Telling America’s Story to the World: Literature, Internationalism, Cultural Diplomacy

Abstract

Abstract This article argues that state and state-affiliated cultural diplomacy contributed to the making of postwar US literature. Highlighting the role of liberal internationalism in US cultural outreach, I contend that the state mainly sent authors like Robert Frost, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, and Maxine Hong Kingston overseas not to demonstrate the superiority of US civilization, but rather to broadcast an American commitment to international cross-cultural connection. Those writers-cum-ambassadors didn’t so much help the state achieve its propaganda goals—indeed, this rarely proved the case—as find in their assignments an opportunity to ponder the international meanings and possibilities of US literature. For many of those figures, courting foreign publics inspired a reevaluation of the scope and form of their own literary projects. Testifying to the inadvertent yet integral role of cultural diplomacy in the worlding of US letters, works like The Mansion (1959), Life Studies (1959), “Cultural Exchange” (1961), and Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989) reimagine the literary in a global, mobile, and distinctly political register.