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Welcoming Strangers: Hospitality in American Literature and Culture By Welcoming Strangers: Hospitality in American Literature and Culture by Puspa L. Damai A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (American Culture and English Language and Literature) in the University of Michigan 2012 Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Susan Y. Najita, Co-Chair Professor Patricia Smith Yaeger, Co-Chair Professor Magdalena J. Zaborowska Associate Professor Susan Scott Parrish © Puspa L. Damai ————————— 2012 For my mom, Deva Devi & In memory of my father, Gopal Ram ii Acknowledgements “Welcoming Strangers: Hospitality in American Literature and Culture” is above all an exercise in gratitude – my gratefulness to America for providing me hospitality; to my mentors and supervisors in the United States and in Nepal for their incalculable gift of education; and to all the academic institutions in the United States and around the world for granting me an intellectual refuge to conduct and complete my doctoral research. Writing a dissertation is a collective endeavor undertaken with the support of a number of individuals and institutions, and my dissertation is no exception to it. It would have been impossible to complete the dissertation without the supervision of my dissertation committee chairs, Susan Najita and Patricia Yaeger. Their wisdom and gracious guidance have shaped and transformed this dissertation. Professor Najita’s insightful and exhaustive comments on the drafts of the chapters, and Professor Yaeger’s intriguing suggestions on analyzing texts and putting heartbeats into my writing will remain true sources of inspiration and provide direction to my academic activities even beyond the completion of my doctoral work at Michigan. I am equally indebted to my dissertation committee members Magdalena Zaborowska and Susan Scott Parrish for their keen interest in my dissertation project, generous advising and invaluable comments and suggestions. Professor Parrish’s comments and suggestions expanded my understanding of American literary studies, while Professor Zaborowska’s suggestions on iii methodology and interdisciplinary research have deepened my knowledge of American cultural studies. I would like to thank Vince Diaz, Frieda Ekotto and Sandra Gunning for their supervision and support during my comprehensive exams. I am also indebted to Phil Deloria, Michael Witgen, Andrea Zemgulys, Christi Merrill and Mamadou Diouf for their inspiring seminars. My deepest gratitude goes to Scott Michaelsen, my mentor at Michigan State University, for believing in me and my work and for unconditionally coming to my rescue. I would also like to thank David Stowe, Stephen Rachman, Ann Larabee and Salah Hassan for their continued friendship and support. I am truly indebted to Judith Butler, Wendy Brown, Dominick LaCapra, Tracy McNulty and Homi Bhabha for their advice and suggestions on my dissertation project. I am grateful to Shreedhar Lohani, my mentor in Nepal, who has always gone out of his way to help me at every step of my life. I would also like to thank Arun Gupta, Ammar Raj Joshi, Bamdev Adhikari and Shankar Bastakoti for being admirable colleagues and friends. A number of institutions provided the much needed resources and refuge to pursue and complete my doctorate in the United States. Thanks are due to the Fulbright Commission of Nepal for grating me fellowships and making it possible for me to pursue higher studies in the United States; to The School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell for an enchanting summer of theory and critical reflection; to the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan for a year-long fellowship; to the JFK Library in Boston, where I collected the material on the Peace Corps; to the Sweetland Writing Center at Michigan for a fellowship in the Dissertation Writing Institute; to the International iv Institute at Michigan for granting me a number of conference travel funds; and to Open Society Foundation in New York for a grant in the final year of my doctoral program. Last but not the least, I would like to thank the Rackham Graduate School for awarding me numerous fellowships and grants without which it would have been literally impossible to conduct my research and complete my degree. I owe a very special thank you to the Program in American Culture for supporting me all these years. I sincerely thank Greg Dowd, Daniel Ramirez, Sarita See and Anthony Mora for their support and guidance, and to Marlene Moore and other staffs in American Culture for coming to my aide whenever I needed any administrative help. Thanks are also due to Brooklyn Posler and Senia Vasquez for always being there to help. I also thank the people at the Knowledge Navigation Center for helping me with the formatting. My fellowship year at the Institute for the Humanities at Michigan was extremely productive, and I am grateful to Sidonie Smith, Daniel Herwitz, Anton Shammas, Amy Kulper, Carol Jacobson, Lisa Disch, Julia Hell, Alaina Lemon, Christian de Pee and Basil Duffalo for their comments and suggestions on the Whitman chapter of my dissertation. My