Cosmopolitan Secrets: The Racialist Affordances of Equivocation in Henry James’s The American

Abstract

This essay argues that through an aesthetics of secrecy, Henry James’s The American admits that the Euro-American cosmopolitan project (which he develops over the course of his entire career) is predicated on racialist ideals. Scholarship on the racialism of James’s oeuvre has largely remained estranged from its cosmopolitanism, likely because they seem incompatible with one another. Building on recent attempts to complicate the Appiahan understanding of cosmopolitanism as demanding of a democratic ethics, I contend that that incompatibility plagues The American. I show how an intrusion of the antebellum Southern context into the French plot betrays the corruption of the cosmopolitan ideal by a national racism James cannot renounce.