“A Harvest of Conversations Among Multitudes”

Abstract

Abstract The last full chapter begins with a brief history of the US-China Conferences (1982–1988) organized by long-time internationalist Norman Cousins. These conferences included such US literary giants as Maxine Hong Kingston, Allen Ginsberg, Toni Morrison, and Lesley Marmon Silko. I devote the bulk of the chapter to an examination of how Kingston, the only writer involved with the conferences from beginning to end, drew upon these cultural diplomatic experiences to reimagine US literature as world literature. Kingston’s international vision first emerges in Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), a novel she completed while attending the 1988 conference. After closely examining the representation of national and global literary transmission in Tripmaster Monkey, the chapter ends with a brief examination of how Kingston’s new internationalism informed her creation of the Veterans’ Writing Workshop.