoing relevance.
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
fties 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 eld of an actively political writing
rooted in environmentalism and the nascent ecology movement. Ra-
chel Carsons 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. Carsons polemic was matched by other telling
interventions in the eld of environmental writingbooks that bound
Stone Ages
Peter Matthiessen and Susan Sontag in Latin America and Asia
6
128 Stone Ages
together accounts of a vanishing natural world with laments for the civi-
lizations (primitive or tribal) rooted in these fragile ecosystems. Peter
Matthiessens work from this time (196115) focused on a microscopic
attentiveness to specic, threatened ecologies. His work also marked
an important moment in the steady globalization of American writings
imaginative outreach. Like Richard Wright and Paul Bowles, Matthies-
sen was a peripatetic gure and a traveler-explorer who immersed him-
self in cultures far from the apparent centers of cultural gravity in the
Eisenhower era, the crabgrass frontier and the annel suits. And like
those gures, Matthiessen was a gure whose responses to world cul-
tures anticipated themes that entered the cultural mainstream a good
number of years later.
The generation of writers who created travel narratives, expatriate
ction, and journalism at this time (roughly the mid-1950s to the mid-
1960s) created some of our rst accounts of phenomena that are now
clichs: 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 signicant number of au-
thors 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 writ-
ers emerged from Euro-American modernism, but their interests were
becoming more cosmopolitan in this interim period between modern-
isms waning and postmodernisms advent.
Having graduated in 1950, Matthiessen went on to found The Paris
Review with his friend George Plimpton. Given his Ivy League back-
ground and an early immersion in European culture, he seemed set for
a career with familiar contours. But he then veered away from an es-
tablished 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
Stone Ages 129
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 Americas deepening in-
volvement in Vietnam, embed themselves in a world of primordial jun-
gles, embattled indigenous peoples, earnest (but troubled) missionary
endeavors and repeated conict 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
denitions.
2
For Matthiessen, explorations of the natural open up into
reections, too, on human ecologies. He then constructs a series of im-
portant representations and analyses of non-Western cultures jeopar-
dized 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 Perus
remote fastnesses.
This body of work sits on the intersecting borders between anthro-
pology, travel writing, memoir, and political commentary. From the end
of the 1950s through the early 1960s he worked in two areas that had
growing signicance in the changing map of American international-
ism: South America and Southeast Asia. These two works, The Cloud
Forest and Under the Mountain Wall, are signicant contributions to
the writing of cultural difference. Each traces a distinctive route into
that tangled terrain where politics, travel writing, and ecopoetics in-
teract. 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 vanishingscultures (hu-
man, animal, and natural) on the verge of extinction. His journeys into
the Amazon or the islands of the Western Pacic 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
130 Stone Ages
literature of exploration and encounter. Matthiessen makes the intertex-
tual linkages plain in frequent references to gures such as Colonel P. H.
Fawcett or the naturalist W. H. Hudson. Such gures 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 projects 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 (15354). Typically, he notes, the expedition is
backed by millionaires or foundations; or the explorer sets off alone,
doomed on his questthough Matthiessen will of course return. Ul-
timately, then, I am not an explorer and none of these basic condi-
tions 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 Matthiessens 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 ne books on the
Inca civilization and Spanish seizure (6364). 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. Its telling that the one chapter about the continents 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 Cit-
ies tells us that they are probably the least interesting aspect of this
continent (114; Matthiessens italics: a slight misjudgment, one feels,
Stone Ages 131
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 Matthiessens methodical record of
encounters with pristine wilderness. As a naturalist and amateur an-
thropologist, Matthiessen focuses on a preindustrial, tribal arcadia, al-
though real and present danger is also part of Matthiessens 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 continents poli-
tics 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 Wal-
ter 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, Matthiessens prose carefully skirts these tumults and
developments, and indeed The Cloud Forests one (intensely Conra-
dian) vision of Latin American revolutionary politics is couched in a
tone that judiciously blends the jaundiced, ironic, and surreal. Mat-
thiessen 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 Conrads 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
132 Stone Ages
national economy by placing the countrys exploitation in the hands of
amateurs (77).
Matthiessens work provokes reections 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 ac-
countstheir capacious engagements with the foreign and the un-
known. 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 failor
at the very least, nd itself compromised or undermineddue to mo-
ments of omission and ignorance, misrepresentation and imprecision.
In Matthiessens work this sense of privilege focuses on the natural
world and on his drive to experience vanishing ecologies before they
nally 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 in-
terested in a progressive modernity focused on industry or the city; his
travel writing is the mirror image of Richard Wrights exploration of ur-
ban 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 inltration of politics into prose that at rst 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 en-
gagement 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 oc-
casionally 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
Stone Ages 133
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 Ithis gure entirely apart from the thousands who died in slav-
ery (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 sightnot, 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 ex-
tinctions.
Peter Matthiessens Entropology
While Matthiessens work at rst appears hesitant in encounters with
historys processes, these texts take on deeper resonances and implica-
tions when placed in context. Matthiessen, American explorer of jungle
and rain forest, worked his way into unknown places at the moment
when the nations 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. engage-
ment 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 Matthiessens journey
into New Guinea and the broader journey of national self-discovery oc-
casioned 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. Its worth remembering that the Rock-
efeller 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 Halberstams famous phrase.
134 Stone Ages
Halberstams study looked at the evolution of Vietnam strategy and
charted the ways that Americas 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 pri-
mordial jungle; tribespeople in an antediluvian setting; reports of can-
nibalism that surfaced after Rockefellers 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 Machlins gaudy account, The
Search for Michael Rockefeller (1972), Rockefeller saw the expedition in
highly romantic terms: Its the desire to do something adventurous,
he explained once, at a time when frontiers, in the real sense of the
word, are disappearing.
10
Matthiessens commemoration of the southeastern Asian Stone Age
formed part of the fascinating, interlocking project that grew out of this
eldwork. Matthiessen was part of a team that included the anthropolo-
gist Karl G. Heider and the anthropologist/documentary lmmaker,
Robert Gardner. The trip produced Under the Mountain Wall, but also
Heiders The Dugum Dani: A Papuan Culture in the Highlands of West
New Guinea (1970) and Gardners lm 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 eldwork would be blended with contemporary tech-
nology: 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 laymans 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
Stone Ages 135
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 ap-
proach is woven into the anthropological account. The Dugum Dani,
for instance, cites Under the Mountain Wall as a source. In later an-
thropological works on the Dani, such as Hamptons 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, posi-
tioned Matthiessen as the teams 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 reporta version of the naturalists or the anthropologists ac-
count of a eld trip. His prose has the at, laconic tone of such writ-
ing; 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 lm are immediately apparent. The book
itself incorporates visual elements: a whole slew of photographs from
Matthiessen and other members of the expedition (including the un-
fortunate Rockefeller), together with diagrams of the Dani settlements.
On one level, such documentation and putative objectivity reinforces
the neoscientic claims of anthropological writing (Matthiessen had
been drawn into a neoscientic rationale by being categorized as the
expeditions ecologist). On another, documentary style is said to
achieve a paradoxical humanism by bringing us into a direct and sup-
posedly 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
136 Stone Ages
What particularly interests me about Under the Mountain Wall,
though, are the proses discursive ickers. Matthiessen sometimes steps
outside documentary code to create a more ctional effect, notably
when he imagines the consciousness of his native peoples or suggests
interiority behind the behaviorism that occupies the texts foreground.
In his anthropological record, Matthiessen concentrates on the typical
behavioral patterns of classic ethnography: rituals, mysticism, conict,
death, and maturation. But he frequently breaks the code of this ethno-
graphic discourse by giving an imagined shape to the interiority of his
tribespeople. In the following passage about one tribesman, Walimo,
Matthiessen places this gure in a rather conventional matrix of feel-
ings: sympathy, fear, rivalry:
His alternative is to muster such assistance as he can and either at-
tempt 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 latters death. Walimos fa-
ther, 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: Yolis rst act,
when he heard of his sons peril, was to retire to his new village in
the mountains, out of harms 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 Maitmos conviction that Walimo should be killed. For these
reasons, in addition to the fact that Walimos guilt is recognized, the
chances are that he will nd no friends to help him.
16
Matthiessens typically laconic discourse shifts into this more specula-
tive, inward-looking analysis of Stone Age character. Having begun
his account with a carefully understated invocation of the anthropolo-
gists or naturalists method, Matthiessen then stretches documentary
record toward a more speculative account of the motivations and as-
pirations 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. Its also worth pausing at this crux, as we did in
reecting on Bowless creation of Amar, or Wrights meeting with the
Stone Ages 137
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 lan-
guage 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 ac-
count 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 Lvy-Bruhls phrase) than it is in
delineating interior Western consciousness. Concentration on the ritu-
als and ceremonies of the Dani is unremitting, and the account nishes
with little sense of the journeys impact on the expeditions 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-re-
exively about how Westerners found their journey of discoveryand
found their selves. But there is nothing in the text of such responsive-
ness, 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 texts broader representations of difference. For a start, Matthies-
sen 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 authori-
ties). 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 happenedor did not happento Mi-
chael 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 texts overwhelming drive is
directed toward a depiction of a hypostatized culture seemingly beyond
process. In order to fulll the documentary quest for realism such his-
torical change needs to be accounted for; but in order to register change,
the edice of documentary style becomes ssured. Matthiessens so-
138 Stone Ages
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 naturalists paradise. The last paragraph con-
tains a tangential but powerful representation of social and ecological
transformationa change heralded by the sudden appearance of the
humble bee. In the encounters between Western invaders and native
ecologies, bees often marked out the rst 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, Weaklekeks 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 ower had rooted in
the elds, 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 ower 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
ower 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 her-
alds 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 creaturesso far
unnamedenter the enclosed primitive world. The writing here, in its
Stone Ages 139
indirection and its acute responsiveness to political/ecological change,
is a notable instance of Matthiessens fusion of anthropological insights
with an elliptical, poetic responsiveness to the natural world. This is
where the strength of Matthiessens best writing lies, in recognition of
dynamic interplay between the ecological and the political.
Matthiessen is an elegist, a writer committed to the commemora-
tion of worlds and ways of living on the verge of extinction. So does he
occupy that antitransitional position explored by Paul Bowles in The
Spiders House? One critique of Matthiessen might run as follows: that
mourning for a threatened ecology becomes a reactive environmental-
ism resistant to modernity and cultural change. The environmentalist
writer, faced with a world where natural habitats and wildlife face ex-
tinction, is more than likely to conclude that articial change should be
resisted at all costs. There is in Matthiessens 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 deects
the text from its origins as documentary testament for a vanishing tribe,
toward a nuanced account of how this culture, like all cultures, under-
goes transition. The parallels with Bowles are intriguing. The Spiders
House contained what I called encoded annotations, where the shift-
ing pluralism of the Maghreb seeped into the text (even as its protago-
nist, Stenham, clung nostalgically to images of unchanging Fez). And in
Under the Mountain Wall the nal discursive resting point is a writing
that reinscribes Matthiessens attentive ecology while incorporating
tribalisms inevitable transformation.
Another, intertextual reading of Matthiessens quasi-anthropologi-
cal travel writing is possible. Matthiessens representations of the Dani
in The Cloud Forestsaturated in minute attentiveness to custom and
ritual, and tinged with elegyare rooted in classic anthropology. Mat-
thiessens 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
Lvi-Strauss. Matthiessens texts enter into dialogue with these writ-
140 Stone Ages
ers. He invokes and inects classic anthropology by his minute atten-
tiveness to custom and ritual, and by his recurrently elegiac tone. The
impress of Lvi-Strausss 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 Matthiessens intertexts, Malinowskis Argonauts of the Western
Pacic (1922)that inaugural eldwork study of New Guineas 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 identied a poignant epistemologi-
cal moment, balanced between the new disciplines expansion and its
subjects 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 impor-
tance dawn before it is too late?
20
Malinowski concluded Argonauts of
the Western Pacic with an elevated plea for anthropological human-
ism and a recognition that ultimately the discipline was self-reective:
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 himselfyet our nal goal is to enrich and
deepen our own worlds vision, to understand our own nature and to
make it ner, intellectually and artistically.
21
The sheer humanistic pro-
gressivism of this sentence (Malinowskilike Lvy-Bruhlcondently
enters the soul of a savage) speaks to us from a lost era.
Or does it? Matthiessen inserted himself into Malinowskis 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
writers imagination. For Bowles, Lvy-Bruhls primitive mind in-
Stone Ages 141
formed representations of the North African marabouts; and for Mat-
thiessen, Malinowskis elegiac vanishings provoked a travel writing
shadowed by imminent loss. As he wrote at the start of The Cloud For-
est, listing places in South America, the very names evoke so much,
and are their own justication for this journey, for one must hurry if
one is still to glimpse the earths last wild terrains (2). What is signi-
cant about this (inter)textual crux is that by placing his work in con-
versation with an earlier phase of anthropological writing, Matthiessen
also looped his work back into a contemporary setting. Malinowskis
savage humanity became Matthiessens preoccupation, just as Lvy-
Bruhls primitive mind became the subject for Bowless ction. But
ctions of savage humanity also gained a grimmer, more ironic reso-
nance when read off against the 1960s historical context. Although Mat-
thiessen 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 nations 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 con-
ict between an advanced civilization and a preindustrial society would
look like. Matthiessen had begun the decade by spending his two sea-
sons in the stone age; but Curtis LeMay, the Air Force Chief of Staff,
added a rather different image of the stone ageof countries that could
literally be moved backwards in historical time. In his 1965 autobiogra-
phy he notoriously outlined his strategy to defeat North Vietnam: My
solution to the problem would be to tell them frankly that theyve got to
draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or were going to bomb
them back into the Stone Age with Air power or Naval powernot with
ground forces.
22
Americas wars, in the American Century of the late 1900s, would
be Stadialist wars where the Republic, developments acme, met cul-
tures 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-
142 Stone Ages
rectly pointed out (by reading out developmental logic), the ultimate
threat was defeat coupled with descent down the ladder of civiliza-
tions: the Stone Age. This is military threat framed as progressiv-
ism: compliant nations will be moved ahead, up the ladder of progress;
defeated enemies will be moved backward in historical time. LeMays
sense of military efcacy is thoroughly embedded in the development
theory explored in this book: developmentor rather, the removal of
the promise of developmentbecomes the inevitable militaristic exten-
sion of enlightened Stadialism. Within this 1960s setting, Matthiessens
commemoration of the Stone Age was less an elegy than a retort.
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 in-
imical 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 impe-
rial heyday, then revises those narratives for an era of American hege-
mony.
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 gures 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-
Stone Ages 143
sleeved owered tourist shirt, the steel-rimmed glasses, khaki pants
and bulldog shoes had become the uniform of earnest American en-
terprise.
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 gure. Another character in
Matthiessens 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 Ri-
beralto 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
crucix (37). The mission is producing neocolonial standardization.
Into this zone, with its resistance to the development of human cul-
ture, Matthiessen inserts contemporary American agents of develop-
ment: the missionary and the military-technological pragmatist. Quar-
rier 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. Mat-
thiessen presents caustic images of what advanced cultures are up to in
such premodern places:
The tail of the ghter was inscribed:
fuerzas areas
And on the pocked fuselage of the light plane was scrawled:
Wole & 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 Americas
rst guides to guerilla combat, the renowned Marine Corps Small Wars
Manual of 1940.
26
Moon, moreover, is Matthiessens version of the tran-
sitional man caught between cultures. Raised on a Native reservation,
he travels in South America as an ironic hybrid gure, both American
and Indian, forged by transmigration from North to South America,
and from Native to Anglo and then to Hispanic Americas. Lewis Moon
144 Stone Ages
is a character whose represented roots are in a biracial American fam-
ily; he is the liminal protagonist with a foot in two cultures. Half-Chey-
enne, with a mongrel white father (48), Moon is the very model of
deracination and conicted origin; and with its protagonist torn by ra-
cial 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 rst 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 rst 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 (reach-
ing right back to Bartolom de Las Casas). The subtlety of Matthies-
sens imaginative project lies in a refashioning of this familiar model
to anticipate more recent thinking about cross-civilization conict and
the colonization of the Americas. Illness, particularly inuenza, plays
its part in the novels 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 iden-
tity. Quarrier has the at ugly voice of Western white America (48).
Moon is a variant of the postHuck Finn primitive who owers in
ctions of the 1950s and 1960s. In the domestic scene, the Beats had
populated America with wandering, yearning mysticsyoung men en-
ergized by the anticonformist idealism epitomized in Kerouacs work.
Expatriate writers had their own versions of this gure: Bowless young
Stone Ages 145
North Africans, with their drug-induced hallucinations and marginal-
ity, and Matthiessens native peoples, cut off from modernity, are distant
cousins of the domestic Outsider gures: the rebels, outsiders, and
nonconformists of the 1950s and 1960s. These representations fore-
ground a specic interpretative conundrum. From one angle, they are
exoticized versions of the Beatnik, neoexistential primitive. Thus the
visions, idealism, and antiestablishment violence of Bowless Amar or
Matthiessens Lewis Moon. But do such representations simply rein-
scribe a clichd primitivism? Woven into the domestic culture, Mailers
hipster gure gained unsettling, oppositional force; but put back within
a non-Western context, these representations might merely become fa-
miliar instances of the primitive and the irrational. There is a central
ambiguity in the ctions 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 representa-
tion 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 Matthiessens romantic primitiv-
ism creates a counterweight to these narratives of self-division. He po-
sitions 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
authors antidevelopmental idealism. Matthiessen develops Moon into
a form of missionary-avenger gure, a character increasingly convinced
that he can become a kind of savior for the native peoples. Moon simu-
lates 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 redemp-
tive leader of the indigenous peoples.
For Matthiessen, the idea of the mission has a capacious signi-
146 Stone Ages
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 (histori-
cal) latecomer to this missionary activity, he senses the irony and self-
deception 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 ac-
tually something nefarious; they get our hopes up with their optimistic
tales simply to get rid of us (180).
How does Matthiessens work t into an intellectual milieu framed
by a concern for development and a progressive sense of social evolu-
tion? Matthiessen seems, on rst consideration of this question, to be
one of those 1950s recusants, rather like Paul Bowles. Neither is inter-
ested in the quintessential terrain of U.S. progress, the suburbs, or the
afuent 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 ctions 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 gures standing outside such transition.
Traditional society, in Daniel Lerners 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 antimo-
dernity.
Matthiessens studies of Amazonia and Southeast Asia are also an
Americanization of those zones of primitive plenitude described by
Lvi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques. Like Lvi-Strauss, Matthiessen ex-
plores 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 anthropologi-
cal 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,
Stone Ages 147
Matthiessen found a way through the impasse by breaking into a poli-
tics of resistance where the writer would become an ally and amanuen-
sis for beleaguered communities faced with extinction.
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 cul-
tural internationalism. The intellectual conversation with French think-
ers, especially the anthropologists and cultural theorists who emerged
in the latter days of the Empire (that is, Lvy-Bruhl, Lvi-Strauss,
Fanon), was widespread and deep; their pervasive inuence will re-
quire further excavation as the mapping of American literary interna-
tionalism is carried forward. This Franco-American cultural dialogue
shaped texts written in the rst glow of Luces American Century,
narratives including The Spiders House or Under the Mountain Wall.
