{"id":19397,"date":"2011-12-31T18:05:13","date_gmt":"2011-12-31T18:05:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=19397"},"modified":"2013-09-15T18:00:17","modified_gmt":"2013-09-15T18:00:17","slug":"trans-american-modernisms-racial-passing-travel-writing-and-cultural-fantasies-of-latin-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=19397","title":{"rendered":"Trans-American Modernisms: Racial Passing, Travel Writing, and Cultural Fantasies of Latin America"},"content":{"rendered":"

Trans-American Modernisms: Racial Passing, Travel Writing, and Cultural Fantasies of Latin America<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

University of Southern California
\nAugust 2009
\n311 pages<\/p>\n

Ruth Bland\u00f3n<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH)<\/em><\/p>\n

In my historical examination of the literary works of Nella Larsen<\/a>, William Carlos Williams<\/a>, Langston Hughes<\/a>, James Weldon Johnson<\/a>, Jessie Redmon Fauset<\/a>, and Carl Van Vechten<\/a>, I investigate U.S. modernists\u2019 interest in Latin America and their attempts to establish trans-American connections. As they engage with and write about countries such as Brazil, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Costa Rica, and Venezuela as utopian spaces, these writers often tend to relegate Latin America to the status of a useful trope, one that allows them to negotiate a variety of identitarian and sexual anxieties.<\/p>\n

The domestic political landscape that informs the desire for migration to the Latin Americas\u2014whether real or fantastical\u2014in the early twentieth century leads to Johnson\u2019s depiction of the savvy and ambitious titular character in his first and only novel, Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man<\/a><\/em>, to Van Vechten\u2019s, Larsen\u2019s, and Fauset\u2019s fantastical Brazil in their respective Nigger Heaven<\/a><\/em>, Passing<\/a><\/em>, and Plum Bun<\/a><\/em>. Hughes\u2019s translation of Cuban poet Nicol\u00e1s Guill\u00e9n\u2019s<\/a> poetry illustrates his straddling of national and color lines through the translation of language. These writers react to Jim Crow laws<\/a>, one-drop rules<\/a>, and color lines in their connections to and fantasies of the Latin Americas. What then of writers who make similar trans-American connections and constructions, but who write from a space of relative privilege, however resistant they are to that privilege? Consider William Carlos Williams, who negotiates the pressures of assimilation in the United States as he attempts to assert his Afro Puerto Rican and Anglo Dominican heritages. Although Williams is commonly recalled as an \u201call-American\u201d poet, his works betray his constant attempts to harness three perpetually shifting and overlapping identities: that of a son of immigrants, of a first generation \u201cAmerican,\u201d and of a son of the Americas.<\/p>\n

The trans-American connections I reveal span the fantastical to the truly cross-cultural. In placing United States modernism and the Harlem Renaissance<\/a> within a larger hemispheric context, I shift our sense of U.S. modernism in general, but also of the Harlem Renaissance\u2019s place within U.S. modernism in particular.<\/p>\n

Table of Contents<\/strong><\/p>\n