UC San Diego UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Beyond the nation : American expatriate writers and the process of cosmopolitanism Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2bb925ff Author Weik, Alexa Publication Date 2008 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO Beyond the Nation: American Expatriate Writers and the Process of Cosmopolitanism A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the Requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Literature by Alexa Weik Committee in charge: Professor Michael Davidson, Chair Professor Frank Biess Professor Marcel Hénaff Professor Lisa Lowe Professor Don Wayne 2008 © Alexa Weik, 2008 All rights reserved The Dissertation of Alexa Weik is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm: _____________________________________ _____________________________________ _____________________________________ _____________________________________ _____________________________________ Chair University of California, San Diego 2008 iii To my mother Barbara, for her everlasting love and support. iv “Life has suddenly changed. The confines of a community are no longer a single town, or even a single nation. The community has suddenly become the whole world, and world problems impinge upon the humblest of us.” – Pearl S. Buck v TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page……………………………………………………………… iii Dedication………………………………………………………………….. iv Epigraph……………………………………………………………………. v Table of Contents…………………………………………………………… vi Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………. vii Vita………………………………………………………………………….. xi Abstract……………………………………………………………………… xii Introduction………………………………………………………………….. 1 Chapter 1: A Brief History of Cosmopolitanism…………...………………... 16 Chapter 2: Cosmopolitanism in Process……..……………… …………….... 33 Chapter 3: Women in Dark Times: Kay Boyle’s Transnational Ethics and Poetics……………………………………………………………. 98 Chapter 4: The Uses and Hazards of Expatriation: Richard Wright’s Cosmopolitan Contradictions………………………………………………… 151 Chapter 5: Sensitivity, Agency and Solidarity: The Critical Cosmo- politanism of William Gardner Smith……………………………………….. 207 Chapter 6: Tales of a Third Culture Kid: Pearl S. Buck and the Challenges of Transnational Sentiment………………………………….. 274 Afterword…………………………………………………………….………. 340 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………. 347 vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the many friends, family members, and professors who have supported me in writing this dissertation. My advisor, Michael Davidson, has been the best mentor I could imagine having as a graduate student. He has been relentlessly supportive and extremely generous with his feedback and encouragement. My wonderful committee members—Lisa Lowe, Marcel Hénaff, Don Wayne, and Frank Biess—have also greatly supported and advised me at various steps of the dissertation process. I would like to express my gratitude as well to Nicole King, whose well-informed guidance and expertise on African American literature were particularly helpful in the early stages of the dissertation project, and who committed much-appreciated time and effort to continuing to work with me after she had re- located to Europe. My special thanks go to Bruce Robbins, who helped me deepen and widen my understanding of actually existing cosmopolitanism in his seminar on “Transnational Culture” in the 2007 School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University. Bruce’s erudite comments on my dissertation chapters have been especially helpful to me. Ursula Heise, too, was kind enough to read drafts of chapters, giving me particularly valuable input on the relation between cosmopolitanism and ecocriticism. I am parti- cularly grateful to Ira Allen for our many invigorating discussions on cosmopolitanism and related topics, as well as for his excellent comments and suggestions on various drafts of my dissertation. Thomas Austenfeld I want to thank for giving me ample vii food for thought on further connections between cosmopolitan and ecological con- cerns, and for trusting that my dissertation will be done in time. Among the staff of the UCSD Literature Department, I want to especially thank Ana Minvielle, Thom Hill, Patricia Valiton, and Dawn Blessman for their won- derful kindness, their great advice, and the many occasions when they made the im- possible possible. A Fulbright grant made it feasible for me in 2003 to come to the U.S. to take up my graduate studies at the University of California, San Diego, financing my first year of studies. I am particularly grateful for the continued and generous financial support I have received since then from the University of California, San Diego, in- cluding the UCSD Center