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TRANS-AMERICAN MODERNISMS:
RACIAL PASSING, TRAVEL WRITING, AND CULTURAL FANTASIES
OF LATIN AMERICA
by
Ruth Blandón
A 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)
August 2009
Copyright 2009 Ruth Blandón
Object Description
| Title | Trans-American modernisms: racial passing, travel writing, and cultural fantasies of Latin America |
| Author | Blandón, Ruth |
| Author email | blandon@usc.edu; routheles@msn.com |
| Degree | Doctor of Philosophy |
| Document type | Dissertation |
| Degree program | English |
| School | College of Letters, Arts and Sciences |
| Date defended/completed | 2009-05-04 |
| Date submitted | 2009 |
| Restricted until | Restricted until 09 Jul. 2011. |
| Date published | 2011-07-09 |
| Advisor (committee chair) | McCabe, Susan |
| Advisor (committee member) |
Boone, Joseph Allen Rowe, John Carlos Diaz, Roberto Ignacio |
| Abstract | In my historical examination of the literary works of Nella Larsen, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Carl Van Vechten, I investigate U.S. modernists’ 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.; The domestic political landscape that informs the desire for migration to the Latin Americas -- whether real or fantastical -- in the early twentieth century leads to Johnson’s depiction of the savvy and ambitious titular character in his first and only novel, Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, to Van Vechten’s, Larsen’s, and Fauset’s fantastical Brazil in their respective Nigger Heaven, Passing, and Plum Bun. Hughes’s translation of Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén’s poetry illustrates his straddling of national and color lines through the translation of language. These writers react to Jim Crow laws, one-drop rules, 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 “all-American” 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 “American,” and of a son of the Americas.; The trans-American connections I reveal span the fantastical to the truly cross-cultural. In placing United States modernism and the Harlem Renaissance within a larger hemispheric context, I shift our sense of U.S. modernism in general, but also of the Harlem Renaissance’s place within U.S. modernism in particular. |
| Keyword | Trans-American; transnational; modernism; race passing; travel writing; translation; James Weldon Johnson; Nella Larsen; Jessie Redmon Fauset; Carl Van Vechten; William Carlos Williams; Langston Hughes; Nicolás Guillén; Latin America; Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man; Passing; Plum Bun; Nigger Heaven; Al Que Quiere |
| Geographic subject (country) | USA |
| Geographic subject (region) | Latin America |
| Coverage era | Nineteenth Century; Twentieth Century |
| Language | English |
| Part of collection | University of Southern California dissertations and theses |
| Publisher (of the original version) | University of Southern California |
| Place of publication (of the original version) | Los Angeles, California |
| Publisher (of the digital version) | University of Southern California. Libraries |
| Provenance | Electronically uploaded by the author |
| Type | texts |
| Legacy record ID | usctheses-m2333 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Rights | Blandón, Ruth |
| Repository name | Libraries, University of Southern California |
| Repository address | Los Angeles, California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@dots.usc.edu |
| Filename | etd-Blandon-2972 |
| Archival file | uscthesesreloadpub_Volume14/etd-Blandon-2972.pdf |
Description
| Title | Page 1 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@dots.usc.edu |
| Full text | TRANS-AMERICAN MODERNISMS: RACIAL PASSING, TRAVEL WRITING, AND CULTURAL FANTASIES OF LATIN AMERICA by Ruth Blandón A 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) August 2009 Copyright 2009 Ruth Blandón |