interaction with other graduate fellows, Graham Nessler, Ben Gunsberg, Nafisa Sheik, Katherine Brokaw and Alan Itkin was no less rewarding. I am also grateful to Louis Cicciarelli and my fellow participants of the Dissertation Writing Institute for their comments and suggestions on the Whitman and Melville chapters of the dissertation. I thank Chris Finley, Lee Ann Wang, Aimee VonBokel, Amy Chen, Rabia Belt, Tayana Hardin, Jessi Gan for being ideal classmates; I also thank Erik Morales and Alexandra Hoffman for being extraordinary friends and neighbors. Thanks are due also to v Keshab Acharya, Nagendra Bhattarai, Iswari Pandey, Tika Lamsal and Yubraj Aryal for their companionship. I owe a huge thank you to Sarita, Aakriti, Aayush, Kanti and Chetana for constantly reminding me that there is a huge world outside the dissertation. Words cannot express my gratitude to my mom, whose unconditional love is the true inspiration behind this study of hospitality. I dedicate my dissertation to her and to my father, whose passing rendered me completely homeless and perpetually in search of hospitality. vi Preface: Guests in Unexpected Places: Hospitality and American Studies1 I sometimes expected the Visitor who never comes. The Vishnu Purana says, “The householder is to remain at eventide in his courtyard as long as it takes to milk a cow, or longer if he pleases, to await the arrival of a guest.” I often performed this duty of hospitality, waited long enough to milk a whole herd of cows, but did not see the man approaching from the town. - Henry David Thoreau, Walden America Global In Walden, Thoreau reveals that he observes a Hindu ritual of hospitality according to which the householder awaits the arrival of a guest everyday at sunset. Thoreau redraws the boundaries of the household and re-conceptualizes self through hospitality, which, for him, provides the ground of his critique of dominant institutions such as the state.2 His critique is premised on his deployment of hospitality and his reinvention of the figure of the host and the guest and their relationship to the household, community, nation and the international. The duty of hospitality, namely, awaiting the arrival of the visitor who may never arrive makes the household a home, and the householder a host. While as a hermit with “his insufficient person” (Howell 59) awaiting the arrival of the visitor who may never arrive, Thoreau evokes hospitality as welcoming strangers, I 1 The title of this preface echoes Phillip Deloria’s Indians in Unexpected Places in which Deloria makes “a hard turn from anomaly to frequency and unexpectedness” in exploring actions by Native Americans (6). 2 Thoreau’s readers have noted the oppositional and critical nature of Thoreau’s works. For Shawn Chandler Bingham, he critiques “the American government as a dominant institution” trampling “on individual conscience” (3); for Sam McGuire Worley criticism for Thoreau is “an act of interpretation and redefinition” (x); for Stanly Cavell Walden is “a withdrawal; it is a confrontation, a return, a constant turning upon his neighbors” (xv); for Sattelmeyer, Thoreau is the “cynosure of the oppositional canon” (18). vii seriously doubt that a Boston Brahmin like him has in mind a person such as myself when he awaits a visitor at Walden while performing the duty and rituals of hospitality prescribed by the Vishnu Purana. A Hindu, but not a believer, a South Asian but not an Indian, and a person from the East, but a student of Western literature, culture, and philosophy, I least expect a welcome from the America of authors such as Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman, whose orientalist “passages” to “India” and Hinduism seem unlikely to offer hospitality to an eccentric visitor such as myself. Why, then, am I writing a dissertation on writers who would not have acknowledged or recognized me as a guest? In the beginning, I deferred the question by asking instead if it would be an important question to ask and reflect upon. I assumed the reason for my choice of the topic was simply personal interest – my genuine interests in both American literature and hospitality, which would amply justify the “area” and topic of my dissertation. After all we live in a world where American literature enjoys the role of global literature taught and read by scholars all over the world.3 Furthermore, my “disciplinary” location within the Program in American Culture, and English Language and Literature seemed to validate my interests, for I thought hospitality in American literature would be the most spontaneous choice for me. If culture means hospitality, and if a culture cannot exist without the laws, practices and “duty of hospitality,” as Thoreau 3 A very recent inquiry into the issue of American literature as global literature is Paul Giles’ Global Remapping of American Literature (2011) which argues that American literature is a global phenomenon not only because it could “imperially claim the whole world as its rightful sphere,” but also because American literature has “imaginatively mapped itself in relation to global domain over the past three hundred years” (1-2).
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