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UC Santa Cruz UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations UC Santa Cruz UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Doing Good, Behaving Badly: Fictions of Philanthropy in the Americas Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6q19j29m Author Papazoglakis, Sarah Publication Date 2018 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ Doing Good, Behaving Badly: Fictions of Philanthropy in the Americas A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in LITERATURE with designated emphases in CRITICAL RACE AND ETHNIC STUDIES and LATIN AMERICAN AND LATINX STUDIES by Sarah Papazoglakis June 2018 The Dissertation of Sarah Papazoglakis is approved: ______________________________ Professor Susan Gillman, chair ______________________________ Professor Christine Hong, chair ______________________________ Professor Kirsten Silva-Gruesz ______________________________ Professor Eric Porter ______________________________ Professor Cecilia Rivas __________________________________ Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by Sarah Papazoglakis 2018 Table of Contents Abstract................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements ................................................................................................. vi Introduction ............................................................................................................. 1 Chapter 1: Funding Insurgency: Black Feminist Counternarratives of American Philanthropy .. 26 Chapter 2: “Aggressive Altruism” in the Global Ghetto: Black and Guatemalan Critiques of U.S. Racial Capitalism .................................................................................................... 73 Chapter 3: Afterlives of Sentimentality: Philanthropy in the Cold War Imagination of Latin America ................................................................................................................. 121 Epilogue ............................................................................................................... 173 Bibliography ........................................................................................................ 185 iii Abstract Sarah Papazoglakis Doing Good, Behaving Badly: Fictions of Philanthropy in the Americas This dissertation sheds light on an under-considered counterhistory of American philanthropy within a twentieth-century hemispheric American literary archive produced in the foreign and the domestic peripheries of U.S. empire. Drawing on a body of feminist and African American, Latinx, Central American, and Caribbean literatures to narrate the “fictions” of American philanthropy from the margins, I read American philanthropy’s global development as a neutralizing response to antislavery and anti-imperialist movements in the Americas that threaten a U.S.-dominated racial-capitalist world order. By framing charity as a modality of U.S. imperial power that produces racial and gender inequality, I examine how fiction serves as a vehicle of critique, one that questions the asymmetry of wealth both within and outside the United States. Considering American philanthropy from a hemispheric perspective, I contend that twentieth-century writers of color inverted traditional conceptions of philanthropy associated with turn-of-the-century white male industrialists and white female reformers. The traditional account of American philanthropy redemptively frames the exploitative nature of extreme wealth accumulation by white male robber barons is redemptively framed as a necessary evil that ultimately serves the common good. In this top-down narrative, American philanthropy is figured as the charitable side of U.S. industrial capitalism. By contrast, the texts I examine expose the ways in iv which the United States has veiled its often violent policies under philanthropy’s kinder, gentler cover. These texts revise American philanthropy along radical lines both by exposing it as a secret weapon for oppression and by reimagining it as a tool for liberation. Doing Good, Behaving Badly also looks at how these texts tap into philanthropy’s untapped liberatory potential by situating minority subjects as agents rather than objects of philanthropy. This archive further denaturalizes the ideology of “doing good” in the twentieth century, a conception of noblesse oblige inherited from Gilded Age gendered distinctions of public/private, masculine/feminine, and wealth/charity, and deployed to rationalize American dispossession both at home and abroad. v Acknowledgements Doing Good, Behaving Badly is the product of many years of work under the instruction, support, and encouragement of my mentors, friends, and family. I thank my dissertation advisors, Susan Gillman and Christine Hong, for their guidance throughout this six-year journey. I am especially grateful to Christine for her unfailingly high standards of scholarship and her dissertation writing group, for always challenging me to drill deeper into my analysis and to write with greater sophistication. Susan has shepherded this project through every major step of the way, helping me to finish within a strict timeline while opening up many professional opportunities along the way. I thank my dissertation readers for enriching this project with their subject-area expertise and critical feedback: Kirsten Silva Gruesz for posing questions on sentimentality and the Americas, Eric Porter for his insights on historical methods and black history and culture, and Cecilia Rivas for introducing me to a wide variety of perspectives on Central American culture and literature. I am also thankful for Despina Kakoudaki’s continued mentorship. This dissertation was completed with the generous support of the Graduate Division at the University of California Santa Cruz in the form of a Chancellor’s Dissertation Quarter Fellowship and the Chancellor’s Graduate Internship Program. I am thankful for two quarter-long fellowships and research and travel funds from the UCSC Literature Department. The Humanities Institute and California Humanities (CH) jointly sponsored a public fellowship that allowed me to work with the incredible folks at CH on their 40th anniversary history project, a stimulating vi experience that came at a pivotal moment in my graduate career for which I am incredibly grateful. A Harry Ransom Center Dissertation Fellowship at the University of Texas, Austin allowed me to conduct research in the Julia Alvarez Collection. Big thanks to the women of Chapter E of the P.E.O. Sisterhood who provided constant support and encouragement throughout my studies. I simply could not have completed this dissertation without the support of my writing group, my bondhus Kara Hisatake, Katie Trostel, and Tsering Wangmo. Together, we have created an amazingly supportive intellectual and social community, one that has made me a better thinker, writer, and friend. Kara inspires me with the focus and stamina she brings to her teaching, her scholarship, and her mentorship of both undergraduate and graduate students. Getting to co-author a publication together was the best! Katie has been leading the way for our group; she has done everything first and used her experience to help me chart a path forward, from exams to dissertation completion and beyond. Tsering nourishes me with her unconditional friendship, her poetry, and her incomparable ability to see specific details and broad context at the same time. She continually opens up new ways for me to think about my work and my positionality. She has also given me a warm home away from home in Santa Cruz. I have relied upon the support of friends and family to sustain me through such solitary work, a challenge for an extrovert like me. I am grateful for Sophie Pappenheim showing up nearly every weekday for the past year to write together. I cannot thank her enough for serving as my editor-in-chief, coaching me to write more vii clearly, critically, and, on occasion, even beautifully. Meagan Smith has been a generous reader and commenter, from the master’s program at American University to guiding me through my first revise-and resubmit publication opportunity. Joanna Meadvin helped me fight off the gerund monsters that plagued my early drafts and has been a real mentor to me throughout. Thank you to Matthew Gervase, Ruth O’Donnell (Ruthy Baby), and Karla Cativo for dance parties, karaoke, trivia, and all around fun times together. Thank you to my parents, Elizabeth and Tom, who are my biggest cheerleaders and supporters; to my sister Erika, the funny one, who always sees the best in me and has listened to me talk about my dissertation so much that she originated the hashtag #lilsisbigwords; to my sister Niki, my partner in crime, who sends me on adventures near and far to explore a world beyond the confines of studying and writing. I dedicate this work to Boris Melnikov. He has been everything to me: loving spouse, masterful copyeditor, thought partner, patient listener, and my refuge in the best and worst of times. viii Introduction It was claimed that white men were "helping" black men by enslaving them; it finally became right to treat black men wrong, and wrong to treat them right. Richard Wright, “Introduction,” Black Metropolis (1945) Fictions of Philanthropy W.E.B. Du Bois employs the figure of the philanthropist to trace “the history of the development
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