By the late 1960s Fanons work had resonated within the United States;
but the movement of Fanon into the emergent discipline of postcolo-
nial theory had been predated by other migrations of French thought
into the postwar intellectual milieu. One can trace the impress of cer-
tain key structural ideas upon American literary globalism. Bowles had
adopted Lvy-Bruhls primitive mentality into his representations of
American expatriates abroad in North Africa; Matthiessens intensely
entropological accounts of Southeast Asia and Amazonia emerged
from an inected reading of Lvi-Strauss. But it was Susan Sontag, in
essays on anthropology and the Vietnam War, who created the most
sustained engagement with the Frenchan engagement that can be
seen as a complex contestation, rewriting and ambiguous endorsement
of Claude Lvi-Strauss. Sontags essays The Anthropologist as Hero
(1963) and Trip to Hanoi (1968) create complex intertextual maps be-
tween the American experience of the 1960s and French readings of the
primitive, especially that fashioned by Lvi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques
(1955).
Although Sontags Against Interpretation (1966) is nowadays re-
membered for the classic essay Notes on Camp, her collection was
148 Stone Ages
also a signicant addition to the discourse of American international-
ism. 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 signicance of French anthropol-
ogy to American writers. She admired the theoretical esprit, creativ-
ity, and independence of Claude Lvi-Strauss (who had also, as he
pointed out, been inuenced in turn by Anglo-American anthropol-
ogy). Lvi-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 eld-
work 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 Lvi-Strauss uses his experienceto reect 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 moder-
nity, on the connection between literacy and power (72). One sees in
this argument a case for the benign inuence of Tristes Tropiques upon
Lvi-Strausss American followers. This work established a paradigm
of personal engagement and discursive variety (landscape . . . the idea
of travel . . . sunsets . . . modernity) whose inuence can be seen in
Matthiessens work or in Sontags 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 Frances midcentury intellectuals had mutated
into a gloomy rendering of cultural collapse: It is strange to think of
these ex-Marxistsphilosophical 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 sug-
gests, is pervasive in Lvi-Strausss 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
Stone Ages 149
from the pseudo-archaic, he acts out a heroic, diligent, and complex
modern pessimism (8081).
Sontags internationalist journey in the 1960s was dominated by
movements through varieties of complex modern pessimism. In read-
ing Lvi-Strauss, she found that the tropics were not merely sad but
in agony; and ve years later she made her rst trip to Asia, to Ha-
noi, where she experienced at rst 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 Ro-
land Barthes (Against Interpretation applied his semiotic methods to
contemporary popular culture), and her rst paragraphs about Hanoi
almost read as if she were anticipating his LEmpire 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 linguis-
tic alienationcut adrift among the signs of a foreign language whose
signicances 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 dif-
ference remove familiar reference points. This is a banal point when
stated baldly; but in Sontags 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 politi-
cal 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
essays critique in fact grows out of Sontags self-characterization as
stubbornly unspecialized. She presents a deantly generalist per-
sona, pitted against the military and diplomatic specialists. In an age
150 Stone Ages
of technocracy (one can catch the trace of the attack on technocracy,
bureaucracy, and specialization that had appeared in David Riesmans
and Christopher Laschs polemics) the nonspecialist will simply arrive,
observe, and work toward her independent essay. Sontags 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 Wrights 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 methods deliberate amateurishness and serendipity might
guarantee insights denied the specialist.
Sontag had not been to Asia before, but the trip proved at rst 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 couldnt avoid worrying and wondering how well I under-
stood the Vietnamese, and they me and my country (2078). 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: Viet-
nam had become so much a fact of my consciousness as an American
that I was having enormous difculty 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 nding the actual
person so much smaller, less vivid, less erotically charged, and mainly
different (209). Eventually, after citing a Godard movieGodard was
one of her reference points for establishing a poetics of defamiliariza-
tion (and another link with French culture)she settled into citing her
own journal to illustrate the initial encounter with Asia. Her rst 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 appar-
ent supercialities of a foreign culture constituted a paradoxical sub-
stance. If a sympathetic outsider could barely understand Vietnamese
Stone Ages 151
society, what would this imply about the broader American project to
read, decode, and manage Asia? In Sontags essay the sheer resistance
constituted by cultural difference would always serve to undermine
Western attempts to master non-Western worlds.
These entries constitute the rst part of the essay, and as one reads
further a clever formalistic response to Vietnam emerges. Sontag un-
derwent a change in her relations to the country, and after a while, she
claimed, she had gained some understanding; her original impressions
were just thatimpressions eventually overtaken by a richer aware-
ness. She created a formalistic method to embody the transition: there
is an opening record, transcribed from journals, which is the account
of a nave entrant into the contact zone where one meets foreigners.
Then there is a reective, approbatory account of Vietnams 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 blunderbussbuilt 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
entityAll I seem to have gured out about this place is that its a very
complex self that an American brings to Hanoi (229). Sontag herself
had created further exploratory narratives of interiority and selfhood in
experimental ctions such as Death Kit (1967). Compared to this socio-
psychological 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 cul-
tural 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 machin-
ery 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
152 Stone Ages
codes of encounter between her American party and their North Viet-
namese 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 ones own
American identity.
For Sontag, Vietnam in 1968 triggered a form of reverse ethnogra-
phy, as she became self-critically aware of her own cultural identity; yet
as we search backwards into the patterns of American literary interna-
tionalism it is Richard Wright, again, who emerges as the prescient g-
ure in developing a narrative where American identity would be scruti-
nized through travel and cultural encounter. But whereas Sontag had to
make her rst trip to Asia to nd that contact zone, for Wright otherness
could be found closer to home, in the West, in Europe, and particularly
in Spain.
In Color and Democracy Du Bois described the Spanish empires de-

cline and positioned Spain as a political frontera, a borderline state
where European glory and failure shone: Spain illustrates the interac-
tion 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
amenco, a dance form that seemed quintessentially Spanish and the
incarnation of many key Hispanic cultural themes. Ralph Ellisons 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 as-
sumed that it had, through enlightenment, science, and progress, dis-
pensed with those tragic, metaphysical elements of human life which
the art of amenco celebrates. In amenco one could nd a cultural
continuum linking the present back to a premodern, preenlightenment
world. The progressive Richard Wright, as we shall see, disliked this
African American Representations
of the Hispanic
Remaking Europe
7
154 African American Representations
primitivism; Ellison, however, admired amencos ancient passion and
staked a claim for its integrity. His amenco 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 demol-
ishing 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, Spains folk-culture could be decoded within an interpreta-
tive matrix solidly entrenched in arguments about modernity and the
meaning of Western culture. Ellison also linked amenco primitivism
to black musical forms such as the spiritual and jazz. Ellison found in
jazz, in the spiritual, and in amenco a non-Western, nonclassical au-
thenticity. Rejecting the charge of primitivism, he found in these mu-
sical 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
Ellisons 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 Euro-
pean and African. Spain straddles two civilizationsand black writers
explored Spain in part as a way to explore their own dual identities
within and outside American culture. Ellison identied the parallels
between Spanish culture and his own black American cultureafter
all, Americans have long found in Spanish culture a clarifying perspec-
tive on their own.
4
Second, Spanish culture embodied a primitivism
that challenged ideals of a classical Western culture. Flamenco (and for
other writers, bullghting offers a similar challenge) presented a rough-
hewn 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 de-
serves 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: Youll see what the Western world is made of.
African American Representations 155
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 suggesteda coun-
try, even a European one, might be primitive while putatively Western.
African American representations of Spain are signicant because they
disrupt and reshape the developmental paradigm. Development codi-
es countries, typically deploying a linear model of progress and tting
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 Ameri-
can 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 stie 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 midcen-
tury 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 19368 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 representa-
tions of archetypal Spanish subjects such as bullghting.
7
These works
emerged from the intense ideological struggles of the 1930s and 1940s,
and reected 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 artthe sense that events in Spain,
four thousand miles away, might now become (as they did for Mother-
well) 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. Wrights 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 Matthiessens work in Southeast Asia and Latin America.
Wrights text explicitly parodies the tradition of colonial and anthropo-
logical reports from primitive lands. Foregrounding a sense of a journey
backwards to earlier stages of development, Wright mimics a pseudo-
scientic 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 Spains articulation of a reverse ethnogra-
phy that creates looking-glass anthropology where a progressive black
American explores the customs of a foreign, ancient, European civili-
zation.
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 wars 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 Wrights racial
and cultural identity as a black American Protestant. In exploring a fas-
cination with Spain, he edged himself into specic literary genealogy:
a chain of black American writers who found in Spain a seductive and
fascinating cultural zone. Wrights journey was framed by the context of
late American modernism, but it was equally framed by African Ameri-
can writing. As M. Lynn Weiss notes, in one of few specic accounts of
Pagan Spain, the larger ambition was to place the history of African
Americans (and particularly Wrights own history) in a global context.
9
Weiss charts that ambition by looking at Pagan Spain in the frame-
work of Wrights oeuvre or via analogues with white American writing
about Spain. She notes Wrights 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, specically black forms of
written engagement with Spain. Take, for instance, Nella Larsen. Ap-
plying for a Guggenheim Foundation award in November 1929, Larsen
specically 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
Andaluca and Mallorca in 193132.
11
Her biographer, Thadious Davis,
notes rather listless journeys among the Anglo-American expatriates.
Larsens great claims for Spain failed to generate new writing. Mean-
while, Claude McKay was working in Bilbao, Madrid, and Barcelona.
He spent the winter and spring of 192930 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 Spains signicance as a hybridized place where antique Ca-
tholicism rubbed against North Africa and the Islamic world. Traveling
between mainland Europe and his home in Morocco, McKay under-
stood 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 identi-
ed Wrights 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 Spaina Spain
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, connec-
tions, and borders, articulated by black writers from the 1930s through
the 1950s, now seems prophetic. Robbie Robertson suggestively re-
draws the global map in The Three Waves of Globalization: The world
consists of three main continentsAfro-Eurasia, the Americas, and Aus-
tralia. Thus Europe is not a continent but a subcontinent, and the Near
East or Middle East is more properly described as West Asia. Trav-
eling 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 gure 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 briey during my days
as a seamanValencia and Alicantebut had not been able to go in-
land. 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 conicts racial dimensions, notably Francos 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 popula-
tion.
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 HeroInternational Bri-
gade and Madrid1937 are examples of competent agitprop poetry
locked in the civil wars immediate drama. They invoke and reinstate
a familiar iconography of heroism and battle sites but do little to forge
a fresh language of political conict. I Wonder as I Wander moves on
from this classic leftist form toward a writing sensitized to the complexi-
ties of the struggle, particularly racial crosscurrents: central passages of
the reminiscence deal with the black presence among the Republicans.
One chapter, Negroes in Spain, is a litany of names, an international-
ized list that testies to black presence:
At Villa Paz I saw also Ed White, one of the rst two men of color
to come to Spain in the original Lincoln Brigade. The other, Alonzo
Watson, had been the rst Negro slain in the Spanish War. In the
hospital at Quinto I talked with Crawford Morgan of New York. Un-
der 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 NegroesTom Brown, Frank Wareeld, 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 blacknessand to congure 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 Ameri-
can literary internationalism, was also creating a fresh sense of America
itself: a nation being remade by internal black migration into a series of
signicant urban centers. Hughes seeks out examples of black sacrice
to position within a narrative about resistance to fascism. Thus the ele-
giac ring to these sentences: The other, Alonzo Watson, had been the
rst Negro slain in the Spanish War. What happens here is that Hughes
moves toward placing Spain as a signicant African American lieu de
mmoire, a site of memory, a place where history and private commemo-
rative 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 Wrights 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 Hughess sup-
port for New Challenger magazine; and during at least two periods of
his life (1935 and 1951) Wright gave public lectures on Hughess work.
Their two books might be read as a furtherance of a lifelong literary
conversation, a dialogue that had now turned outwards into interna-
tionalist writing and Spain.
20
Hughes, for instance, anticipates the at-
tentiveness to religion that will be such a major part of Wrights study.
He notes the Falangists religiosity: The Falangist papers reaching
Madrid were most religious, even running in their advertisements slo-
gans 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. Hughess realization that even the secular world of
politics is saturated with religious iconography meshes with Wrights
condemnation of Hispanic paganism. As such, I Wonder as I Wander
both anticipated and perhaps underpinned Wrights attempt in Pagan
Spain to decode a foreign cultures foundational structures.
What this African American genealogy of writing about Spain dem-
onstrates is an increasingly concrete awareness of local politics and cul-
ture, 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 Wrights Other World
Wright himself had rst written about Spain during the civil war; in 1937
he published six articles on the topic for the New York Daily Worker.
They shared Hughess desire to draw attention to black American pres-
ence in the conict, 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 creat-
ing a cross-cultural comparison that anticipated Pagan Spain. These
articles were relatively early instances of Wrights expanding cultural
internationalism. One might think of Wrights career in terms of a
steady movement toward cultural anthropology: questions of cultural
otherness and mediations between different societies came decisively
to the fore during his 1950s work. He moved on from the polemics and
urban naturalism of his early career to become a literary anthropolo-
gist, translator, and traveler. In 195960, 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 re-
main unpublished (the manuscript is in the Beinecke Library at Yale
University). Floyd Ogburn has written about these poems as a depar-
ture from Wrights 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 Wrights 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 ac-
tual 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,
Wrights biographer, characterizes these trips to Africa and Spain as
linked by a preoccupation with irrationality. Underlining Wrights
own faith in rationality Fabre contends: For the rst time in Africa,
Wright was really afraid, afraid of the pagan religion with its incom-
prehensible and bloody practices.
24
Fabre is surely right to locate this
link between Wrights varied travel bookseven 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 under-
scored 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 instru-
ment 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
There is a recurrent cultural irony at play in Pagan Spain. The
profoundly secular Wright nds 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 Wrights resistancecomic and exasperatedto
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 rst 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 patron-
izing ministrations. In a later exchange, a visit to a village sees him be-
come quite literally the object of scrutiny. While peasants stare at him,
he is an object that was neither human nor animal (13132), Wright
becomes the target of the racialized gaze.
26
Above all, the villagers con-
gure 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 conde-
scension in their manner; they acted with the quiet assurance of men
who knew that they had the only truth in existence and they were of-
fering it to me (1617). The obtrusive phrase here is the only truth in
existence. Pagan Spain is a text where the object of anthropological
study usurps the ethnographers 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, quizzi-
cal 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 com-
plicit 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 Steins
phrase, Spain is primitive, but lovely. For Stein, Spains primitiv-
ism denotes a familiar notion of romantic backwardness. Images of
Spanish ruin and romantic failure emerged in American writing as
early as Washington Irvings The Alhambra (1832); but Wright was the
rst writer to attempt a detailed ideological analysis of Iberian back-
wardness. Paganism is cognate with this backwardness, but it also
has a politicized inection, 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 im-
perial power, Spain, had become a bizarrely antediluvian society. At the
center of its national identity, the sheer backwardness of premodern be-
lief; within Spains 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
signies a curious and dangerous fusion of intense Catholicism and re-
pressive 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 Spains
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, emphasiz-
ing how far Spain had fallen to the rear of her sister European nations
(117). Underpinning this commentary is a straightforward progressiv-
ism; Wright reads off a landscape literally encoded with signs of devel-
opment. Terrain becomes text, a script where the traveler nds marks
of economic or political advance.
Pagan Spain complemented Wrights other works of the 1950s as
an ironic critique of European pretensions to advancement. It was a
skeptical take on Galbraiths decade of development and European
pretensions to advancement. Spain was a modern nation congured as
part of a dark continent, saturated with superstition, irrationality, op-
pression, and totalitarianism. In his nal paragraphs Wright explicitly
rooted this irrational paganism in 1492s imperial impulse:
In 1492, in the name of God, the Son and the Holy Ghost, the Catho-
lic 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 Gods 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 sacrices 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 Wrights 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 Inquisi-
torial regime and a single-minded ideology that were the antithesis of
progress. Wrights 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 parti-
san form of a liberal, republican progressivism, where Spains monar-
chy, its Church, and its empire were inserted into a Manichean world-
view, 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
Wrights fascination with factual or documentary discourses, and with
a literary globalism that might draw on the analytical methods of the so-
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 so-
ciological and polemical work, a monumental analysis of the African
American urban community that folded together statistical and demo-
graphic analysis with political theory. Wright introduced the book with
praise for the honest science of Chicagothe sociological research
of luminaries such as the University of Chicagos 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, journal-
ism, letters, guidebooks, confessional narrative, and, most important,
ction.
30
These various registers can be found in Wrights book, but its
two dominant modes are a form of analytic essay (derived from political
science or sociology) and a wryly ironic rst-person narrative. When
he began to work on the Spanish job Wright examined the nations
history; he also researched at the United Nations library in Geneva,
reading up-to-date information on the development of Spains econ-
omy.
31
This combination of historical reading with socioeconomic
analysis provides Pagan Spains 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 meth-
ods. On his journey to Geneva he was accompanied by his old friend,
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). Pa-
gan Spains analytical, essayistic, and academic registers are clearly
indebted to Wrights grounding in the social science of Myrdal, Park,
and the Chicago school. At the arguments 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, Formacin Poltica: Lecciones para las Lechas.
He uses this text to mesh Columbuss explorations with Spanish fas-
cism. 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 full? to which the answer given is: Since the most re-
mote 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 mis-
sionaries they sent there, to civilize the whole of America (30). The
Formacin Poltica has two functions within Pagan Spain: rst, it acts
as a skein to link together the texts disparate sections; second, it reveals
the Spanish ideology in the ideologys own words. This is self-revela-
tion, an exposure of pagan Spain through its own discourse. Wright
grandiloquently deploys Formacin Poltica 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 Wrights answer to Steins comment
that Spain is where one can nd 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
countrys central, dening ideology or what Myrdal had termed a
creed: through the nations texts or documents that ideology or
creed reveals itself. Wright steadily denes the Spanish ideology: pa-
gan 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
the identication 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 identied 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 Myrdals American
progressivism, locating a European creed of antidevelopmentalism.
Pagan Spains argumentative pattern moves between a generalized,
theoretical analysis and highly specic, localized illustrations of Span-
ish life. Wright attempts, not always successfully, to yoke together a gen-
eralizing rhetoric (centered on ideology or creed) with the travel-writ-
ers reliance on telling vignettes or cameos. Pagan Spains random and
varied encounters are bracketed by a cultural anthropology attuned to
this underlying creed or social ethos. When he conrms the correspon-
dence between Spanish Protestants and African Americans the reader
recognizes a carefully precise, social scientic rhetoric: I shall describe
some of the facets of the psychological problems and the emotional suf-
ferings of a group of white Negroes whom I met in Spain (137; Wrights
italics). Behind such sentences lies Wrights reading of sociologists such
as Myrdal and Cayton. At the same time, Pagan Spain undoubtedly po-
sitions its neoscientic rationale alongside a more familiar humanism.
Note in the above sentences Wrights 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 specic context.
One unsettling scenario takes its cue from Spains hostility toward
its tiny Protestant minority. Wright here follows Myrdals 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
Christ, could hardly be more explicit. Wrights account of under-
ground 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 child-
hood. 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 psychologi-
cal suffering that the Spanish Protestant was doomed to undergo at the
hands of the Church and State ofcials and his Catholic neighbours.
