Landscape for a good citizen: The Peace Corps and the cultural logics of American cosmopolitanism

This dissertation examines the cultural practices of the Peace Corps as an expression of a peculiarly American vision of cosmopolitanism. Founded at the height of American liberalism and amid the global turbulence of decolonization and the cold war, the Peace Corps offered a compelling national story of continuity and coherence at a moment of transition in American society. The depiction of the decolonizing world as a "new frontier," the testing ground for a new generation of citizens, drew a direct line between the country's revolutionary republican past and its emergence on the world stage as a military and economic superpower. This vision of a coherent, historically stable national character contained an ideal of citizenship wrought by the intersections of class, race, and gender in U.S. culture and society. The Peace Corps represented an influential, mainstream vision of the American citizens' participation on the world stage.The Peace Corps not only made the world newly accessible to individual American travelers, but also produced an array of representational conventions that gave meaning to Peace Corps experiences. Volunteers enacted the successful achievement of American/global citizenship through their adoption and creation of technologies for representing their experiences: in the performance of banality in postcolonial settings in the elaboration of "non-ugly Americanness" in the experience of "culture shock" in narrative performances of self-possession and subjective coherence. I explore both the cultural underpinnings that support the subjectivity of American/global citizenship and the acute contradictions that often attend the position of the volunteer abroad.The dissertation concludes by exploring the Peace Corps's support for liberal arts education as a the basis of American cosmopolitan citizenship. Here I explore the competing articulations of parochialism and worldliness that play out in the Peace Corps and in the internationalization of liberal arts curricula since the 1980s. The promises of "experiential learning" associated with study abroad---often a cornerstone of an international curriculum---offer students of the neo-liberal university an opportunity to fulfill a desire perhaps most richly embodied by the cultural archive of the Peace Corps: an ideal of self-actualized worldly participation was enacted experientially, corporeally, and discursively.