for the University Pre-Doctoral Humanities Fellowship and the Humanities Dissertation Research Fellowship. In addition, the UCSD Literature Department awarded me travel grants and a One-Quarter Dissertation Fellowship. Without all this generous funding, which allowed me to fully concentrate on my dis- sertation research and writing, it would not have been possible for me to finish my degree in such a comparatively short time. My project would not have been possible at all without the generous help of a great number of people inside and outside of academia. This is especially true for my chapter on William Gardner Smith, which required a good amount of research in both public and private archives. It was through my friend Bruce Dick that I was able to make contact with a number of important scholars of African American literature, who, he himself included, gave me valuable input on the chapters on both Wright and viii Smith. Of those, I am particularly grateful to Michel Fabre, who welcomed me into his house in Paris and generously opened up his wonderfully extensive private archive for me. Sadly, Michel passed away only a few months after our meeting, and I very much regret that he was not able to complete the paper he had planned to give on Richard Wright at the 2008 Centennial Conference in Paris. Like all scholars in the field of African American literature I deeply appreciate Michel’s seminal work on black Ame- rican expatriates in general and Richard Wright in particular. We all will continue to profit from it. I also want to thank Amritjit Singh, David Bakish, Edward Margolies, and Richard Gibson, who all have helped me greatly in tracking down information on William Gardner Smith. Richard Gibson was especially helpful not only because he knew so many interesting details about Smith, but also because he put me in contact with Smith’s family in Philadelphia. My great thanks here go to Smith’s sister Phyllis M. Ford, who gave me a warm welcome in her house in Philadelphia, and who pro- vided me with a wealth of valuable information about her late brother. She was also the one who helped me to establish contact with Smith’s widow and literary executor Ira Gardner-Smith, who in turn was extremely amiable and supportive. Without these people, much of the information included in my chapter on Smith would not have been unearthed. Part of my research on Smith was conducted at the New York Public Libra- ry, which generously gave me access to the Farrar, Straus and Company Files, and at the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library at Yale University, where some of ix Smith’s papers are on file in the James Weldon Johnson Collection. I very much want to thank both institutions for their generous open-door policy and helpful staff. My special thanks go out to my friends and family in the U.S. and Europe, who all supported my project wholeheartedly, and who kindly tolerated my temporary vanishing from the face of the earth whenever a chapter was due. I especially want to express my gratitude to Boris Bugla, who not only spent hours discussing drafts of my chapters but also regularly saved the lives of my cats when I had, once again, forgotten to buy cat food betimes. My wonderful mother Barbara was the one who took my calls after midnight and who again and again told me that everything would turn out just fine. My sister Jo, too, had an ear for me whenever I needed a good listener, and my father Peter bolstered me in the more material realm. Finally, I want to thank Michael von Mossner for his unwavering emotional and intellectual support, for his patience, and, not least, for the many excellent meals he cooked to keep me going during the final stages of dissertation writing. I look to him with the utmost love and respect. Chapter 3, in part, has appeared as “The Wandering Woman: The Challenges of Cosmopolitanism in Kay Boyle’s Early Novels.” Kay Boyle for the Twenty-First Century: New Essays . Ed. Thomas Austenfeld. Trier (Germany): Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2008. 151-86. Chapter 4, in part, has appeared as “The Uses and Hazards of Expatriation: Richard Wright’s Cosmopolitanism in Process.” African American Review 41.3 (2007): 459-75. x VITA 1994 B.S. in Business/Marketing, University of Applied Science for Printing and Media, Stuttgart (Germany) 1994-1999 Production Manager and Assistant Producer in German Television 1999-2003 Undergraduate and graduate studies in Philosophy, Linguistics, and English and American Literature, University of Stuttgart (Germany). 2000-2003 Head Writer and Dramaturge for the German television series Fabrixx 2002-2003 Teaching Assistant, American Studies Department, University of Stuttgart, Germany 2005-2006 Teaching Assistant, CAT Program, Sixth College,