For that exquisite suffering and emotional torture, I have a spontane-
ous 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 Ameri-
can abroad. Wright found another form of doubled religious identity
in Spain. He remains the ercely disaffected atheist, but his acute sen-
sitivity 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 dis-
section of the policing of Spanish society, create a distinctively Afri-
can American account of Francos regime. While the book bears the
contextual impress of the cold war and ideological struggles between
Communism and Fascism (for example, in Wrights fascination with
totalitarianism), it is also marked by a black Southerners alertness to
harassment and the psychology of marginality. Just as in earlier civil
war writing he drew parallels between the Spanish Loyalists and Af-
rican 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 afnities that they held in common
with American Negroes, Jews, and other oppressed minorities. It is an-
other proof, if any is needed today, that the main and decisive aspects of
human reactions are conditioned and are not inborn (137). Crucially,
the afnity 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 so-
cieties 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 nal 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.
Wrights travels often lead to rather vertiginous moments, when the
temporary liberation from the self that one might expect from travel
collapses back into xity 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 trans-
formation promised by stepping outside of ones own culture. Never-
theless, it is one thing to recognize for oneself that apparently marginal
elements of a life-narrative might remain salient; it is another to nd 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 discomted by the importance the Spanish accord his
skin color. For the Spanish, colordarknessis 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, unset-
tling implication of Steins 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
identity out therethe WestWright nds that he is what this West-
ern world is made of, that his skin is an alterity used by that culture to
articulate itself.
A Western Man of Color
Let us return to the moment when Wright rst encounters the Spanish:
I was a heathen. . . . I was not only a stranger, but a lost one in dire
need of being saved (1617). What interests me here is the simultane-
ous recognition and obscuring of racial difference. The Spanish im-
mediately mark his otherness; but by a process of transference this ra-
cial 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 isthe descendant of Africans? Framing this
encounter, in fact, is a much larger displacement in the text: the explo-
ration of various kinds of racial Others (the Moor, the Native Ameri-
can) in place of a recognition of the role that Africans played in the con-
struction 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 difcult to see how the subject of slavery could be over-
looked. In place of Wrights lacuna (slaverys absence), there is a histo-
riographic 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 powersjust
as the term Negro was adopted into English, with a heavy implica-
tion 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
Blackburns
magisterial study suggests one reply to Steins assertion that in Spain
Wright would nd 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
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 intel-
lectual framework began to give way to a rewritten history of slavery.
Kenneth Stampps The Peculiar Institution (1956) and Stanley Elkinss
Slavery (1959) created a new historiographical space for institutional
and comparative analysis (Elkins explicitly positioned North Ameri-
can 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 na-
tion was neededan 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 Wrights other 1950s writings
one can see that he would always take a very specic interpretative line
on Spain. In a sense, that country took on a broader theoretical reso-
nance for him, and what mattered was the overall shape of its irrational-
ism. Spain could then be tted 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 particularTradition and Industrializationrepre-
sents what is perhaps the nest condensation of his meditations on the
new postwar globalism. For Wright industrialization stands for mo-
dernity; 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 Africas industrial modernization). The essay makes it clear
that the underpinning theme of all the travel books, including Pagan
Spain, was modernityand 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 com-
prehensive model of Western civilizations expansion and its encounter
with Asian and African otherness. Declaring himself a Western man
of color he acknowledges the Wests agency, while deploring its de-
fensiveness and racism.
36
Wrights sense of historical transition is on
full display, as is his sense of historical ironythe 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 political-
cultural resistance to its own hegemony. For Wright, presenting him-
self as a clear-eyed observer of historical change, the Wests 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 Pa-
gan Spain enters and alters the domain of Wrights work. For Pagan
Spain created a reading of the West marked by his chronically skepti-
cal . . . 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 na-
tions. What strikes the twenty-rst-century reader of these texts is their
interlocked, mutually reinforcing power. Gertrude Stein had advised
Wright that in Spain he would nd 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 pagan-
ism 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
is that Im 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 soci-
ology, nascent international relations thought, psychology, and liberal
economics, became the dominant discourse in U.S. writing of the
Other. Wrights 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 ter-
rain to the development theorists, and like them he was rooted in mid-
century 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. Wrights signicance becomes a pivotal
one, when we look back at his career from an early twenty-rst-cen-
tury position. He was one of the rst writers to register a moment of
transition, as a radical Marxism founded within the Victorian industrial
order began to fade, while religious observanceas a political phenom-
enonreasserted itself. Again and again, in Indonesia, Spain, and Af-
rica, Wright nds 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 recogni-
tion 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.
The world has changed a great deal since Richard Wright ew to Indo-
nesia and Paul Bowles drove around Morocco in a chauffeured Bentley.
What E. P. Thompson termed the enormous condescension of poster-
ity 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 dif-
culties recurs across a range of textsof different genres (travel writ-
ing, ction, social science survey), with different audiences. First, most
American commentators assumed that progressformulated as a
Western, technologically driven, and increasingly secular movement
was the inevitable dynamic of all cultures. This belief animated Daniel
Lerners hopeful progressivism. Certain literary intellectuals recognized
the ideological centrality of this notion and then created countervailing
representations: hence Paul Bowless 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 writers task became the commemoration of sites near ex-
tinction. What would these writers think of the conspicuous lack of
progress or development in many parts of our world? Figures such as
Ugly Americans and Vanishing Europeans
American Presence, European Decolonization
8
176 Ugly Americans and Vanishing Europeans
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 ll newspapers and Web pages.
Second, the development paradigm meant that the immediate his-
torical backdrop to the postwar world was often obscured. Belief in the
passing of traditional societies meant that decolonizations fallout was
barely registered by political or social theorists. Development proffered
a model of historical change that at times discounted colonialisms
continuing relevance to the postcolonial situation. To work within the
tradition of American progressivism, with its commitment to the fu-
ture 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 reg-
istered 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 signicantless interesting reallythan the new selves and
cultures brought about by transition into modernity.
The third difculty centered on religion. Often, a foreign cultures
religious practices appeared bafing, bizarre, or irredeemably exotic to
social scientists and the ction 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 traveler-
writers really grappled with religions centrality in many cultures. Again,
though, one notes the ways in which the African American globalist tra-
dition 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 continuingif not expand-
ingrole that religion plays in the international affairs of the twenty-
rst century. Although he wrote in a Marxist tradition, Du Bois always
remained sensitive to the role that religion played in African Ameri-
can 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
Ugly Americans and Vanishing Europeans 177
forcedin West Africa, Indonesia, and Spainto share the older mans
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 religions continuing
signicance, they tended to lock non-Christian faiths (notably, Islam)
into exotic narratives of magic and difference. Very few travelers sensed
that religionagain we think of Islammight continue to resonate as
nationalism or as a form of political resistance to the West. This is one
reason why Wrights conversations in Africa and Asia were so impor-
tant; he found himself surprised by, and having to account for, the on-
going importance of religious belief across global society, even though
his own intellectual odyssey was toward self-secularization. To Wrights
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 en-
counter with an Islamic radical at Bandung resonates as an exceptional
moment, not only for the tension that underwrote the conversation, but
for the exchanges sheer idiosyncrasy, as Wright recognized that within
the emergent nations that so thrilled him, there would be gures whose
pagan intensity (to adopt his phraseology) resisted the transition to
modernity.
In this chapter I want to work with some of these issuesmodern-
ization, secularization, developmentby juxtaposing four texts writ-
ten in the 1950s: The Ugly American (1958) by William J. Lederer and
Eugene Burdick; Saul Bellows Henderson the Rain King (1959); Er-
nest Hemingways Under Kilimanjaro (written in the 1950s, although
published posthumously); and a Carnegie Report on expatriate experi-
ence, missionaries, and diplomacy, The Overseas Americans (1960). In
the texts we see ctional 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
specic 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
Asia or Africa. For Lederer and Burdick, Bellow, and Hemingway, the
ction of development is also a stage for presenting a particular gure,
the robust and neo-Rooseveltian pragmatic American who will replace
the settlers, colonial administrators, and fonctionnaires of European
empire.
The basic American ethic is revered and honored:
Burdick and Lederer
In one of the periods most notorious books, The Ugly American, the
authors, William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, concluded their nar-
rative with A Factual Epilogue that pinned the tale directly into a real-
world setting. The books title gave rise to a clich (the ugly American
crashing around a globe he barely understands or cares to understand),
a now-hackneyed phrase that masks the books role in performing sig-
nicant cultural work. The Ugly American was as close as the American
novel gets to a Graham Greene type of political ction: 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-million-
copy bestseller whose title became a synonym for what was wrong with
American foreign policynote the past tense), and its success encour-
aged the authors to write a sequel, Sarkhan, published in 1965.
The ctional republic of Sarkhan is a generic Southeast Asian na-
tion, 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 per-
sonnel witness the nal defeat of Frances 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 communisms 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
direct impact on quality of life. Diplomatically, the United States is woe-
fully 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:
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-sufciency, 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 prag-
matic engagement with the local scene, establishes anticommunism and
democratic self-sufciency in Asia. Radical military tactics (based on
Maos guerrilla strategy), innovative farming, sensitive diplomacy, and
language skills: these form the transformational, revolutionary Ameri-
can 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 ju-
dicious 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
diplomacys limitations. The context is the cold war, but characters de-
ploy a language rooted in 1940s conceptions of the world community.
American policy focuses on a mobilization of the world community
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 mid-
1940s ideal of the global world community; and the paranoid style of
a cold war discourse xated on conspiracy. Later episodes use these
two discourses for an analysis of the Sarkhan crisisand by extension
for an analysis of Americas relationship with Asia. The writers create
a telling incident where the ambassador, Gilbert MacWhite, nds 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 aw (105). Paranoia
and missionary zeal intertwine; the missionary impulse nds 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 ction. With the United States embroiled in Viet-
nams deepening conict, the analysis supplied by Burdick and Le-
derer proved resonant. As Neil Sheehan demonstrated in his Vietnam
history Bright Shining Lie, the novels ctionalization of U.S. involve-
ment in Southeast Asia occupied a strange interzone where fact met
ction. The Ugly Americans central character, Colonel Hillandale, was
based on Major General Edward Lansdale, a key gure 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 Commu-
nist Hukbalahap rebels in the Philippines in the early 1950s. The Ugly
American helped to cement Lansdales position as a radical, freethink-
ing, ofcer attuned to the new ways of cold war conict. According to
Sheehan, Vietnam ofcers such as John Paul Vann read the novel with
interest: The Ugly American, the novel by Eugene Burdick and Wil-
liam Lederer that had embellished Lansdales legend and made good
sense to Vann when he had read it, was a political tract, written as c-
tion . . . 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 ex-
ample of serious political thought.
3
This crossover between fact and ction works in both directions.
The ctional world of The Ugly American is touched by the histori-
cal context of postwar involvement in Asian insurgencies. At the same
time, Sheehans historical account of Vietnam sometimes reads as if it
were a ction created by those maverick analysts, Burdick and Lederer.
Sheehans novelistic treatment of Vietnam and his extended medita-
tion on John Paul Vann create a strange elision, as the gures of 1950s
literary internationalism were incarnated in a real life gure. Sheehan
shapes Vann as if he were a character from a developmental ction.
Vann is the modern American manager, a descendant of the men in grey
annel suits characterized by the postwar sociologists. He is a soldier,
but he has an mba in logistics; his evenings in the eld are spent com-
piling reports and strategic analyses. Furthermore, Vanns 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 Sheehans evaluation, is ultimately a gure
committed to pragmatic engagement with Vietnamese society and that
societys steady modernization. Vann wanted to work with the grain of
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
ghting would be done by the South Vietnamese: The primary if un-
spoken mission of the American troops would be political . . . the core
of a new strategythe 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 Lerners analysis of the Middle East and search for the transi-
tional elements within a traditional society.
That imaginative space where Americans represented their inser-
tion into the developing world had become a place where popular c-
tions, real-life biographies, imagined narratives, and practical policy in-
tersected 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 nal chapter is A Factual Epilogue, in
which the authors state: Although the characters are indeed imaginary
and Sarkhan is a ction, 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 novelists ction making. In a way, Burdick and Lederer suggest,
the American writer simply cannot afford the privileged space of dis-
engagement from politics. So some sections of the text feature barely
ctionalized 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 ctional-
ized 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 textstill in print and embedded in the popular culture by
dint of its memorably acerbic title. Burdick and Lederer posit a post-
European model of how to read and manage the developing world. In
their ctional 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. Burdicks work, as Rupert
Wilkinson has pointed out, reveals a continual fascination with the ex-
pert, an expatriate specialist who can engage immediately and decisively
with alien cultures. Burdicks overseas scenarios are apt to feature a type
of tough, brainy hero which we might call the cultural operatorone 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 gures. Colo-
nel Hillandale is the typical Burdick gure 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 Wests favor.
7
Burdick and Lederer had few precedents when they came to invent
their ctional Asian nationor at least, few American precedents. The
British imperial novel forms an underlying matrix for The Ugly Ameri-
can; but the authors had to invent a new gure to become a counterpart
to the British settlers, soldiers, and imperial administrators.
They also needed a gallery of gures to set against the Soviets: in this
cold war setting, the Soviets played the best game, with their profes-
sional (a favorite term) corps of well-trained, linguistically adept dip-
lomats and development experts. The Soviets in The Ugly American get
on with the job, are brilliantly professional, eschew ashiness. The
Ugly American addresses their threat by positioning a post-European,
thoroughly American overseas operator: Asia now receives the tech-
nocratic U.S. soldier-diplomat. A brilliant meritocrat, this new gure
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
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 ctional embodiment of
that casual, democratic militarism rst seen in the hagiographic ac-
counts of Theodore Roosevelts Rough Riders: if America is to have
imperialists, they should bein dress and mannerinformal, casual
and everyday gures, not the starched mannequins of the British Em-
pire.
8
Atkins possesses an innate masculine virtue and an integrity that
can be counterpointed (as Ugly American explicitly shows) against Brit-
ish stufness 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 Roosevel-
tian 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 Roosevelts eyes, a sterling, all-American regi-
ment.
9
The Ugly American updates this ideal and inserts the Roosevel-
tian 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 muck-
ing-in, easygoing and immediately likable. Their innate democratic af-
fability, the novel suggests, forges an American charm that can win wars.
The Ugly American is scathing about amateurish engagements in Asia but
nds 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 Le-
derer suggest, it will be occupied by embodiments of pragmatism, stal-
wart masculinity, and inherent modestyinternationalized incarnations
of Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt. The chicken farmer, Tom
Knox, embodies Midwestern straightforwardness; he is a poultry special-
ist from Iowa who wants to share his expertise with peasant communities
but faces an entrenched development ideology that privileges big infra-
structural projects. Tom is thanked for his work by a French diplomat
who ies 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 deca-
dence. 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 Americans recasting of the relationship between Amer-
ica and Europe is central to the texts mapping of U.S. engagements
in Asia. Clearly, Burdick and Lederer had created a narrative where
American power would encounter and then succeed established Eu-
ropean presence. What is signicant is that this middlebrow yarn, with
its curious mixture of exoticism and practical advice, had entered an
arena already prepared by international affairs commentary. Americas
movement into what still seemed to be a highly Europeanized global
system had already elicited a range of prescient essays. It is chasten-
ing 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 intel-
lectuals came across references to North Africa, it was likely to be in
the context of an essay such as G. L. Arnolds piece, French Politics:
Failure and Promise, published in Partisan Review (1953). Arnold dis-
cussed the endless war in Indo-China (Frances doomed last attempt
to assert itself in Vietnam; the asco at Dien Bien Phu occurred a year
later) or tension in North Africa (decolonizations 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 pub-
lished a piece called European Anti-Americanism, examining the
ironic reversal whereby Europe had become the colony of its former
colony; this was a powerful early critique of European anti-Ameri-
canism and an early acknowledgement of the United States as emergent
global superpower.
12
Another essay, by Hannah Arendt, Understand-
ing and Politics, foregrounded an important discussion of imperialism
while dening the British Empire in historical terms; Arendt picked
up Churchills phrase, the liquidation of the British Empire, to place
British power rmly in the past.
13
And a later essay by G. L. Arnold,
Co-Existence: Between Two Worlds, remains rmly 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 Arnolds early version of domino theory
in the argument that India might be lost to the West through Com-
munism.
14
Partisan Review writers, then, sensed a moment of transi-
tion, as they identied the world orders 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 wars ideological struggle. It made its points simply but
tellingly, deploying a comic book version of Emersons representa-
tive menthe kinds of Americans we nd and should hope to nd in
Southeast Asia. Through its ramshackle hybridism (ction, guidebook,
polemic, satire) The Ugly American also shaped the emerging debates
about the United Statess 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
(beginning in fall 1956, the date of Suez) a major Syracuse University proj-
ect 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 authorsHarlan Cleveland, Gerard J. Mangone, and John Clarke
Adamswarned that the American educational system has not yet
mobilized its imagination and its resources to meet the urgent require-
ments 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 busi-
ness presence was expanding. The project team placed researchers in
Yugoslavia, Iran, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Japan, while two of the au-
thors 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 Lerners Passing of Traditional Society (also dating from
this late 1950s milieu) the teams research methods would consist of the
interview, the questionnaire, the personality test, and the biographic
data sheet. And as with Lerners work, David Riesman took his place
in the background of the studyhere 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 reform-
ing 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 Bellows 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 profes-
sor, are working to militarize, proselytize, or to reorganize the lives of
their foreign cousins. Most of the latter are not unhappy to have these
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 fo-
cus for American-led militarization or proselytizing is not a question
that occurred to the Carnegie experts; cold war imperatives obscured
difcult 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 persons goodwill
is another persons interference, especially if the two have different col-
ored 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, Americas pure
products will emerge all the brighter. The problem is that behavior
and attitudes obscure goodwillthe 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 com-
mentators 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 ac-
tivities 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 or-
ganizations. 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. Nonethe-
less, they remained embodiments of a distinctive national ideology of
progress and development: As evangelists for schooling and sanita-
tion, 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
As American policymakers, intellectuals, and writers began to formu-
late early responses to the post-Suez realm, Saul Bellow created his own
freewheeling riff on these themes of pragmatism, evangelism, and Amer-
ican immersion in Africa: Henderson the Rain King (1959). As a one-
time student of anthropology and the former editor, as Morris Dickstein
wryly notes, of a journal called The Noble Savage, Bellows 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,
Bellows 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 Bellows 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) self-
hood found throughout Bellows ction. 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). Hen-
derson himself is a brilliant recasting of The Ugly Americans idealism,
technocracy, and ugliness. Speaking in his amplied, mock-heroic
rst-person, Henderson himself draws attention to his size, his sheer
physical presence, and grotesquely amusing details such as the tattoo of
his wifes 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 Twains
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court (1889), replaying the con-
trast between Yankee technological progressivism and absolute back-
wardness (European feudalism or African rituals). What strikes the
twenty-rst-century reader is the gusto with which Bellow redeploys
stereotypical images of African rituals and mysticism that seem half-
remembered 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
hyperbolic fantasy about the overseas American and his wonderful ca-
pabilities. One also notes the careful references to heroes of the British
Empire, such as the explorer of Labrador, Sir Wilfred Grenfell; Hen-
derson 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 Kiliman-
jaro), 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 Bellows 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 po-
liticala sense that the American buffoon-technocrat can nally enter
into the underdeveloped world and become the rain king.
