A lecture by Harilaos Stecopoulos
Monday, March 18, 2019, 4-5:30pm
VOC-zaal, Bushuis/Oost-Indisch Huis
Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012CX Amsterdam
From the hemispheric cultural diplomacy of the Good Neighbor era to the recent public relations campaign in the Middle East, the U.S. government has often turned to American literature to shore up the nation’s international image and promote U.S. policy abroad. Drawing on archival sources—e.g., Salzburg Seminar syllabi, U.S.I.A. memos, International Writing Program publicity materials—“Telling America’s Story to the World” demonstrates that U.S. propaganda initiatives contributed to the “worlding” of American literature and affected domestic literary concerns in the process. From the 1940s through the 1980s, state propagandists became de facto literary gatekeepers who privileged first middlebrow, then modernist and, eventually, multi-ethnic American writing as the literature most valuable for U.S. diplomatic relations. By valuing literary modes for their perceived global appeal, state propagandists generated a complex imperial apparatus that continues to shape our national literature to this day. The current scholarly fascination with what Wai Chee Dimock has dubbed “American Literature in the World” should be read in part as a legacy of this imperial formation. Yet these officials also inadvertently prompted some literary ambassadors to trouble the Pax Americana by offering them opportunities to forge new transnational bonds outside the purview of the state. This talk will consist of an overview of the project with a particular focus on two very different literary diplomats: William Faulkner, a novelist usually linked to cold war modernism; and Allen Ginsberg, a poet typically understood as hostile to the very idea of cultural diplomacy.
Editor of The Iowa Review, Harilaos Stecopoulos teaches US literature and culture at the University of Iowa. He has published Race and the Subject of Masculinities and Reconstructing the World: Southern Fictions and US Imperialisms, 1898-1976. He is currently finishing two projects: “The Cambridge History of the Literature of the U.S. South” (for Cambridge University Press) and “Telling America’s Story to the World: Literature, Internationalism, Cultural Diplomacy” (for Oxford University Press).