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The Contours of America: Latin America and the Borders of Modernist Literature in the United States

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The Contours of America: Latin America and the Borders of Modernist Literature in the United States View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carolina Digital Repository THE CONTOURS OF AMERICA: LATIN AMERICA AND THE BORDERS OF MODERNIST LITERATURE IN THE UNITED STATES Aram Shepherd A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Chapel Hill 2012 Approved by: María DeGuzmán Linda Wagner-Martin Minrose Gwin Joseph Jordan Laura Halperin ABSTRACT ARAM SHEPHERD: The Contours of America: Latin America and the Borders of Modernist Literature in the United States (Under the direction of María DeGuzmán) This study examines how modernist authors in the 1920s and early 1930s used representations of Latin America to support constructions of ―America‖ and U.S. national space. Following the Spanish-American War of 1898, the United States emerged as a global power on the world stage. This era saw improving communication technologies and transportation, increasing international connections between artists, and a shift in the dominant form of imperialism as the age of U.S. territorial expansion came to an end. I examine the work of authors Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, John Dos Passos, and José Juan Tablada in responding to these rapid transformations. Although writing from a variety of locations and for a variety of purposes, each at crucial moments in their texts relies on images of Latin American peoples, nations, and cultures to consider the place of the United States as a nation and their own artistic production in an increasingly interconnected world. Reading these authors in a transnational perspective while situating them in a specific historical context shows how national space and borders were imagined in ways that increasingly recognized transnational possibilities even as they sought to limit the influence of such cultural connections. The project is structured around four geographical foci: Europe, the Southwest, Mexico, and New York. I use Hemingway‘s The Sun Also Rises to consider how the ii idea of South America and the U.S. frontier helps to structure European expatriate geography. I then analyze how Cather‘s engagement with the Southwest shows the desire to incorporate elements of Mexican culture to invigorate U.S. national culture while simultaneously excluding a living transnational presence within U.S. borders. I follow by connecting Dos Passos‘s Latin American experiences and his anti-imperialism to a retreat to frontier nostalgia in the U.S.A. trilogy. Porter‘s engagement with Mexico reveals complex cultural circulations between the United States and Mexico that form the international context of the development of Mexican national culture in the post- Revolutionary period. Finally, I explore Mexican poet Tablada‘s New York writing as it extends connections across borders in an attempt to represent Mexico to readers in the United States and the United States to audiences in Mexico. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter I. INTRODUCTION: THE SHIFTING CONTOURS OF THE UNITED STATES AND THE BORDERS OF MODERNISM .............................................................................................. 1 II. EXPATRIATE GEOGRAPHY: LOCATING SOUTH AMERICA IN ERNEST HEMINGWAY‘S THE SUN ALSO RISES ................................................................................................ 36 III. WILLA CATHER‘S BORDERED FICTIONS: INCORPORATION AND EXCLUSION, THE SOUTHWEST AND MEXICO .................................................................. 85 IV. MODERNISTS ACROSS BORDERS: JOHN DOS PASSOS AND KATHERINE ANNE PORTER ...................................... 143 Dos Passos‘s U.S.A. and the End of U.S. Expansionism .......................... 153 National and Transnational Circulations in Porter‘s Mexican Writing ........................................................................................ 189 V. MÉXICO EN NEW YORK: JOSÉ JUAN TABLADA AS CULTURAL AMBASSADOR ................................................................. 222 VI. CONCLUSION: READING AND WRITING BORDERS ...................... 244 WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................. 249 iv CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: THE SHIFTING CONTOURS OF THE UNITED STATES AND THE BORDERS OF MODERNISM In the second chapter of Ernest Hemingway‘s classic modernist novel The Sun Also Rises (1926), one expatriate writer from the United States living in Paris, Robert Cohn, asks another, Jake Barnes, to accompany him on a trip to South America. The conversation, which continues for several pages as Robert entreats and Jake demurs, brings Latin America into the circulation of places associated with modernism.1 Although the appearance of Latin America in the novel is brief and the characters do not take the proposed trip, this moment suggests that a geographic imagination stretching beyond the dominant modernist New York-Paris-London axis figured, if not prominently, significantly in the works of U.S. writers of the 1920s and 1930s. Representations of Latin America appear at key moments during this period in the works of expatriate writers living in cosmopolitan European cities, as Hemingway was when he wrote The Sun Also Rises, and in the works of writers primarily based in the United States. Other modernist writers of this period went to Latin America, some for short visits and others 1 I define Latin America to include Mexico, the nations of Central and South America, and the Caribbean. This broad definition follows the most common usage in the United States during the period I am studying and suggests the ways the countries to the south of the United States were linked from the perspective of the dominant culture in the United States, particularly through the lens of the Monroe Doctrine‘s claims of U.S. hemispheric privilege. 1 for longer stays. At the same time, Latin American writers working and publishing in the United States negotiated this same field of representation in depicting Latin American people, cultures, and nations for audiences in the United States. This study examines modernist writers in each of these positions to consider the ways representations of Latin America in the literature of the period contributed to reconfiguring the borders of national identity and culture at the time the U.S. was ending its era of territorial expansion and establishing itself as a global power. Since the late 1990s, literary scholars have been exploring new approaches to the subject of U.S. literature and culture within the framework of transnational or border studies, which situates U.S. culture in a context that extends beyond the nation‘s borders.2 This much-needed perspective has challenged the national orientation of previous American Studies scholarship that focused on America as the United States and the United States as a delimited area of study. The transnational turn has yielded impressive and exciting scholarship that reveals previously unnoticed interconnections and flows of peoples, ideas, and cultural artifacts across, around, and under national boundaries. Among the most important developments has been, as Amy Kaplan has written, ―to redress the conceptual limits of the frontier, by displacing it with the site of ‗the borderlands‘‖ (16). While the frontier has continued to play a significant role in the U.S. 2 The expansion of American Studies has been led by the work of scholars such as Ramon Saldívar, Gloria Anzaldúa, Kristin Silva Gruez, Amy Kaplan, John Carlos Rowe, and Doris Sommer. The influence of a transnational perspective has been a subject of much discussion within the American Studies Association as suggested by the number of recent presidential addresses at the association‘s annual conference that have addressed the subject: in 1998, Janice Radway‘s address ―What‘s in a Name?‖; in 2003, Amy Kaplan‘s ―Violent Belongings and the Question of Empire Today‖; in 2004, Shelley Fisher Fishkin‘s ―Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies‖; and in 2007, Emory Elliott‘s ―Diversity in the United States and Abroad: What Does It Mean When American Studies Is Transnational?‖ 2 imagination and has been central to much scholarship on U.S. literature, to see border scholarship, which emerged in the 1980s and gained prominence in the 1990s, as displacing the frontier overlooks the ways in which modernism itself sought to challenge the place of the frontier in the U.S. imagination. The project of transnational scholarship, as it seeks to replace definitions of culture delimited by national boundaries, shares with modernist writers of the 1920s a rejection of the perceived provincialism of the United States. Modernist writers, like theorists of the borderland, saw the frontier mythology as exhausted or stifling. This is not to suggest that modernist writers engaged in the same critical examination of the frontier as contemporary critics have undertaken. Rather, this connection points to ways transnational scholarship‘s interest in looking beyond borders has led it to overlook the way borders were created and maintained in the modernist period. Whereas today the project of transnational scholarship is most often concerned with the ways borders are destabilized, writers in the 1920s were responding to increasing global interconnections across continents by creating or reformulating the borders of both national space and U.S.
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