The novel parodies many of modernisms recurrent fascinations:
primitivism, ritual, and the contemporary selfHenderson moves
through a ctional Africa engineered by Conrad, Eliot, and Heming-
way. Henderson the Rain King suggests that writing about a foreign
space often becomes a discourse about ones 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 Conrads Kurtz, traveling through a terrain that might have been
imagined by J. G. Frazier. There is a kind of mirroring effect in the
novels mapping of Africa: the country becomes a primitivist reposi-
tory for the themes and tropes of Western modernism. And ultimately,
Hendersons comic imperial individualism remains Bellows cynosure;
Africa signies 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 y 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
spaces, not a settler. His stay is a temporary one, part of a larger pattern
of movement. The novels last lines crystallize a dream of restless Amer-
ican 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 supremacythe beautiful propellers of
an intercontinental aircraft. Out of Africa (and its noisy black chaos),
Henderson feels a sense of release and reafrmation 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 riv-
eted 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 runningleaping,
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 nations day and
then to move on the world stage. But the narrative structures of The
Ugly American, Henderson the Rain King, and Hemingways Under
Kilimanjaro also suggest the complexities of inserting American pro-
tagonists 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 Hendersons plainspoken catchphrases). Under Kili-
manjaro presents another, more twisted narrative response to decoloni-
zation. Although we associate late Hemingway with his elegiac memo-
ries 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 rst version, Hemingways son, Patrick, edited the two-
hundred-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 fathers work, and reshaped the text
as a binary romance where Hemingway moves between the relation-
ships with his wife and a native African woman. Patrick Hemingway
also discussed the text as a postcolonial document, a ction 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 195354, that there was no future forfor want of a better
termwhite 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 narratives posthumous publication should not obfuscate its sig-
nicance. Its very range tracks a host of cultural and political motifs
current in the 1950s. Hemingways love of the huntparticularly the
safarihad serendipitously led him into one of the contested spaces of
the decolonization era. This is eccentric late Hemingway, but as with
Dos Passoss Brazil on the Move, the nal stages of a modernist career
witnessed continued engagement with world politics. The text reca-
pitulates many of Hemingways 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, techni-
cal account of hunting; the sentimental and intermittently ironic lan-
guage of marital love; the barely ctionalized memoir of Hemingways
circle at a specic moment in time; and the tiresome barroom humor.
The manuscript is then specically located in terms of time, place, and
political context. The place is Kenya, as it moves toward decoloniza-
tion; effectively, after Indian independence and South Africas Unilat-
eral Declaration of Independence, the country had become the last ma-
jor British colony in terms of status (unlike Nigeria, Kenya had a large
white settler population). Hemingways autobiographical rst-person
narrator moves among a late colonial cast: the white hunters, colonial
ofcials, and boys of the savannah. But this was also the moment of
the Mau Mau emergency (as it was known by the British), although
Hemingway for the most part sidesteps commentary on the insurgency
or the colonial authoritys brutal response.
25
As Christopher Ondaatje
(brother of the novelist Michael Ondaatje) has recently pointed out,
Hemingways 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 argu-
ment 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 con-
temporary change within a late imperial order.
27
Living and working in Kenya, Hemingway was an American abroad
amid the British Empires literal and textual spaces. Hemingways 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 g-
ures such as the old soak, G. C. (Gin Crazed) feature prominently.
Surrounded by the accoutrements of the settlersthe booze, ries,
and ironic social ritualsthe 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 writ-
ing of Empire are at moments starkly immediate; Patrick Hemingway
refers to his fathers 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 run-
ning through this American text from the period of decolonizationan
anxiety about being seen as European or, specically, British. It is all
too easy to become generically Western, to lose what is uniquely or
exceptionally American, or even to become identied with the fail-
ures 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
United States. The Ugly American focused these problems in military-
diplomatic terms and deployed French culture as a dening 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 antiquarian-
ism. Textual and contextual information also conrms Hemingways
deep immersion in British colonialism; the narrative results of that im-
mersion were conicted plotlines and an awkward series of character-
izations and self-characterizations: Hemingway became an honorary
member of an African tribe in Kenya, but he also became an honorary
British colonial ofcial during his safari.
In traveling through East Africa Hemingway moved into a literal and
written space, and he inserted his own writing into the eld of imperial
textuality. Kenya was an intensely written place, the center of a broader
East African world recounted in travel books and ctions by Evelyn
Waugh and Wilfred Thesiger. Hemingways text is shadowed by this
work. A colonial police ofcer says to him at one point that were the
last of the Empire builders. In a way were like Rhodes and Dr. Living-
stone. Hemingways response: In a way, I said.
30
From this context,
its impossible to imagine the tone in which this statement is uttered,
although its hard not to imagine a meld of laconic humor and irony un-
derpinning these words. Empires 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
(16970). One way to read Under Kilimanjaro is as an American text
written back to the British Empire, a novel where the U.S. traveler di-
rectly inserts himself into a quintessential imperial terrain.
31
But the cultural impress of Europe on the globe posed another
worrythat of homosexuality. In a classic maneuver Hemingway de-
marcates and divides his tribes according to a code of loyalty and au-
thenticity; and these tribal demarcations are also sexual. The Masai are
portrayed as coddled, idolized by the homosexuals; but Heming-
way venerated the Wakamba, who were completely loyal to the Brit-
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 ght.
They had always been drug addicts and now they were becoming alco-
holics (130). The Masai ght, Hemingway adds, under a mass hysteria
which cannot come off except under the inuence of drugs (130). Mark
Spilkas case for Hemingways quarrel with androgyny here becomes
especially compelling, as the writer ghts to fend off associations be-
tween 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? Hemingways 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 im-
perialism? He invokes, resists, mocks, pastiches, and pays homage to
the British Empire; but he refuses, as it were, to refuse it. Hemingways
text, with its gallery of colonial types and its aristocratic joshing, en-
compasses 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-
print. This now seems a telling ctional 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 Heming-
ways ctional memoir reimagines the culture and politics of decolo-
nizing Africa. One narrative strand focuses on post-Lawrentian trib-
alism. Hemingway seems to have wanted to create a form of invented
tribal religionan invented tradition for the strangely hybrid world he
nds 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 re-
sponse to cultural detraditionalization or merely amounts to intellectual
scavenging is our next question.
Hemingways self-fashioning is complexly related to his encoun-
ters with non-American cultures and his pursuit of an authenticity
that canrather paradoxically, perhapsalso absorb and synthesize
cultural otherness. Hemingway is the most recognizably branded of
U.S. writers in his general image of masculine independence, synony-
mous 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 dif-
ferent culture. In a sense, however, the two sides of Hemingwayif we
momentarily separate them in this wayare part of the same persona.
For Hemingway, personality or character is founded on ideals of tech-
nique and adaptability; by learning a particular hunting tactic, or how
to sh or to box, one can achieve a certain mastery of self and envi-
ronment. This mastery allows one to pass into a different cultural
space, although ones own innate characterthe importance of being
Ernestremains 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 self-
created identity. Charo, his wifes gun bearer, had wished to convert
me to Islam some twenty years before and I had gone all through Rama-
dan with him observing the fast (32). Typically, the accession to Islamic
belief (and what a prospect that would be: Hemingway as an Ameri-
can-Islamic author!) comes not through a leap of faith but through the
ritual and self-discipline of fasting. An important wrinkle in the texts
representational fabric occurs at this point. In his ight from the Masai,
Hemingway alights on East African Moslems as repositories of integ-
rity and authenticity. Stripped of doctrinal or devotional features, these
gures stand for an archetypal image of loyalty. Charo is manly and
ritualistic in his actions, and sufciently 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 per-
ceives as threatening. Charo occupies the space in Hemingways ction
where we nd a disciplined male alterity that is culturally distinct but
also admirable and also, quite possibly, attainable; it is the place where
Hemingway places bullghters, shermen, and African hunters. Even
though Charo wanted to convert Hemingway to Islam, Hemingways
own irtation with Islam emerges out of his own ability to reshape such
cultural difference in the light of lifelong fascinations with stylized mas-
culinity. Some forty years after Hemingways depictions of Islamic dif-
ference, Richard Powers and Don DeLillo encountered a religious dif-
ference that was less amenable to Western mastery and self-fashioning.
The world in which we now live is in some profound respects thus

quite distinct from that inhabited by human beings in previous pe-
riods 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 overesti-
mated both Japans rise to hegemony and the United Statess relative
decline), he captured the importance of demographic shifts and inter-
national migration.
2
In what he termed these great new times Rieff
These great new times
Cosmopolitanism and Contemporary Writing
9
200 These great new times
observed that the globe had simply grown too crowded, and its pros-
perous areas had become too accessible from its slums. New move-
ments of people across previously cavernous distances constituted the
emergence of the worlds hard facts into American life, the dreary
wake-up call of history and demography. He even located a world-his-
torical shift in his own lifetime, the 1960s, which . . . now look like the
white worlds 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 Cen-
tury: Americas 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 devel-
oped world now seems, like many sound ideas, to have become a clich.
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
ction demands to be understood.
In this nal chapter I want to explore current U.S. writing in its in-
ternationalist congurations, and to ask how two of the eras major art-
ists, 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 (Pow-
erss Plowing in the Dark; DeLillos 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 cosmopolitan-
ism that has eforesced during the past ten or fteen years. In journals
such as Public Culture, and across literary theory, anthropology, politi-
cal science, and sociology, this term has achieved a totemic centrality.
Arjun Appadurai, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Amartya Sen, Walter Mi-
gnolo, Ulrich Beck: the list of cosmopolitan thinkers is long and grow-
ing. How this body of thought relates to American internationalism is
a critical question. Its 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
These great new times 201
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 threaten-
ing encounter between the American writer and non-Western cultures.
Don DeLillos Mao II (1991) and Richard Powerss Plowing the Dark
(2000) are partly set in the strife-torn Beirut of the 1980s; both explic-
itly place the terrorist in a global ction where the American abroad
encounters increasing danger. The American traveler now nds himself
confronting gures 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 personalitys summation, as if
James Baldwins 1961 commentthat in leaving America one discov-
ered what made one American, not blackhad become an expatri-
ate 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
codes implications. But another argument suggests itself: that the world
has shifted in some way at the centurys end. A fresh internationalist para-
digm has emerged, and writers have responded to the changed global
climate. There denitely seems to be a tonal shift in American literary
globalism if we move on from the late 1950s to the 1990s. Edginess, wari-
ness, and an insidious anxiety enter these texts voices. Like the British
protagonist of Ian McEwans recent ction, Saturday (2005), these West-
ern gures are abroad in a world made anxious: And now, what days
are these? Bafed 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
conict. Each author heightens the ironies by the choice of profession
they make for their protagonists: teacher and writer. These gures 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 Spiders House Bowless pro-
tagonist ed Morocco on the edge of revolution. Throughout her fam-
ilys Chinese sojourn Pearl Buck witnessed the countrys repeated po-
litical 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 bafed,
but it was not yet fatal. Things had certainly worsened thirty years
later, and for Powers and DeLillo the place of the encounter now be-
comes crucial. In Powerss Plowing the Dark the promise of travel and
the ideal of an expansive foreign otherness collapse into the kidnap-
pers terrifying room: You wait. The waiting becomes a game. Then
the game becomes a contest. They mean to break your will. They nd
this cute. Some kind of victory for the worlds downtrodden, to make
mighty America wet its pants. So it turns into a State Department mis-
sion, 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. Islams attraction for Bowless expatriates was this
very resistance to the modern. Intriguingly, it is an Islamic sealed room
that recurs in the n-de-sicle 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 for-
eign wars: By now youve made the world papers. Yet another Ameri-
can, like the reports you used to read and le away, unimaginable. Chi-
cago now knows the name of those who captured you, while you as yet
do not (101). To the kidnappers, the victim is a gure 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 van-
ished, to be replaced by fundamental ignorance or a brutal generaliza-
tion, reducing individuals to indices.
Wright and Buck created a midcentury peripatetic and communal
internationalism. The writer traveled across disparate terrains but usu-
ally found him or herself in recurrently familiar scenes set in market,
peasant village, and teeming non-Western streetthe settings for bar-
tering, 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 ctions of DeLillo and Powers. The hos-
tage-takers basement replaces the market; the bracing encounter be-
tween the Western/developed self and the tribal/undeveloped Af-
rican or Islamic Other gives way to kidnapping. There is a quite literal
narrowing-down of possibility, as earlier environments of literary inter-
nationalism (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 cur-
rent 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 Ameri-
can teacher who is half-Iranian and whose designation as an American
confounds his hybrid background. A group of Islamist radicals in mid-
1980s Beirut hold Taimur Martin in a succession of secret rooms and
hideaways. The novel creates two dichotomous worldsthe kidnap-
pers 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 places 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 imaginations room a place that is in effect historys room,
the space where an American victim nds himself physically conned
and buffeted by historical contingency. In virtual reality all things work
out; but in historical time, chance and ideology mean things fail to
work out. Even to eat or to relieve oneself have become almost impossi-
ble acts. Terrorism creates plots where the twist is shaped by the ter-
rorist and where agency is removed from the victim. In Powerss novel
such loss of agency or control is the ultimate threat posed by terror-
ists 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 Powerss drifting and aimless protagonist,
the conict in Beirut then has the awful fascination of event: Youve
brought this all on yourself. Walked open-armed into a civil war. Youve
negotiated with it since childhood, this sick desire for event (14748).
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, concret-
izes and advances a debate staged in the previous quarter centurys
U.S. writing about the national culture, modernity, and progress. Pow-
ers shapes a narrative, a dialectic between self-consciously techno-
logical 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 centurys terrorists
and computer engineers. Thus one of Powerss topics, explicitly fore-
grounded at several moments in the text, is Francis Fukuyamas n-
de-sicle thesis propounding the end of history. The novel begins in
the mid-1980s, running through to the rst Gulf conict (199091) and
the year of Fukuyamas 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 sym-
bolic 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 ten-
sion. The epigrammatic title introduces Powerss ironic undermining
of the 1990s ideology of posthistorical globalism and technological fu-
turism: History and its victims kept their hands to the plow, broken,
exhausted, like an old married couple trapped for life in loves 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 prof-
fers posthistorical certitude. Political change, historys stuff, will be-
come 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 plow-
ingbroken, exhausted. Narratives are unable to break through to
that sunlit upland, even as they incorporate the compelling fascination
of the terrorist event.
Mao II and the End of History
DeLillos Mao II revisits and recasts many of the topics and scenarios
discussed in this study. It opens with one of the American novels most
scintillating representations of missionary lifeexcept 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 nd converts. DeLillo has a keen eye for the new faiths of the post-
modern order; Islam and new age cults now occupy religions global
foreground. In the American sunlight of Yankee Stadium the young
Westerners enter the cults heartland. Such symbolic moments herald
larger shifts in global culture that create freakish conjunctions and con-
nections across disparate societies. DeLillos subject, as throughout
his later work from White Noise (1984), is postmodern America in all
its networked complexity (as Tom LeClair writes: DeLillos 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-
tion of 1950s internationalist textswhen air travel began in earnest and
the writer could quickly nd himself in the contact zone of an inter-
national meeting or African marketplacehas become a global anxiety.
Writers themselves are under surveillance and assault. Bill Gray, the
reclusive author at the novels dark heart, is a recusant gure who has
declined to engage with the networks of the media and marketing. But
he nds himself drawn steadily into engagement with the world, and
specically its apparent master: the terrorist.
The novels imagined spaces are signicant. Gray, the writer, lives in
a remote area of upstate New York. At one point DeLillo paints a char-
acteristically hallucinatory image of a small town on the Kansas prairies.
But other settings are foreign cities: Athens, London, BeirutDeLillos
ction responds to a world recongured 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 personalitys extinc-
tion: the Moonie wedding or the English soccer tragedy at the Hill-
sborough stadium, where ninety-six fans were crushed to death. But
the individuals space has become conned and sequestered: Grays
isolated house, hotel rooms, the hostages basement, the ships 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 terrorists grievance, op-
positionality, and resistance to authority. Furthermore, terrorism had
absorbed from imaginative literature the ability to reach into the indi-
vidual consciousness. Now, the imagination, and narrative itself, had
become colonized by the predominant mode of terror. One of Mao IIs
characters, Brita, confesses that there is no moment on certain days
when Im not thinking terror. They have us in their power. In boarding
areas I never sit near windows in case of ying glass. I carry a Swed-
ish passport so thats okay unless you believe that terrorists killed the
prime minister.
10
DeLillos meticulous replaying of motifs drawn from American liter-
ary internationalism creates one of the worldliest novels of recent years.
Critics have often drawn attention to DeLillos sense of a networked
world; but there is also a denite shape to his transnational cartogra-
phy. The book has four signicant locales. First, the United States it-
self. Even here there is a telling subdivision between the Manhattan and
upstate New York places where Bill Gray now nds himself, and the
hinterland of the Great Plains where he came fromand where his as-
sistant (Scott) and the refugee from the Moonies (Karen) will meet in a
desolate small town. Second, there is the Middle East: Beiruts war-torn
precincts, where the novels second protagonist, a Swiss aid worker,
is held hostage; and Ayatollah Khomeinis Iran. Third, DeLillos East
Asia reaches into Americas very heart with its cultural inuence and
soft power. Finally, Gray travels to the old Europe of London and Ath-
ens. 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-clichd, obvious descrip-
tive ashes into a world of bleary touristy icons. The selection of these
particular sites resonates. Is this the rst American novel of the Asian
century? Mao II is not Asian in the way that Pearl S. Bucks novels ob-
viously arethe narrative never touches Asias actual soil. Yet Asia has
become a pervasive presence in DeLillos America, and is the embodi-
ment of what it might mean to encounter a foreign culture. Asia signies
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 commodied in such representations as
Warhols Mao pictures, can still be felt. Mao II, a Westernized image
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, Hobsbawms Age of Extremes. Even the most
anti-Western and austere of revolutionaries can nally be incorporated
and assimilated into the West; and in a further twist, commodication is
also the moment for artistic transcendence. The Wests power, the im-
age Mao II suggests, lies in a symbiotic melding of individualized cre-
ativityenough to produce the artist Andy Warholand consumerist
capitalism. Individual creativity, rapidly disseminated by the markets
replicated images and products, will defeat Maoism and other revolu-
tionary movements.
This might be a Fukuyama-esque or neoconservative reading of how
DeLillo has created a ction 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 Grays death. Liberal capitalisms triumph and Communisms
fall have inaugurated a new world not with a bang but a whimper. Sec-
ond, post-1989 plots, scenarios, and characters begin to take shape in
DeLillos ction. 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-rst 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 be-
tween French and American internationalism, in the work of a French
historian of colonization, Marc Ferro. Ferros mordantly synoptic ac-
count, Colonization: A Global History (published in English in 1997),
traces the relentless unication of the world by capitalism, of which
colonization has been a vital component: While there existed in the
sixteenth century world economiesChina, the West, the Islamo-
Turkish worldunication 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. Ferros account is signicant. It emerges from that school
of French Annales thought exemplied by Fernand Braudel, with its
emphasis on the longue dure of history across epochs. For Ferro,
the worlds created by the cold war and decolonization are less sig-
nicant than the relentless undertow of history and the steady unica-
tion of the global system under what he terms King Money. Ferros
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 impor-
tant passage he identies the antiphonal counter-analysis in these
terms: But it was the former colonized peoples who not long ago gave
a similar example of calling ofcial 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, rst on
the ground of facts and narration, and afterwards on that of values by
calling into question those which gave legitimacy to the colonial con-
quest.
