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

Telling America's Story to the World 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, Harilaos Stecopoulos contends that the state mainly sent authors like Ralph Ellison, Robert Frost, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, and Maxine Hong Kingston overseas not just to demonstrate the achievements of US civilization but also to broadcast an American commitment to international cross-cultural connection. Those writers-cum-ambassadors may not have helped the state achieve its propaganda goals-indeed, this rarely proved the case-but they did find 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, 1967), Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), and Three Days Before the Shooting... (2010) reimagine US literature in a mobile, global, and distinctly political register.

1 - The Good Neighbor Theory of American Literature: Archibald MacLeish and "the New World" of the United Nations
2 - "Chau-vin-ism! Con-form-ity! Self-de-termi-nation! Freeeeeeeeee-dom!" Ralph Ellison, Robert Lowell, and Occupied Salzburg
3 - People to People, Writers to Writers: William Faulkner, the Snopes Problem, and Middlebrow Internationalism
4 - Diasporic Diplomacy: Langston Hughes, the Africa Propaganda Campaign, and Black Literary Internationalism
5 - Republic of Letters, Cockpit of Controversy: Arthur Miller, PEN International, and Literary Détente
6 - "A Harvest of Conversations Among Multitudes": Maxine Hong Kingston, Wittman Ah Sing, and the US-China Writers' Conferences

Harilaos Stecopoulos is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa. He earned his doctorate at the University of Virginia and is a renowned scholar in the field of US literature and culture. Stecopoulos's books include: A History of the Literature of the US South (2021), Reconstructing the World: Southern Fictions and US Imperialisms (2008), and Race and the Subject of Masculinities (1997).