12
For Ferro, globalization has become a nal struggle over in-
formation. The oppositional voices of the griots or the marabouts ght
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 discomted by his own prescience. Mao II read like a chronicle of
deaths foretold. The mapping of the near future had achieved uncanny
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 ter-
rorism and the global network.
14
He had got it right, but rightness was
a harsh premonition. Even the Roman numeralsMao IIsat on the
page like miniature congurations of the World Trade Center.
15
The
Twin Towers resonate through the text as one of a repertoire of late
twentieth-century icons: Khomeinis face, Mao, personal computers,
Moonie mass weddings. The essay, published in Harpers magazine in
the United States and in the Guardian in Britain, bluntly asserted: To-
day, again, the world narrative belongs to terrorists.
16
It created noth-
ing 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 Ru-
ins of the Future addresses a crisis while articulating new forms of po-
litical-cultural analysis. DeLillos epigrammatic sentences build into a
series of juxtaposed paragraphs and crosscut lines of enquiry that sug-
gestively map an interpretative alterity. Rather than owing 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 ver-
sion of the global systems analysis rhetoric beloved by those policymak-
ers 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 inuential than governments. The dramatic climb
of the Dow and the speed of the internet summoned us all to live per-
manently 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 DeLillos prose
that languages exuberant futurism shades into another language. Sen-
tences 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. Worldsour world, in factmight 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 DeLillos analysis one interpretative
discourse crumbles into another, a process alarming and revelatory.
The writers job is to move across these various interpretative matrices,
combining and juxtaposing discourses to nd 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 Pynchons The Crying of Lot q (1966), when Oedipa Maas
looks down on San Narciso: She thought of the time shed opened a
transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her rst 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
signicance, a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning.
18
For Oe-
dipa, the highways create ordered swirl, an image Pynchon mapped
onto the circuit boards miniaturism. His resonant symbol established
a sense of circuits as legible, able to create denition 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 frag-
mentation, not synergistic integration. As the information circulates
and open circuits proliferate, so the network causes the collapse of dis-
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 net-
works. The essays miniature narratives of loss establish an immediate
emotionalism that counterpoints systemic dehumanization. The writer
himself emerges in his own narrative, a suffering gure peering into the
tragic scene at Ground Zero.
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 ligree 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 fa-
ade. It is almost too close. It is almost RomanI-beams for stone-
work, but not nearly so salvageable. Many here describe the scene to
others on cellphones.
Oh my God, Im 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 reafrms human presence by acts of witness. Re-
peatedly, the essay literally replays moments of chance communion,
either directly on Manhattans streets or through communications
networksexchange 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 Futurean American hymn ending with the Islamic blessing, Al-
lahu akbaras a return to the scene of witness for the globalist writer.
Faced with danger and rage, DeLillo enters the American street, pick-
ing his way through the rubble, listening in to cell phone conversations,
imagining other narratives: We live in a wide world, routinely lled
with exchange of every sort, an open circuit of work, talk, family and ex-
pressible 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 humanismexpressible feelingre-
minds us of Richard Wrights wish to reinstate the human heart into
cold war politics, or Paul Rabinows 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 essays oblique radicalism rests
on skepticism, a doubled sense that ideas can evolve and de-evolve.
In his ction the evolution of ideas can lead to a constriction, a de-
terminism 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 nds 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 pos-
sibility 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 plots logic might be
reversible. Examined from the essays humanistic perspective, this is re-
demptive. If ideas de-evolve, then terrorisms 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
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
Eric Packers Car
In his account of the cosmopolitan thought developed by Henry James
and Edward Bellamy, Thomas Peyser argued these gures had located
the globe as the fundamental unit of human association (his italics).
22
Peysers study, Utopia and Cosmopolis, maps what might be American
cosmopolitanisms rst stage, emergent at the turn into the twentieth
century, when gures 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 outpour-
ing 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 rst-generation cosmopolitans sensed the new world-
liness 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 to-
ward experience . . . the relativity that went with it had its drawbacks.
23
These cosmopolitan discontents provided the matrix for Henry Jamess
writing. He created dangerous connoisseurs such as Gilbert Osmond
(The Portrait of a Lady) or complex plots, notably that of The Ameri-
can, 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 ear-
lier 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 consolidations main architect, the United States, will inevita-
bly be changed. This is the paradox DeLillos work sensitizes us to. In
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 DeLillos
hypothesis about the contemporary scene: World is supposed to mean
something thats self-contained. But nothing is self-contained. Every-
thing enters something else.
24
This everything might mean people
or ideas or things. Indeed, in Cosmopolis the worlds everything, now
washed up on the streets of Manhattan, includes consumer goods, dis-
placed migrants, ideologies, and advanced technology.
DeLillo has always been a novelist working within an America be-
come Americana (the title of his rst book, published 1971): a useful
term for the sports and pop cultures, and the domestic political de-
monology 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 Cosmopo-
lis New Yorks streets have become part of the paradoxically Third
World America David Rieff saw in Los Angeles. In the following pas-
sage DeLillo even uses a term, the street, more familiar to us in for-
mulations 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 Cosmopoliss protagonist, the
uber-nancier Eric Parker. He is the symbolic analyst embedded in
nancial markets, transnational networks, and technological modernity.
He has responded to the truth of the future, but the street persists,
churning away outside Packers apartment. Richard Wright ew to
West Africa and Indonesia to witness the street vendors and griots. For
DeLillos character a walk through New York brings the world to ones
home. In a United States awash, as the social theorist Arjun Appa-
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 ar-
rived from war zones in Somalia or the Balkans.
DeLillo constructs Cosmopolis around a life in the day of Packer, this
fantastically wealthy nancier. The plot nods to modernist texts such as
Joyces 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 en-
counters set against the postwar citys bracing modernity. The allusion to
Bellow is part of Cosmopoliss foundation in the postwar literary stratum,
in texts produced by DeLillos predecessors and contemporaries: Saul
Bellow, Norman Mailer, and Philip Roth. Packer, with his quarterbacks
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 Bellows
Herzog (Herzog), Mailers Rojack (An American Dream), and Roths
Portnoy (Portnoys Complaint). His character is that utterly distinctive
compound of Emersonian romanticism, (William) Jamesian will, and
postwar sexual appetite that exploded into 1950s and 1960s ctions. De-
Lillo represents Packer as a brilliant primitive set loose against Manhat-
tans modernity. Packer, to use the ironic language James Baldwin took
from French colonialism, is both volu and non-volu. He is a so-
phisticate, an analyst, and a connoisseur; but also impulsively physical,
driven by sexuality and violence. He is a heavily muscled street ghter
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 lmexplosions of that machismo seen in Mamet or Scorsese:
the sudden murder, the take-down, the st 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 Jamess Gilbert Osmond. In Packer,
DeLillo has created another unsettling cosmopolitan, the cosmopolitan
as primitive and American thug: Carefully he kicked him in the nuts,
watching him spaz and crumple in Torvals grip. When the ash 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 con-
strained by a plot bringing Packer to his end in a ruined building, shot
down by a former employee. The exuberant possibility suggested by ear-
lier 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 Ameri-
can plots marked by connement and violence. Planted within global
contexts, DeLillos protagonists are enmeshed in narrative patterns that
channel and nally undermine the cosmopolitan plenitude promised by
their identities as writer or nancier. 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 theorys conceptualiza-
tions of what Ulrich Beck has called the risk society. Becks inuential
analysis identied 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 immisera-
tion 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 (Becks italics).
27
This is recognizably the
world of DeLillos ction, and one thinks immediately of the Airborne
Toxic Event in White Noise. For another social theorist, Anthony Gid-
dens, accelerating globalization has created a new formation of risk, and
this in turn creates the reexive pattern of risk assessment that is so
much a part of modern experience: A signicant part of expert think-
ing and public discourse today is made up of risk prolinganalyzing
what, in the current state of knowledge and in current conditions, is the
distribution of risks in given milieus of action.
28
Beck and Giddens would recognize the world of Cosmopolis. Secu-
rity is a major issue, and the culture of risk and risk proling shapes the
ctional city. Packers car, in which he peripatetically crosses the city,
encapsulates this ambivalent melding of cosmopolitan dialogue and ob-
session with security. Protected by bodyguards, ceaselessly alerted to
threat, he is a man caught in complexity and endangered by contingen-
cies. The vehicle is a refuge, a self-created prison on wheels. Meanwhile,
risk assessments, accounts of advanced weaponry, and meditations on
the nancial markets instability drive DeLillos mordant dialogue. Out-
side the car, the streets suggest a new geography of danger. The televi-
sion carries reports of political assassinations; demonstrations erupt;
a protestor chooses self-immolation; a bomb goes off; mourners com-
memorate a dead rapper.
The social theorists Anthony Elliott and Charles Lemert have sug-
gested the current stage of globalization has produced a new individu-
alism, as contemporary capitalism and advanced technology reshape
our private lives. They argue that we are in the midst of a global trans-
formation 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 indi-
vidualism that is both utterly advanced and atavistically primitive, sug-
gests a shape for twenty-rst-century cosmopolitanism.
DeLillos novella is a satirical, comedic, and violent fable of the cos-
mopolis. Yet recent conceptual work on cosmopolitanism has at times
seemed markedly utopian. Such writing has predicated a condent
contemporary self able to converse across national borders. In Kwame
Anthony Appiahs essay Cosmopolitan Reading, a world made up
of these individuals takes shape, a utopian globe where difference is
acknowledged and conversations are possible: Cosmopolitan read-
ing presupposes a world in which novels (and music and sculptures
and other signicant objects) travel between places where they are un-
derstood 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-
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
DeLillos cosmopolis shares Appiahs sense
of gaps of space through which signicant objects travel, but its
notable that he creates a disturbingly surreal version of cultural trans-
mission. DeLillos signicant object, a thing that practically becomes
a character, is the customized stretch limousine carrying Packer. DeL-
illo brilliantly imagines the car and reminds us of the automobiles cen-
trality in such modernist classics as The Great Gatsby. But this limou-
sine is a new thing and a premonition of a future. It is a global museum
on wheels, a work of high technology, tted with computer displays,
an infrared camera, and a heart monitor. The oor is Italian marble.
Packer has had the car prousted, cork-lined against noise, just as the
French writers apartment was soundproofed (7071). 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 ourish of grafti (101).
Now it is a striking sight under the streetlamp, with a bruised cartoon-
ish 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 pro-
duction, and in how we create cultural value. His novels are littered with
cultural workers: writers, photographers, curators, artists, and profes-
sors. In Cosmopolis he rearticulates what might be seen as high cos-
mopolitan theory by taking cultural signicance out of the museum or
the university, and placing it on the street. Cosmopolis maps cosmopoli-
tan value in a thoroughly twenty-rst-century manner. What, Packers
limo asks us, is signicant about many of the objects we value, which
after all are far more likely to be mass consumerist products than elite
artifacts. How does signicance circulate in a world of digital technol-
ogy? Cosmopolis suggests that the next stage in cosmopolitan thought
will have to account for both cultural exchange and Appiahs common
conversations within a twenty-rst-century context forged by turbo-
charged consumerism and digital networking.
Conclusion
Writing in Hanoi in 1968, the year many commentators see as a deci-
sive 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 conict was lost, and U.S. forces left Saigon in a chaotic
evacuation. But Sontags identication of a global American status that
was imperial proved prescient, and the country did not, as it had dur-
ing the 1920s, turn toward isolationism. These large patterns of geo-
politics 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 cul-
tural internationalism, global integration, and cosmopolitanism. Sontag
declared herself a citizen of the American empire, and one way to un-
derstand 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 responsi-
bilities 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
us, too, with often-overlooked but compelling narratives. From Bucks
memoirs of missionary-era China, through Wrights 1950s travels, and
Matthiessens journeys to the Stone Age of Southeast Asia, a geneal-
ogy of contemporary American literary internationalism takes shape. In
the most recent congurations of that genealogy, Susan Sontags 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 technol-
ogy, migration, and terrorism have created a risk society now forever
embedded in a global network.
DeLillos 9/11 essay, In the Ruins of the Future, offered a simple
but telling global vision: We live in a wide world, routinely lled with
exchange of every sort, an open circuit of work, talk, family and ex-
pressible feeling (1). The exchange might be routine, but for many of
Americas writers the efforts to describe that exchange have been any-
thing 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, do-
mestic suspicion. To adopt Amartya Sens ne phrase, these were writ-
ers 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-rst cen-
tury will answer; but we can thank DeLillo and his kindred American
internationalists for framing the terms of this question for us.
:. The American Writer and Development
1. Richard Wright, The Color Curtain: A Report of the Bandung Conference (1956;
repr., Jackson ms: Banner Books, 1994), 1112.
2. Wrights sense of Bandungs 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 sub-
jects (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, 3148 [Boulder co: Lynne Ri-
enner, 2003], 33). The Final Communique of this Asian-African Conference (April
1824, 1955) is reprinted in A. W. Singham and Tran Van Dinh, Conferences of the
Non-Aligned Countries :q:q, (New York: Third Press Review Books, 1976), 79.
See also Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2001), 19192. According to historian Thomas Borstelmann (in a recent
account of American foreign policy and race relations), The Eisenhower adminis-
tration 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, Alge-
ria: The Realities, trans. Ronald Matthews (New York: Knopf, 1958).
Notes
4. Graham, Personal History, 248.
5. Graham, Personal History, 58788.
6. Daniel Boorstin, America and the Image of Europe: Reections on American
Thought (New York: Meridian Books, 1960), 13.
7. Virginia Whatley Smith, French West Africa, in Richard Wrights Travel
Writings: New Reections, ed. Virginia Whatley Smith, 179214 (Jackson ms: Uni-
versity Press of Mississippi, 2001). Wright planned to spend four months in Franco-
phone 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 Saids
formulation, divides Orient and Occident, becomes less persuasive. Reviewing the
cultural relationship between Europe and Asia, Said noted a common denomina-
tor, the line separating Occident from Orient (Edward Said, Orientalism Recon-
sidered, Race and Class 27 [1985]: 2).
9. Recent studies also stress recovery as the critical task of literary international-
ism. 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 dimen-
sions of American abroad in the non-European world (American Geographics: U.S.
National Narrative and the Representation of the Non-European World, :8o:86
[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 ,,: What We Think of America (London: Granta,
2002). The epigraphs from Harold Pinter and Michael Ignatieff map the extremity of
response: A fully-edged, award-winning, gold-plated monster . . . it knows only one
languagebombs 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 histori-
cized in more than theory (Representing the South Pacic: Colonial Discourse from
Cook to Gaugin [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 12).
12. Stephen Ambrose, Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy since :q8, sev-
enth edition (New York: Penguin, 1993), xi.
13. Paul Boyer, By the Bombs Early Light: American Thought and Culture at
the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985), especially 14165. See also
Thomas Hill Schaub, American Fiction in the Cold War (Madison: University of Wis-
consin 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., Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 211.
224 Notes to pages .q
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), 31314.
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. Kennans dry imagining of a Third World keen to call on who-
ever would help it develop, regardless of ideology, is echoed by cold war histori-
ans: 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 :q:qq., seventh edition [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993], 171).
25. Irving Horowitz, Three Worlds of Development: The Theory and Practice of
International Stratication (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 291332.
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), 7398. Susan Manning, Fragments of Union: Making Connec-
tions in Scottish and American Writing (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 6364.
30. One example: in refusing to apologize for colonialism, George Kennan la-
conically 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 condently arrayed themselves and other peoples along that con-
tinuum according to their estimate of their cultural achievements and its close cor-
relative, skin colour (Michael H. Hunt, Conclusions: The Decolonization Puzzle in
U.S. PolicyPromise versus Performance, in The United States and Decolonization:
Power and Freedom, ed. David Ryan and Victor Pungong, 20729 (Basingstoke and
New York: Macmillan and St. Martins Press, 2000), 216.
31. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Structure of Nations and Empires: A Study of the Re-
curring Patterns and Problems of the Political Order in Relation to the Unique Prob-
lems of the Nuclear Age (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1959), 1.
Notes to pages q:6 225
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 devel-
opment era and gures such as Halpern from a 1980 (post-Iranian revolution) U.S.
perspective, see John L. Esposito, ed., Islam and Development: Religion and Sociopo-
litical Change (Syracuse ny: Syracuse University Press, 1980). Espositos contribu-
tors could now see that the model adopted by Halpern and Lerner in the 50s and
60s failed to account for Islams continuing vitality within so-called traditional soci-
eties. See Michael C. Hudsons skeptical take on secularization, Islam and Political
Development, in Islam and Development, ed. Esposito, 124.
33. David Reynolds, One World Divisible: A Global History Since :q (London:
Penguin, 2000), 8687.
34. David Riesman, introduction to Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional So-
ciety: Modernizing the Middle East (1958; repr., New York: Free Press, 1964), 1011.
35. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902; repr., New York: W. W. Norton,
1963), 12. The American counterparts to Marlows ironic commentary are Mark
Twains satirical squibs of 19001901, 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 :8q::q:o, 45773
[New York: Library of America, 1992], 461).
36. Lerner, Passing of Traditional Society, 410.
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).
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.
226 Notes to pages :,.
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 pro-
duced 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 Wil-
son 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 Gov-
ernment, Foreign Affairs 27 (1949): 37988. 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 [Gar-
den City ny: Doubleday, 1964], 49). This essay, a study of national character, global-
ism, and American power in the cold war, now seems sharply prescient.
.. The Skin Game
1. W. E. B. Du Bois, The African Roots of War, Atlantic Monthly 115 (May 1915):
70714, reprinted in W. E. B. Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses :8qo:q:q, ed.
Philip S. Foner, 24457 (New York: Pathnder Press, 1970), 251.
2. Alain Locke, The Great Disillusionment, lecture delivered to the Yonkers Ne-
gro 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), 10510. Locke attacked the pretensions of European civilization to world-
dominance and eternal superiority (107).
3. Stewart, introduction to Race Contacts, xxvii.
4. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, The Realities in Africa: European Prot 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 Conict,
American Journal of Sociology 49, 5 (1944): 450.
Notes to pages ..q 227
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: Ap-
palled by the poverty and disease he witnessed there, he wrote to Churchill describ-
ing 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: Har-
court, Brace and Co., 1945), 78.
12. See China and Africa, a speech given in Peking on the occasion of his ninety-
rst birthday (February 23, 1959).
13. Du Bois, Color and Democracy, 17.
17. W. E. B. Du Bois, Careers Open to College-Bred Negroes (Commence-
ment Address, Fisk University, June 1898), in Writings, 82741 (New York: Library
of America, 1996), 831.
18. Ross Posnock also cites this phrase and then discusses Du Boiss 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, 87110 (Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 1998).
19. James B. Stewart has argued that Du Boiss internationalism was also framed by
a model of evolution through stages. He examines two essays in particular: The Devel-
opment of a People (1904) and Mr. Sorokins Systems (1942) (In Search of a The-
ory of Human History: W. E. B. Du Boiss 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, 26188 [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, :q:q6, ed. Herbert Aptheker
[Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1978], 37475).
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 Wrights reading of Africa, see Ngwarsungu Chi-
wengo, Gazing through the Screen: Richard Wrights Africa, in Richard Wrights
Travel Writings, ed. Smith, 2044.
228 Notes to pages o
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), 18182.
23. Wright presented his encounter with the Communist Party as a struggle be-
tween the individualistic intellectual and a party machine dominated by paranoid bu-
reaucracy. 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), 11562.
24. Richard Wright, Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (1954;
repr., Westport ct: Greenwood Press, 1974), 4849. Further references are given in
the main body of the text.
25. It is worth pointing out the centrality of markets for many American traveler-
writers. 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 Melvilles remarkable account of Liv-
erpool docks The Dock-Wall Beggars, in Redburn (1849) (The Writings of Her-
man Melville, vol. 4, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle
[Evanston il: Northwestern University Press, 1969], 18588).
26. Wrights account of the African economy, and his emphasis on the circula-
tion of goods, can be read in conjunction with David Trotters 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 Fanons impact in the United States on 26265.
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 writ-
ten Wright a fan letter: he had all of Wrights 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, Fanons 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 Juliens ar-
ticle, Terrains de Rencontre: Csaire, Fanon, and Wright on Culture and Decoloniza-
tion, Yale French Studies 98 (2000): 14966. Julien argues that Wright and Csaire
make too little of the colonized: Wright sees, at best, the tragic elite who must
drag their colonized people into modernity (165).
Notes to pages q 229
32. A recent historical evaluation suggests that both Du Bois and Wright were
in their separate ways correct: Nkrumahism was variously dened as scientic
socialism and a complex ideology that Nkrumah was steadily developing (for in-
stance, 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],
16263). See also Young, Postcolonialism, 24246.
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, 20729 (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): 88193. For a detailed discussion of this essay, its relevance
to Wrights thought, and the broader dimensions of Wrights sociological method,
see Carla Cappettis invaluable study, Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography,
and the Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 6164 and passim. My
arguments read out the internationalist implications of Cappettis interpretation of
Wrights domestic ethnography.
36. Everett V. Stonequist, The Marginal Man: A Study in Personality and Culture
Conict (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 Sociol-
ogy, ed. Gary Alan Fine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 13839.
39. Robert Park, introduction to Stonequist, Marginal Man, xiv.
40. Stonequist, Marginal Man, 78.
41. Park, introduction to The Marginal Man, xivxv.
44. James Clifford, On Ethnographic Surrealism, in The Predicament of Cul-
ture: 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
230 Notes to pages q,
Malcolm X: The Last Speeches, ed. Bruce Perry (New York: Pathnder, 1989), 167
68.
48. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 178.
49. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 17980.
50. Bruce Perry, Malcolm: The Life of a Man who Changed Black America (New
York: Station Hill, 1991), 335; see 26068 for his discussion of Malcolms 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, 1835 (New York: St. Martins, 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. Baldwins recognition of domestic French repression, formed by postimpe-
rial rage, explains his criticism of Richard Wrights 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 (Lon-
don: Routledge, 1992), 6. For the writers in this chapter the contact zone would
outlast the era of colonial encountersthere will always be places (Baldwins Pa-
risian street, Wrights postcolonial African markets) where radical inequality, and
intractable conict are suddenly manifest.
56. James Baldwin, The New Lost Generation, in Collected Essays, 65972:
665.
. You were in on the last days
1. Until recently, however, relatively few critics had located Bowless signicance
for American orientalism and U.S. readings of Islam. The tide is now turning. See
Brian T. Edwardss important readings of Bowles and other Americans abroad in the
Maghreb, Morocco Bound: Disorienting Americas Maghreb, from Casablanca to the
Marrakech Express (Durham nc: Duke University Press, 2005).
2. Paul Bowles, The Spiders 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 Moroccohis sense
Notes to pages ,6 231
that historical change brought inevitable cultural decline. Thus a comment on Tang-
ier (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 con-
tinue (Paul Bowles, Two Years before the Strait: Tangier Journal, :q8,:q8q [Lon-
don: Peter Owen, 1989], 15, 35).
4. Simon Bischoff, ed., Paul BowlesPhotographs (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, Moroccos 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 Islams 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 ei-
ther too many or too few geographical signiers 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 work-
ing, 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 rst draft is the nal draft. I cant revise. . . . I rst write in long-
hand, 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, Bowless rst published poems appeared in transition,
a modernist magazine.
12. Abdelhak Elghandor, Atavism and Civilization, Ariel 25 (1994): 11.
13. The photographic record of Bowless 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, 1819.
15. Clifford Geertz, Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indo-
nesia (New Haven ct: Yale University Press, 1968), 80.
232 Notes to pages 66.
16. John P. Entelis, Comparative Politics of North Africa: Algeria, Morocco, and
Tunisia (Syracuse ny: Syracuse University Press, 1980), 3031.
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 eldwork as a special kind of localized dwelling remains (James Clifford, Routes:
Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century [Cambridge ma: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1997], 21).
18. As primitivity, as the age-old antetype of Europe, as a fecund night out of
which European rationality developed, the Orients actuality receded inexorably into
a kind of paradigmatic fossilization. The origins of European anthropology and eth-
nography 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 Bowless 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. Bowless interest here seems to me more ethnographic than representa-
tional to use Michael Norths distinction. Bowles was fascinated by primitivism,
but his narrative technique remained largely orthodox rather than forging Norths
dialect of modernism: Was this new interest primarily ethnographic, xated 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, Modernisms African Mask: The Stein-Picasso Col-
laboration, 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, Lvy-Bruhl explicitly con-
trasted his ideas to those of the English anthropological school who saw similar
mental processes in us and undeveloped peoples. Lvy-Bruhl emphasized differ-
ent mental processes (Lucien Lvy-Bruhl, Authors Introduction to How Natives
Think [1910; repr., New York: Washington Square, 1966], 10).
25. Lvy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, 25.
26. Lvy-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-ve years: the results which I have just reached concern-
Notes to pages 6,. 233
ing these facts make this development nal, by making me abandon a badly founded
hypothesis, at all events, in cases of this type (Lucien Lvy-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 Lvy-Bruhl.
27. Dillon, You Are Not I, 174.
28. Geertz, Islam Observed, 9.
31. Dale F. Eickelman, Moroccan Islam: Tradition and Society in a Pilgrimage
Center (Austin: University of Texas Press 1976), 67.
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 trans-
lated 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 Re-
ections 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, 293305
(New York: Pantheon, 1988).
39. Paul Rabinow, Reections on Fieldwork in Morocco (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1977), 23. Further references are given in the text. Rabinows ac-
count of the experiential basis of eldwork reads, quite deliberately one supposes,
as a novelistic account of his Moroccan tripa 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 eldworkthat one should some-
how keep intact the observer part of being a participant-observer. One can see in
Rabinows breaking of this covenant an attempt to remold the anthropological inheri-
tance 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 intellectu-
ally 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.
234 Notes to pages ,.,8
. Sinophilia
1. Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle (1962; repr., London: Penguin,
2001), 15455. Dicks imaginary Chinese history continues: The American work-
man, 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 transac-
tion 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 Fic-
tion 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 Imagi-
nation, :q:q6: (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Klein covers pop-
ular journalism (Readers Digest), popular ction (James Michener), and musicals/
lms (The King and I, South Pacic).
4. Joseph Nye Jr., The Paradox of American Power: Why the Worlds Only Super-
power Cant Go It Alone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 19. Nye positions
China as one of the New Challengers to American power (1822).
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 Imperi-
alism, 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, Reections on the Walgreen Lectures, in American Diplo-
macy, expanded edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 158. Kennan
saw this sentimentality as a form of national narcissism, of collective self-admira-
tion. 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, 4460.
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 ex-
pertise 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).
Notes to pages 8:8 235
12. John K. Fairbanks introduction to the 1968 edition of Edgar Snows Red
Star over China is another illuminating description of China within the contexts
of the American mission, Manifest Destiny, the Pacic frontier, and modernization.
He imagines Snow looking at Asia. In 1936 he stood on the western frontier of the
American expansion across the Pacic 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 Chinas myriad villages and had inspired and aided the rst efforts at
modernization. In the early 1930s American foundations and missionaries both were
active in the movement for rural reconstruction, the remaking of village life through
the application of scientic 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 West-
ern 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, :q:q:q.o, translated from Chinese and edited by Robert
W. Clopton/Tsuin-Chen Ou (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1973), 3056. 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 Rus-
sell (Paul Varg, Missionaries, Chinese, and Diplomats: The American Protestant Mis-
sionary Movement in China, :8qo:q. [Princeton nj: Princeton University Press,
1958], 99).
14. For further extended examples of Luces Sinophilia see Patricia Neils, China
Images in the Life and Times of Henry Luce (Savage md: Rowman and Littleeld,
1990).
15. John King Fairbank, The United States and China (New Edition, Cambridge
ma: Harvard University Press, 1958), 12, 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, 27988.
17. Agnes Smedley, Battle Hymn of China (New York: Knopf, 1943); William Hin-
ton, Fanshen (1967; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
18. Adamss 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
236 Notes to pages 88,
point Chairman Mao sings a plaintive critique of port imperialism and the mission-
ary impulse, defending his countrys integrity:
We have all we need:
New missionaries, businesslike,
Survey the eld 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 Councils .o.o
Project (Washington dc: National Intelligence Council, 2004), 29, 4748. Its also
worth noting that these demographic gures are for nations, and do not include eth-
nic 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 popula-
tion), one can safely say that the gure of 4 percent could be broken down to reveal an
even smaller gure 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, 35378 (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?, Harpers (January 1933): 14355.
26. Conn, Pearl Buck, 25961. 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 fbis War on Freedom of Expression (New Bruns-
wick nj: Rutgers University Press, 1993). A nice example of fbi surveillance, and its
Notes to pages 8,q: 237
eccentric geopolitics, occurs in Clayborne Carson, Malcolm X: The fbi File (New
York: Carroll and Graf, 1991), 179. The le reports Malcolms 1959 trip to the Middle
East, but describes this as a trip to the Far Eastan interesting relocation of Egypt
to the Pacic 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 Bucks 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 lm 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 lms cultural politics were rmly tilted toward a nativ-
izing of the novel (Blake Allmendinger, Little House on the Rice Paddy, American
Literary History 10, 2 [1998]: 36077).
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 upbringingsand
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 em-
pire, as many less privileged British or French citizens could, for better and worse).
. Nonalignment and Writing
1. Walter LaFeber, The American View of Decolonization, 17761920: An Ironic
Legacy, in The United States and Decolonization: Power and Freedom, ed. David
Ryan and Victor Pungongs, 2440 (Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan and St.
Martins Press, 2000), 24.
2. Paul Orders, Adjusting to a New Period in World History: Franklin Roos-
evelt and European Colonialism, in The United States and Decolonization, ed. Ryan
and Pungong, 6384. 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, 21942 (Cam-
bridge 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, 16887: 169,
173.
238 Notes to pages q::o
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, :q:q88, ed. Brenda Gayle Plummer, 11540 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 116, 135. Fraser, who is an historian,
makes extensive use of Wrights commentary of Bandung.
5. For the processes of composition behind The Color Curtain, which involved
a typically Wrightean amalgamation of personal testimony, political and histori-
cal research, and neo-sociological interviews, see Virginia Whatley Smith, Richard
Wrights Passage to Indonesia: The Travel Writer/Narrator as Participant/Observer
of Anti-Colonial Imperatives in The Color Curtain, in Richard Wrights Travel Writ-
ings, ed. Smith, 78115.
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. Wrights meetings in The Color Curtain can usefully be placed against the
works of Bernard Lewis. See Lewiss What Went Wrong? The Clash between Islam
and Modernity in the Middle East (2002; repr., New York: Perennial, 2003), especially
11732, Time, Space, and Modernity. Also see Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War
and Unholy Terror (2003; repr., New York: Random House, 2004), especially 13764,
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. Ori-
entalism 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 Lammings The Negro Writer and His World, Prsence Africaine
810 (1956): 32527.
11. George Padmore, Africa: Britains Third Empire (London: Dennis Dobson,
1949), 193218. Wright wrote the foreword to Padmores Pan-Africanism or Commu-
nism? 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 individuals own words and frame
questions so as to reveal the organization and disorganization of attitudes as the re-
sult of changes in fortune, and their incorporation and expression through and their
Notes to pages :o::. 239
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 unself-
conscious statements of value which revealed what the subject assumed was gener-
ally understood and taken for granted (Fred H. Matthews, Quest for an American
Sociology: Robert E. Park and the Chicago School [Montreal: McGill-Queens Univer-
sity Press, 1977], 162).
14. See Carla Cappettis discussion of Wrights participant-observer technique
in Writing Chicago, 199200.
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 Wrights encounter with Euro-
peanized Moslems. He concludes his study with the hope that moving beyond the
ideological constraints of jihad and tna and, indeed, beyond Europes geographical
borders, these young men and women will present a new face of Islamreconciled
with modernityto 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, 5556.
19. John Kay, Poor States Stay Poor, The Truth About Markets: Why Some Na-
tions Are Rich But Most Remain Poor (London: Penguin, 2004), 26769.
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, 6061.
22. Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt, On the Borders between U.S. Studies and
Postcolonial Theory, in Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnic-
ity, and Literature, ed. Singh and Shmidt (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2000), 12.
23. The social theorist Zygmunt Bauman has recently glossed these political dif-
culties: 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-en-
closure race. Thus, nonalignment was seen as the blocks-era equivalent of that no
mans 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-
240 Notes to pages ::.::,
servative, 196069, in Carr, Dos Passos: A Life, 52351 (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, :qo:q8o, 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), 13762.
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 congurations of conservatism informed
the work of Flannery OConnor, Caroline Gordon, Allen Tate, Zora Neale Hurston,
and (most importantly) Ayn Rand. For the kind of literary history that can pay atten-
tion to a politics of writing in the ways Im suggesting, see Werner Sollorss analysis of
Hurstons resistance to the desegregation of black schools: Of Mules and Mares in a
Land of Difference; or, Quadrupeds All? American Quarterly 42 (1990): 16790.
28. Goulart, writes William Keylor, was a radical populist who supported re-
distributionist economic policies that alarmed the entrenched oligarchy and its sup-
porters in the military. . . . The American ambassador and military attach had been in
touch with the plotters and later conveyed Washingtons approval of the coup. Gou-
lart went into exile and a military dictatorship was established (William R. Keylor, A
World of Nations: The International Order Since :q [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), 24962.
31. Walter LaFeber, The American Age: United States Foreign Policy at Home and
Abroad since :,o (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 55659.
32. Although much contemporary criticism deals with the politics of
representation(s), I suggest that a rather different form of criticism may take us fur-
ther 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 main-
tained the ideal of la littrature engage, in their various ways. For these gures, to
write is inevitably to write about the world of politics in a very direct way.
Notes to pages ::,:.: 241
33. C. L. Sulzberger, Whats Wrong with U.S. Foreign Policy? (New York: Har-
court, Brace, 1959).
34. C. L. Sulzberger, Unnished Revolution: America and the Third World (New
York: Atheneum, 1965), 3. For a harsher critique of Sulzbergers kind of benevolent
neoimperialism, see Christopher Laschs 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 featuresracism, militaristic appeals, the rhetoric of heroism and self-sac-
ricedropped away, to be replaced by a new emphasis on efciency and the mod-
ernization of backward countries, ritualistic reassertion of the right of self-determina-
tion, 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: Reections 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), 8384.
36. Frank Ninkovich, Modernity and Power: A History of the Domino Theory in
the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 312, 31718.
Ninkovichs conclusion to this book, 31220, is an important analysis of foreign policy
maneuvers, read through the prism of modernity.
6. Stone Ages
1. Morris Dickstein, Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fic-
tion :q:q,o (Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 2002), 128.
2. Peter Hulmes essay, Traveling to Write (19402000), is a good recent ex-
ample 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, 87101
[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): 514.
4. Peter Matthiessen, The Cloud Forest: A Chronicle of the South American Wilder-
ness (New York: Viking, 1961), 23. Future references to this work are given in the text.
5. Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War :q:qq., seventh edition
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993), 209.
6. William R. Keylor, From Chapultepec to Castro: The United States and Latin
America, 19451962 and The Inter-American System Since the Cuban Missile Cri-
sis, in Keylor, A World of Nations: The International Order Since :q (New York
and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 93113, 26083.
242 Notes to pages :..::
7. Thomas J. McCormick, Americas Half-Century: United States Foreign Policy
in the Cold War and After, second edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1995), 14144, usefully summarizes this quintessential early 1960s development
policy.
8. Matthiessens 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 its going to be end of the world ([1984; repr., New York:
Penguin, 1992], 329).
9. Halberstam has some wonderful, telling passages concerning the Kennedy
administrations self-condence in its dealings with the undeveloped world: The
fascination with guerilla warfare reected the men and the era: aggressive, self-con-
dent 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], 12223).
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. Machlins nonchalant acknowledgement of murder shows how
cultural relativism entered into accounts of the Harvard Peabody expedition: By
their own lawsand 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 civili-
zation (248). Rockefellers death was certainly an over-determined narrative and
continues to attract attention. Samantha Gillisons novel, The King of America (New
York: Random House, 2004), is a recent ction 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, Pea-
body 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 Peabodys 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. Gardners lms are sublime and beautiful poems
in which each society Gardner lms becomes a metaphor for the tenderness and cru-
Notes to pages ::: 243
elty we all are capable of recognizing when we look deep into our own hearts (Docu-
mentary 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), 19697. Future references to this work are
given in the text. This rst edition included as an end piece an unnished drawing by
Michael Rockefeller, The Mountain Wall.
17. Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Eu-
rope, qoo:qoo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 18790.
18. Matthiessen is most obviously indebted to Tristes Tropiques (1955), the
landmark text in which Lvi-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 Reections on Contempo-
rary Travel Writing [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998], 181).
19. Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacic: 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 Pacic, xv, 518.
21. Argonauts of the Western Pacic, 51718.
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 Wallaces vice presidential candidate in 1968. For a recent ac-
count of the racialized aspects of Vietnam, including the infamous My Lai massacre,
see Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line, 21321, 22931.
23. Neil L. Whitehead, South America/Amazonia: the Forest of Marvels, in The
Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, 12238
(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 Matthiessens text in terms of their critiques
of American evangelism. Lvi-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 in-
surance 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
244 Notes to pages :6:
of their profession they displayed shocking callousness and lack of feeling (Claude
Lvi-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 rst ofcial statements of insurgent or guerilla praxis by the American mili-
tary (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 refer-
ences 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.
,. African American Representations
1. W. E. B. Du Bois, Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (New York: Har-
court, Brace and Co., 1945), 31. Du Boiss comment here readsas does much of his
worklike a premonition of recent work on America and empire. For a commentator
such as Amy Kaplan, the United Statess entry onto the global (imperial) stage was
counterpointed by Spains exit from that international scene in the Spanish-Ameri-
can War. See Birth of an Empire, in The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S.
Culture (Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 2002), 14670.
2. Ralph Ellison, Flamenco, Saturday Review, December 11, 1954, in The Col-
lected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan, 711 (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 Brit-
ish edition. Steins 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, 14243,
53637 (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, 24877 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 274. Bellow
Notes to pages :: 245
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 suf-
fering and poetic violence and political agony, and Elegy carries the literary weight
of tragedy and disciplined lamentation (Danto, Encounters and Reections: 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 Moth-
erwell, with a text by H. H. Arnason, second edition (New York: Harry N. Abrams,
1982).
8. Wrights ironic and refracted meditations on color have led some commenta-
tors 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 Wrights Pagan Spain, in The Black
Columbiad: Dening Moments in African American Literature and Culture, ed. Wer-
ner Sollors and Maria Diedrichs, 21225 (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
Womans Life Unveiled (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), 345,
cites Larsens Guggenheim application and goes on to discuss her travels in Spain
(36769, 37283).
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 McKays three sonnets for Barcelona, 32627.
14. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cam-
bridge 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.
19. The phrase lieu de mmoire, adopted from the French historian Pierre
Nora, has proven suggestive for historians of African American culture. Genevieve
Fabre and Robert OMeally point to a highly energized interaction of history and
246 Notes to pages ::q
memory at the nexus of personal and collective memory (introduction to History
and Memory in African-American Culture, ed. Fabre and OMeally [Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1994], 7).
20. Michel Fabre, The Unnished Quest of Richard Wright, second edition (Ur-
bana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 14243, details the New Challenge project
(intriguingly, Claude McKay was also involved). Cf. 115, 354 for accounts of Wrights
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 latters death.
22. Richard Wright, Walter Garland Tells What Spains Fight against Fascism
Means to the Negro People, Daily Worker, November 29, 1937, 2.
23. Floyd Ogburn, Jr., Richard Wrights Unpublished Haiku: A World Else-
where, melus 23 (1998), 5781.
24. Fabre, Unnished Quest, 39899. The information about the composition of
Pagan Spain draws on Fabres detailed account of Wright in Spain, 40725.
25. John Lowes analysis of Wrights 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 Co-
nundrums of Pagan Spain, in Richard Wrights Travel Writings, ed. Smith, 11947).
26. Kaplan in The Anarchy of Empire analyzes a Spanish empire now subject to
the American gaze of early lm (14670). Wrights comment suggests that for the
black American within Spanish culture the racialized gaze will trump a national
gaze. Kwame Anthony Appiahs trenchant critique of Black Power, we recall, casti-
gated Wright for redeploying a neocolonial gaze in his anthropological fantasy of
African life. Perhaps, then, Pagan Spain (1957) marked a more sophisticated under-
standing of spectatorship and power than Black Power itself (1954).
27. Richard Wright, :. 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, xviixxxiv (1945; repr., London: Jonathan Cape, 1946), xvii.
29. Wright, introduction to Black Metropolis, xx.
30. Michael Kowalewski, introduction to Temperamental Journeys: Essays on the Mod-
ern Literature of Travel, ed. Kowalewski (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 7.
31. Fabre, Unnished Quest, 411.
32. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern De-
mocracy (1944; repr., New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 3.
Notes to pages :6o:6, 247
33. Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the
Modern, :q.:8oo (London: Verso, 1998), 156.
34. Kenneth Stampps 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 historiog-
raphy 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 (6380).
35. Gunnar Myrdal to Richard Wright, April 16, 1957, cited Fabre, Unnished
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.
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, 25960 (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), 28485. 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.
Clarkes 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 (JanuaryFebruary 2005): 6177.
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 Communisms 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 empirein the literal sense of uniformis
248 Notes to pages :,o:8
well made by Karl E. Meyer, who introduces his chapter Patterns of Mastery, Brit-
ish and American with photographs of the young Winston Churchill (in 1895) and
Theodore Roosevelt (1898). Churchill, a second lieutenant in the Queens Own Hus-
sars, 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 inclusive-
ness 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 Anglo-
Saxon manqu with a nice kepi. For a further source on the cultural politics inecting
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). Berghahns account of American projects aimed at winning over snobby
European elites (which looked down on U.S. provincialism) is pertinent to my dis-
cussion 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):
31420.
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 Kings First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the
British Empire. Empires 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 criticismdevelopment thus becoming part of the British imperial
lexicon as a response to this pressure (R. F. Holland, Colonialism and the Anglo-
American Alliance, European Decolonization :q:8:q8:: An Introductory Survey,
5256 [Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985]).
14. G. L. Arnold, Co-Existence: Between Two Worlds, Partisan Review 21
(1954): 14760. As the title suggests, one identiable strand in Partisan Review
thought was to maintainhowever tenuouslya co-existence between the polar-
Notes to pages :8:86 249
izations brought about by the cold war. Such acts of political nonalignment were in-
creasingly difcult 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 civil-
ian 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, 1056).
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 Wrights admonition in
Black Power to Nkrumah to militarize Ghanaian society. If ones country was go-
ing 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 Bellows
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 Labra-
dor. Forty years ago, when I read his books on the back porch, I swore Id be a medi-
cal missionary (Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King [New York: Viking Press,
1959], 78).
22. Bellow, Henderson the Rain King, 34041.
23. An Evening with Patrick Hemingway, The Hemingway Review 19, Special
Section on True at First Light (1999): 1011. Patrick Hemingway noted: The manu-
script itself, if it had been published exactly as it is, would have been difcult 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 rst time (910).
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 Hemingways en-
counters with the British Empire in its latter East African days. See Caroline Elkins,
Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britains Gulag in Kenya (New York: Henry
Holt, 2005), and David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya
250 Notes to pages :8,:q
and the End of Empire (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005). On the evidence collated in
these important revisionist accounts of decolonization, Hemingways realizationas
reported by his sonthat 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, 77118, ana-
lyzes 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 texts strange blend of
fact and fantasy, the true and the false, in this interesting but awed book about Af-
rica (192).
27. Contrast Hemingways relative indifference to Mau Mau with Malcolm Xs
invocation of the insurgency. One biographer reports of Malcolms 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). Hendersons His-
tories 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 Ruarks 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 en-
countered 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. segrega-
tionist politics. Ruarks ction was critical of the rapid shift to black rule, and he
openly mocked the ability of Africans to govern themselves. . . . Ruark became the
white resistances 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 extrava-
gantly self-dramatizing American heroes who then nd themselves in European spots
(Paris, central London, rural Spain, the beach at Dunkirk) where their national iden-
tity 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 signicant difference at this point (pukka sahib ones)
between Under Kilimanjaro and the earlier version, edited by Ernests son, Patrick
Hemingway. True at First Light reads: The old Pukka Sahibs have been often de-
Notes to pages :q:q 251
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
fathers knowledge of British imperial texts? The later (fuller) version has a signi-
cant 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, Hemingways Quarrel with Androgyny (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1990): Hemingway derives opposing yet overlapping strands of
feeling about manhood from Victorian protofeminist and imperial ctions. Of course,
he also derives them from his upbringing in a peculiarly British and androgynous
home, where such ctions were amply shelved (6).
33. This is the productive terrainthe intersection between Empire and the gay
writing of the colonythat Alan Hollinghurst explored in rendering the ctional Af-
rican journals of his character Lord Nantwich (Hollinghurst, The Swimming Pool
Library [London: Chatto and Windus, 1988]).
q. 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 DeLillos Mao II. Like some of the Californians Rieff encountered in Los An-
geles, the Yale historian Paul Kennedy also addressed the challenge from the Pacic
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 Post-
2000 World and Winners and Losers in the Developing World have immediate
relevance to my discussion, and the latters title demonstrates that development still
maintained its power to structure analyses of world affairs (Kennedy, Preparing for
the Twenty-First Century [London: HarperCollins, 1993], 13762, 193227).
3. Rieff, Los Angeles, 22, 215, 128, 180.
4. American society itself is also going through a similar process of de-European-
ization, Kotkin wrote. Embodying this trend, he cowrote the book with a Japanese
author: The United States can ourish anew in the age of Asia (Joel Kotkin and
Yoriko Kishimoto, The Third Century: Americans Resurgence in the Asian Era [New
York: Crown, 1988], 2, 29).
252 Notes to pages :q.oo
5. My arguments in this chapter take their shape against the cosmopolitan theory
developed by scholars working in many elds. See the following texts: Arjun Appa-
durai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1996); Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Moder-
nity (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): 72148; and Amartya Sen,
Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006).
6. James Baldwins 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. Intrigu-
ingly, when Baldwin wrote about this return to American selfhood, he used a vocabu-
lary directly rooted in that language of development that has been my subject: In
short, the freedom that the American writer nds 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: Univer-
sity of Illinois Press, 1987), 233.
10. Don DeLillo, Mao II (New York: Viking Penguin, 1991), 4041. 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, 2122, 24, 2728, 74. The reader looking
for signs of DeLillos fascination with mortality in its American context will nd 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 signicance: Id 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:
Notes to pages .oo.:o 253
An Interview with Don DeLillo, in Introducing Don DeLillo, ed. Frank Lentricchia,
4366 [Durham nc: Duke University Press, 1991], 46).
14. For a searching analysis of DeLillos essay, and in particular an account of
how DeLillo has put the very idea of representation at stake, see Marco Abel, Don
DeLillos In the Ruins of the Future: Literature, Images, and the Rhetoric of Seeing
9/11, pmla 118, no. 5 (2003): 123650.
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 Satu-
rated Self : Don DeLillo on the Problem of Rogue Capitalism, Contemporary Lit-
erature 46 (2005): 78107.
18. Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot q (1966; repr., London: Vintage, 1996),
1415.
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 Noises mordant
observations about disaster: Every disaster made us wish for more, for something
bigger, grander, more sweeping (64).
21. Abel, Don DeLillos 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. Peysers account is particularly
persuasive in its analysis of Howellss 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. DeLillos emphasis on permeability and intercon-
nection nds 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 Global-
ization [London: Routledge, 2006], 176).
254 Notes to pages .:o.:
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 (Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 119.
29. Elliott and Lemert, The New Individualism, 116. Many passages in this work
suggestively juxtapose themselves against DeLillos recent writing: Hence the mer-
ciless 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, 197227: 22425. Many of the most trenchant proponents of a cos-
mopolitan vision draw on their own life-narratives to explore this form of transna-
tional 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), 18586.
Notes to pages .:6..: 255
Index
Adams, John: Nixon in China, 87,
236n18
Adams, John Clarke, 187
Africa: and Saul Bellow, 18991; U.S.
postwar policy and, 104; and
W. E. B. Du Bois, 2729; in writings
of Richard Wright, 40. See also spe-
cic countries
African American writers: globalist
discourse of, 4647; and religion, 47;
and Spain, 15373; and travel writ-
ing, 52; and understanding of colo-
nialism, 28. See also specic writers
Against Interpretation (Sontag), 14748,
149
Al-Fassi, Allal. See Fassi, Allal Al-
Algeria, 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,
8586, 147
American Civil Liberties Union, 9091
American South, 5152, 53
anthropology: and Paul Bowles, 6566,
71, 73, 7679; and Peter Matthiessen,
13336, 13940; and Susan Sontag,
149; in writings of Richard Wright,
112, 162
Appadurai, Arjun, 200, 21516
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, 2930, 32;
in writings of Don DeLillo, 207. See
also Korean conict; Southeast Asia;
and specic countries
At Play in the Fields of the Lord (Mat-
thiessen), 129, 14247
258 Index
The Autobiography of Malcolm X (Mal-
colm X), 4, 4749
Baldwin, James, 4953, 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, 56, 4953; and Paris, 52; terror-
ism in writings of, 53; and W. E. B.
Du Bois, 46
Bandung conference: and Commu-
nism, 104; and Malcolm X, 47; and
nonalignment policies, 240n23; and
Richard Wright, 12, 104, 172, 177
Baraka, Amiri, 4849
Barthes, Roland, 149
Bauer, P. T., 11
Beat generation, 14445
Beck, Ulrich, 200, 217
Bellow, Saul: Henderson the Rain King,
4, 177, 18991; modernism in writ-
ings of, 190; Seize the Day, 216; and
Spain, 155
Berber decree, 6162
Blackmer, D. L., 11
Black Metropolis (Cayton and Duke),
165, 16667
Black Power (Carmichael and Hamil-
ton), 3839
Black Power (Wright), 3, 12, 3436,
39, 41, 4446, 1067, 108, 112, 115,
15758, 173
Bowles, Paul, 5579; ambiguities in
writings of, 67; and anticolonial
nationalism, 5859; and civilized
world, 59; Coca-Colonization in
writings of, 67; contrasts in writings
of, 6768; cultural loss in writings
of, 6364; and destruction of na-
tive cultures, 140; disengagement in
writings of, 61; exoticism in writings
of, 69, 97, 146; as expatriate, 34,
5758, 60, 232n13; and international-
ism, 128, 147, 220; and Islam, 55,
57, 6164, 6971, 7274, 75, 11011,
202, 232n7; and Morocco, 5566;
mysticism in writings of, 6972;
nationalism in writings of, 56, 5859,
70; and Orientalism, 56, 59, 69, 74,
7778, 233n18; outsiders in writings
of, 14445; and Pearl S. Buck, 97;
and Peter Matthiessen, 139, 14445;
and primitive mind, 14041; primi-
tivism in writings of, 6364, 7172,
233n18; and progress, 175; and reli-
gion, 7475; restorationism in writ-
ings of, 74; serpent images in writ-
ings of, 6869; and Susan Sontag,
150; transition in writings of, 5859,
6567, 79; as traveler, 5, 9, 238n31;
and Westernization, 5960
Works: For Bread Alone, 75; A Life
Full of Holes, 75; The Spiders
House, 4, 5560, 6076, 11011, 139,
147, 202
Boxer Rebellion, 91, 92, 93
Brazil, 4, 11821, 122, 192
Brazil on the Move (Dos Passos), 4,
11821, 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., 8994, 241n32; bicul-
turalism in writings of, 9495, 101;
and China, 87, 9899; contrast of,
Index 259
to post-9/11 writers, 202, 203; and
exotic cultures, 92; exoticism in
writings of, 97; expatriate experi-
ence in writings of, 97; and literary
internationalism, 9091, 9899, 128,
22021; on Mao Zedong, 95, 96;
and missionary dissent, 101; mixed-
race people in writings of, 9596;
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,
8990, 94102; The Good Earth,
238n29; My Several Worlds, 4,
8990, 9194
Buckley, William F., 117
Burdick, Eugene: The Ugly American, 5,
177, 17886, 194
capitalism, 29, 3638, 42
Carmichael, Stokely: Black Power,
3839
Carnegie Project: The Overseas Ameri-
cans, 5, 177, 18688
Carson, Rachel: Silent Spring, 12728
Catholicism, 162, 16364, 168
Cayton, Horace R.: Black Metropolis,
165, 16667
Chamberlain, John, 85
change: in American culture, 6; in
China, 83, 9192; and Pearl S. Buck,
98, 101; and Peter Matthiessen, 132,
13739; and Richard Wright, 106; in
writings of John Dos Passos, 121; in
writings of Paul Bowles, 6566, 67,
231n3; in writings of Richard Pow-
ers, 205
Cheever, John, 146
China, 81102; American presence in,
87; identity of, 97; impact of mis-
sionaries on, 9192; loss of, 86;
and Malcolm X, 4748; as market,
82; as nemesis, 82; and Pearl S.
Buck, 94, 98, 100101; and W. E. B.
Du Bois, 31, 8789; in World War
II, 8486
China Past and Present (Buck), 4,
8990, 94102
Cleveland, Harlan, 187
The Cloud Forest (Matthiessen), 4, 129,
13233, 13940, 146
cold war, politics of: and colonialism,
1034; effect of, on American global-
ism, 78; and Malcolm X, 48; and
Pearl S. Buck, 91, 100; and represen-
tations of China, 86; and The Ugly
American, 17980, 183; and unicul-
tural universalism, 124; in writings of
Richard Wright, 168
Cole, Thomas, 16
Coleman, J. S., 11
Color and Democracy (Du Bois), 3,
3132
The Color Curtain (Wright), 2, 3, 12, 44,
88, 1089, 11115, 173
Communism: in China, 86; develop-
ment models in opposition to, 15;
and John Dos Passos, 117, 121; in
Latin America, 131; and Richard
Wright, 3435, 113, 173, 229n23; as
totalitarianism, 110
Conrad, Joseph, 1718, 131, 140, 142, 190
260 Index
Cooper, James Fenimore, 16
Cosmopolis (DeLillo), 21520
cosmopolitanism: in contemporary
writing, 21420; after 9/11, 200201;
and Pearl S. Buck, 99, 101; in Vic-
torian period, 214; in writings of
midcentury travel writers, 128; in
writings of Paul Bowles, 66; in writ-
ings of Richard Wright, 41
cultural internationalism, 2326, 12324,
160
culture, 32, 33, 11516, 228n18
culture, American: change and progress
in, 6, 8; and national security, 8; and
1950s literary culture, 127; and Peter
Matthiessen, 128, 14647; as popular
culture center, 12324
culture, primitive: Beats as, 145; en-
counters with, 14142; in writings of
W. E. B. Du Bois, 32. See also cul-
ture, traditional
culture, traditional: and Claude Lvi-
Strauss, 14849; and decolonization,
176; mistaken belief in, 175; and
Peter Matthiessen, 129, 132, 139, 140,
144, 14647; and Richard Wright,
1078. See also culture, primitive
Dean, Vera M., 11
Death Kit (Sontag), 151
decolonization: effects of, 176; and
Ernest Hemingway, 19192, 196,
250n25; models of, 116; and Paul
Bowles, 5556, 58, 70; and repre-
sentations 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 terror-
ism, 204, 210, 253n13; urban spaces
in writings of, 206
Works: Cosmopolis, 21520; In the
Ruins of the Future, 21014, 221;
Libra, 210; Mao II, 6, 2012, 20510,
215, 217, 252n2; White Noise, 205,
210, 213, 217, 254n20
democracy, 122, 184
demographic materialism, 89
de-Occidentalization, 107
detribalization, 41, 42, 4344
development: and American elites, 3;
and Spain, 155; and tradition, 14;
transformation of, 7; universal and
bipolar models of, 2326; in U.S.
appeals to China, 84; in writings of
James Baldwin, 51; in writings of
John Dos Passos, 121, 122; in writ-
ings of Peter Matthiessen, 14142,
143, 146; in writings of Richard
Wright, 4546, 122, 125, 156, 161, 172
development theory: American and Eu-
ropean rivalry in, 1213; classic texts
of, 1723; in Gunnar Myrdal, 11517;
and historical change, 175; and
modernization, 1016; and Richard
Wright, 173; of take-off, 11516
Dewey, John, 84, 236n13
Dick, Philip K., 31, 8182, 87, 235nn12
Dinesen, Isak, 193
discontent, 14
disengagement, 61, 137. See also engage-
ment
Dos Passos, John, 11725; and anti-
Communism, 121; Brazil on the
Move, 4, 11821, 122, 192; as ex-left-
Index 261
ist, 118; fbi surveillance of, 91; and
internal colonization, 11920; inter-
nationalism of, 11721, 128; literary
conservatism of, 11718, 120, 241n27;
Manhattan Transfer, 119, 122; and
neo-conservativism, 118, 121; and
political world, 241n32; and Richard
Wright, 119
Du Bois, W. E. B., 2834; capitalism in
writings of, 29; and China, 8789;
colonial system in writings of, 3132,
3334; Color and Democracy, 3, 3132;
culture in writings of, 32, 33, 228n18;
and Eurocentrism, 31; and George
Padmore, 111; and internationalism,
220; and James Baldwin, 46; and Mal-
colm X, 47; as Marxist, 39; and Pearl
S. Buck, 31, 100; The Realities in Af-
rica, 2829; and religion, 32, 176; and
Richard Wright, 34, 46; and Spain,
153; and white supremacy, 8788;
Worlds of Color, 8788
Duke, St. Clair: Black Metropolis, 165,
16767
Dulles, John Foster, 104
Eickelman, Dale, 7273, 7677
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 17
Eliot, T. S., 190
elites, American, 3
elites, intellectual, 30, 134
Ellison, Ralph, 15354
engagement, 1056, 179, 188. See also
disengagement
entropology. See culture, traditional
environmentalism, 12728, 138, 139
Eurocentrism, 30, 31
Europe. See British Empire; France
evangelism. See missionaries
exoticism: and Richard Wright, 161;
in writings of Ernest Hemingway,
19697; in writings of Paul Bowles,
69, 97, 146; in writings of Pearl S.
Buck, 97; in writings of Peter Mat-
thiessen, 145, 146
expatriate experience: in The Over-
seas Americans, 18688; and Paul
Bowles, 34, 5758, 60, 232n13; in
writings of Pearl S. Buck, 97
Fairbank, John King, 86
Fanon, Frantz: inuence of, 116, 147;
and Richard Wright, 34, 107; The
Wretched of the Earth, 3839
Fassi, Allal Al-, 6162
Fawcett, P. H., 130
fbi surveillance, 91, 237n26
Ferro, Marc, 2089
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 91; The Great
Gatsby, 217, 219
amenco dance, 15354
For Bread Alone (Bowles), 75
France, 50, 208, 231n54; cultural inter-
nationalism of, 147, 148, 150
freedom, 84, 104
Fukuyama, Francis, 204
Galbraith, J. K., 1011, 12, 163
Gardner, Robert, 13435, 243n15
Geertz, Clifford, 61, 6566, 7273, 76
Gellner, Ernest, 6566
Ghana, 3638, 250n18
Giddens, Anthony, 217
Glazer, Nathan, 8, 23
globalism: in postWorld War II period,
24; and Richard Wright, 161; and
United States, 78, 85; in writings of
African Americans, 4647; in writ-
262 Index
globalism (cont.)
ings of W. E. B. Du Bois, 2834. 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, 13334, 243n9
Halpern, Manfred, 17
Hamilton, Charles: Black Power, 3839
Harvard Peabody Expedition, 13335
Heider, Karl G., 134, 135
Hemingway, Ernest, 19197; and decolo-
nization, 19192, 250n25; exoticism in
writings of, 19697; midwesterners in
writings of, 193; primitivism in writ-
ings of, 19495; as proto-postcolonial
author, 45; self-exploration in writ-
ings of, 196; and Spain, 156, 157, 160;
Under Kilimanjaro, 177, 19197; white
settler culture in writings of, 19293
Hemingway, Patrick, 19192, 251n31
Henderson the Rain King (Bellow), 4,
177, 18991
Hinton, William, 87
Hirschmann, A. O., 11
homosexuality, 19495
Horowitz, Irving, 14
Howe, Quincy, 85
Howells, William Dean, 214, 254n23
Hudson, W. H., 130
Hughes, Langston, 91; I Wonder as I
Wander, 15860
hunting, 19293
Hurston, Zora Neale, 241n27
idealism, 75, 84
identity, American: in cold war, 8; and
Ernest Hemingway, 19394, 251n29;
after 9/11, 2012; and Richard Wright,
152, 156; and Susan Sontag, 151, 220;
and The Ugly American, 194
identity, individual: in writings of Ernest
Hemingway, 19697; in writings of
James Baldwin, 50, 201, 253n6; in
writings of Pearl S. Buck, 101; in
writings of Richard Wright, 11213;
in writings of Susan Sontag, 15152.
See also self
Indian Country (Matthiessen), 243n8
indigenous culture. See culture, tradi-
tional
individualism, 218
Indochina, 50, 185. See also Vietnam
internationalism: cultural, 2326,
12324; and development theory, 22;
and discontent or terror, 53; of John
Dos Passos, 11721; and Malcolm
X, 4849; after 9/11, 200; and Paul
Bowles, 128, 147, 220; and Pearl S.
Buck, 9091, 9899, 128, 22021;
in pre-Vietnam era, 18788; in The
Ugly American, 17980; of United
States, 8485; and W. E. B. Du Bois,
31, 3234, 228n19; in writings of
midcentury travel writers, 128. See
also globalism
interviews, attitudes revealed in, 112
In the Ruins of the Future (DeLillo),
21014, 221
In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (Matthies-
sen), 243n8
Index 263
Iran, 17, 176
Irving, Washington: The Alhambra, 163
Islam: culture of, after 9/11, 202; and
Daniel Lerner, 1920; and Ernest
Hemingway, 19697; and Malcolm
X, 4849; mistaken ideas about, 177;
and Paul Bowles, 55, 57, 6164, 69
71, 7274, 75, 11011, 202, 232n7; and
Richard Wright, 105, 109, 11011, 113
I Wonder as I Wander (Hughes), 15860
James, Henry, 214, 216
Japan, 199, 252n2
Kallen, Horace, 85, 12324
Kennan, George, 1314, 83, 235n9
Kennedy, John F., 23, 12021
Kenya, 19294
Kerouac, Jack, 144
kidnapping, 2023
Korean conict, 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, 2034
Lederer, William J.: The Ugly American,
5, 177, 17886, 194
Leiris, Michel, 4445
LeMay, Curtis, 14142, 244n22
Lerner, Daniel: and cultural mobility,
176; inuence of, 20; and life his-
tory, 112; Middle East in writings of,
1718; The Passing of Traditional
Society, 11, 1721, 124; and progress,
175; transitional gures in writings
of, 1719
Lerner, Max, 1113
Lessing, Doris, 193
Lvi-Strauss, Claude, 13940; on mis-
sionaries, 244n25; and monoculture,
244n18; and Peter Matthiessen,
14647, 148, 244n18; and Susan Son-
tag, 14749
Lvy-Bruhl, Lucien, 7172, 77, 78,
14041, 147, 233n24
Lewis, Bernard, 239n8
Lewis, W. Arthur, 12
liberal consensus, 110, 12122, 123
Libra (DeLillo), 210
A Life Full of Holes (Bowles), 75
literary conservatism, 11718, 120,
241n27
literary diplomacy, 910
literary internationalism, 5, 9091, 98,
159, 201
Locke, Alain, 28, 46, 227n2
A Long Way from Home (McKay), 157
Luce, Henry, 87; American Century,
22, 84, 8586, 147
Maghreb, 7679
Mailer, Norman, 145, 184, 216
Malcolm X, 4749; and anticolonial
struggle, 47; The Autobiography of
Malcolm X, 4, 4749; and Gunnar
Myrdal, 47, 124; and Islamic self-
hood, 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, 4748
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 13941
Mangone, Gerard J., 187
Manhattan Transfer (Dos Passos), 119,
122
Manifest Destiny, 83
264 Index
Mao II (DeLillo), 6, 2012, 20510, 215,
217, 252n2
Mao Zedong, 95, 96
Mapping the Global Future, 89, 237n21
marabouts, 7274, 7677, 141
Marcuse, Ludwig, 18586
Marginal Man (Stonequist), 4144,
4647
market scenes: in writings of James
Baldwin, 50, 52, 229n25; in writings
of Paul Bowles, 6566; in writings of
Richard Wright, 3536, 108. See also
street scenes
Marxist interpretation: and develop-
ment theory, 2122; by Frantz Fanon,
39; and Richard Wright, 36, 107; by
W. E. B. Du Bois, 39
Matthiessen, Peter, 12847; and British
exploration narratives, 194; cultural
loss in writings of, 140; and disen-
gagement, 137; environmentalism
in writings of, 138, 139; exoticism in
writings of, 145, 146; and explora-
tion and encounter, 12930, 142; and
globalization, 128; and John Dos
Passos, 121; as literary diplomat, 9;
mixed-race people in writings of,
14344; Native Americans in writ-
ings of, 14344; natural history in
writings of, 13031; Otherness in
writings of, 137; outsiders in writings
of, 14445; and Papua New Guinea,
129, 13334; and political engage-
ment, 132; and primitive mind,
137; and primitivism, 132, 145; race
and racism in writings of, 14344,
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, 14247; The Cloud Forest,
4, 129, 13233, 13940, 146; Indian
Country, 243n8; In the Spirit of
Crazy Horse, 243n8; Under the
Mountain Wall, 4, 129, 13337,
13940, 147
McEwan, Ian, 201
McKay, Claude: A Long Way from
Home, 157
McLuhan, Marshall, 20
Melville, Herman, 229n25
Middle East, 1718, 207. See also specic
countries
Mignolo, Walter, 200
migration, 43
militarization, 89, 188, 250n18
military intervention, 14142
Millikan, Max F., 11
Mills, C. Wright, 89, 14
missionaries: and China, 83; and de-
velopment theory, 1819; dissent of,
101; and Indonesian Islam, 109; in
The Overseas Americans, 188; and
Pearl S. Buck, 90, 91, 97, 101; sense
of superiority in, 8384; in writings
of Don DeLillo, 205; in writings of
Peter Matthiessen, 14244, 14546,
244n25; in writings of Richard
Wright, 39, 40
mixed-race people, 9596, 14344
modernity: and Peter Matthiessen, 132;
and Richard Wright, 106, 110, 171
72; and United States, 124; in writ-
ings of Don DeLillo, 217; in writings
of John Dos Passos, 121; in writings
of Paul Bowles, 6364, 74
Index 265
modernization, 1016, 19, 82
monoculture, 244n18
Morocco: as French protectorate,
6162, 76; interpretations of, 6676;
and Paul Bowles, 5566
Motherwell, Robert, 15556
Myrdal, Gunnar: An American Di-
lemma, 16667; comment of, on
Pagan Spain, 171; culture in writings
of, 11516; in development theory,
12, 20, 12122; and Richard Wright,
11417, 166; Rich Lands and Poor,
11415, 122; and secularization of the
self, 176; social science techniques
of, 113
My Several Worlds (Buck), 4, 8990,
9194
nationalism, 56, 5859, 70, 177
Native Americans, 14344, 162, 170
natural history, 13031
neo-conservativism, 118, 121, 208
New Deal order, 118, 241n26
New York ny, 53, 5960, 74, 207
Niebuhr, Reinhold, 16
9/11, responses to, 200202
Ninkovich, Frank, 8283
Nixon, Richard, 94
Nixon in China (Adams), 87, 236n18
Nkrumah, Kwame, 3940, 45, 230n32
non-alignment policies, 40, 240n23
No Name in the Street (Baldwin), 4, 56,
4953
Nye, Joseph, Jr., 82
OConnor, Flannery, 241n27
oppression, 34
Orientalism, 56, 59, 69, 74, 7778,
233n18
Otherness, 3536, 137, 152, 155, 16064,
170, 172, 173
outsiders, 3435, 14445
The Overseas Americans (Carnegie Proj-
ect), 5, 177, 18688
Padmore, George, 11112
Pagan Spain (Wright), 3, 44, 51, 105,
15457, 159, 16070, 173, 247n26
Palestine, 21
Papua New Guinea, 129, 13334
Paris, 52
Park, Robert, 20, 41, 4243, 112, 113,
12324, 165, 176
Partisan Review, 8, 18586
The Passing of Traditional Society
(Lerner), 11, 1721, 124
Peru, 129, 14247
Plimpton, George, 128
Plowing the Dark (Powers), 6, 2012,
2035
Posnock, Ross, 11314
Powers, Richard, 197; Plowing the Dark,
6, 2012, 2035
primitivism: and Peter Matthiessen, 132,
145; and Richard Wright, 161, 162;
of Spanish culture, 15354, 16263;
transformation of, 7; in writings of
Ernest Hemingway, 19495; in writ-
ings of Paul Bowles, 6364, 7172,
233n18
progress: in American culture, 6; and
development, 14142; and develop-
ment theory, 1213, 1516; in midcen-
tury liberalism, 12122, 123; mistaken
belief in, 17576; and Paul Bowles,
175; and Peter Matthiessen, 146; and
Richard Wright, 42, 1056, 108, 161,
173; and technology, 2021; trans-
266 Index
progress (cont.)
formation of, 7; and W. E. B. Du
Bois, 32, 88; in writings of Gunnar
Myrdal, 11617
progressivism, 99
Pynchon, Thomas, 211
Rabinow, Paul, 6566, 7879, 213,
234n39
race and racism: as animating force, 105;
and James Baldwin, 49; and Mal-
colm X, 48, 49; and Pearl S. Buck,
9091, 9394; and Spanish civil war,
15859; and W. E. B. Du Bois, 29
30, 31, 3233, 87; in writings of Peter
Matthiessen, 14344, 144; in writings
of Richard Wright, 12425
Rand, Ayn, 241n27
The Realities in Africa (DuBois), 2829
religion: and African American writers,
47; as animating force, 105; centrality
of, 17677; and development theory,
22; and Langston Hughes, 160; and
nationalism, 177; and Paul Bowles,
7475; 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), 11415, 122
Rieff, David, 199200, 215, 221
Rieff, Philip, 188
Riesman, David, 8, 14, 1718, 20, 23,
150, 188
Rockefeller, Michael Clark, 13334, 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, 14950
Sen, Amartya, 200, 221, 255n30
sentimental imperialism, 83
Shannon, L. W., 11
Sheehan, Neil, 18081
Silent Spring (Carson), 12728
skin game, 48, 49. See also race and
racism
slavery, 17071
Smedley, Agnes, 31, 8687
Snow, Edgar, 86, 236n12
Spain, 15370
Spanish civil war, 155, 15860
social psychology: and Arab society,
20; and national consciousness, 8;
and The Overseas Americans, 187; of
postcolonial Gold Coast, 3738; and
sociocultural shifts, 4243
Sontag, Susan, 14752; Against Inter-
pretation, 14748, 149; and Ameri-
can identity, 151, 220; and cultural
encounter, 149; Death Kit, 151; and
French cultural internationalism,
147, 148, 150; and interiority narra-
tives, 151; and networks of represen-
tation, 150; psychological analysis
in writings of, 4; self-exploration in
Index 267
writings of, 149; and self-representa-
tion, 14950; and underdeveloped
world, 4; and Vietnam, 14951
South America, 129, 13031, 13233, 163.
See also specic countries
Southeast Asia, 17886. See also Indo-
china; Vietnam
The Spiders House (Bowles), 4, 5560,
6076, 11011, 139, 147, 202
Stadialist theory, 1617, 14142
Stein, Gertrude, 15455, 156, 160, 169,
172
Stonequist, Everett, 20, 4144, 4647,
113, 176; Marginal Man, 4144,
4647
street scenes, 52, 215. See also market
scenes
Streit, Clarence K., 24, 85
Suez asco, 17
Sulzberger, C. L., 12223, 242n34
Taiwan, 9798
Tarzanism, 77
Tate, Allen, 241n27
technology, 2021, 248n7
terrorism: and Don DeLillo, 204, 2067;
after 9/11, 201; in writings of James
Baldwin, 53; in writings of Richard
Powers, 204
Thesiger, Wilfred, 194
Third World, 1415, 23
Tibet, 98, 100
Tillion, Germaine, 2
totalitarianism, 10910, 113, 168
transition: in mid-1950smid-1960s,
12122; in writings of Paul Bowles,
5859, 6567, 79; in writings of Pe-
ter Matthiessen, 146
transnationalism, 128
travel, democratization of, 5
travel writing: and cultural internation-
alism, 220; decentralization of, 56;
and James Baldwin, 5253; as liter-
ary 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, 17886, 194
Under Kilimanjaro (Hemingway), 177,
19197
Under the Mountain Wall (Matthies-
sen), 4, 129, 13337, 13940, 147
United Nations, 31
United States: and China, 84, 85; ig-
norance of, of nonwestern world,
6; and Pearl S. Buck, 98, 100;
technological supremacy of, 248n7;
as theory, 1723. See also American
South; New York ny
United World Federalists, 24
universalism, 24, 99
Updike, John, 146
Vann, John Paul, 18182
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, 18082;
and U.S. intellectual-political elite,
134. See also Indochina
Ward, Barbara, 11
Waugh, Evelyn, 194
268 Index
Westernization, 22, 5960, 108, 124, 172
Wharton, Edith, 58
White Man, Listen! (Wright), 171
White Noise (DeLillo), 205, 210, 213, 217,
254n20
white supremacy, 4748, 8788, 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), 8788
The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon),
3839
Wright, Richard, 3440; and American
ideology, 16667; and Bandung
conference, 12, 104, 172, 177; and
capitalism, 3638, 42; Catholicism
in writings of, 162, 16364, 168;
cold-war politics in writings of, 168;
colonial system in writings of, 3738;
and Communism, 3435, 113, 173,
229n23; contrast of, to post-9/11
writers, 202; and decolonization,
146; and detribalization, 41, 42;
and difference, 16970; and Don
DeLillo, 213; and empire, 171; and
engagement, 1056, 179; as ex-leftist,
3435, 113, 229n23; and exploration
and encounter, 156; fbi surveillance
of, 91; and amenco, 153; geopoliti-
cal development in writings of, 42;
and globalism, 41; and globalization,
161; and Gold Coast, 3738; and
gradual transformations, 12223; and
haiku, 161; and hybridism, 4142;
and imperialism, 171; and Indonesia,
1089; and industrialization, 4546,
171; and interference, 1067; and
internationalism, 128, 221; and Is-
lam, 105, 109, 11011, 113; and James
Baldwin, 53; and John Dos Passos,
119; and Kwame Nkrumah, 3940,
230n32; and Langston Hughes,
15960; materialist-economic analy-
sis in writings of, 108; on militariza-
tion, 250n18; and Native Americans,
162, 170; and nonalignment, 1056;
and Otherness, 3536, 152, 16064,
170, 172, 173; outsiders in writings
of, 3435; as participant-observer,
112; and Pearl S. Buck, 93, 102; and
Peter Matthiessen, 132; and politics,
241n32; postcolonial thought in writ-
ings of, 38; and Protestants, 16769;
psychological analysis in writings
of, 108; race and racism in writings
of, 12425, 17073; and religion,
109, 168, 17677; and social analysis,
11213, 239n13; and sociology, 112,
166; and Susan Sontag, 150; time in
writings of, 106; travels of, 1045;
and travel writing, 3, 9, 35, 45, 161,
165; and universalism, 24; and
W. E. B. Du Bois, 46; and Western-
ization, 108, 124, 172
Works: Black Power, 3, 12, 3436,
39, 41, 4446, 1067, 108, 112, 115,
15758, 173; The Color Curtain,
2, 3, 12, 44, 88, 1089, 11115, 173;
Pagan Spain, 3, 44, 51, 105, 15457,
159, 16070, 173, 247n26; 12 Mil-
lion Black Voices, 165; White Man,
Listen!, 171
Yamey, B. S., 11

Apostles of Modernity

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Apostles of Modernity

University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln and London

2 The American Writer and Development

Few Americans have looked at an Asian or African country without

I am appalled and oppressed by the discovery that American people

He was anti-Western, all right. And I wondered why Western na-

Thami shook his head. What a wonderful thing to be an

In Color and Democracy Du Bois described the Spanish empires de-

The world in which we now live is in some profound respects thus

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