Beyond the nation: American expatriate writers and the process of cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism, the understanding of oneself as a 'citizen of the world,' has enjoyed a highly interdisciplinary comeback in recent years. Taking up the challenges posed by ever-increasing global migration and neo-liberal globalization, scholars have been evaluating cosmopolitanism's potential as a possible corrective or even counter-discourse to both nationalism and global corporate capitalism. My project in this context is twofold: on the one hand, I am interested in how the actually-existing cosmopolitanism(s)---to use Bruce Robbins's term---of a selection of American writers have looked, in moments of both success and of failure. On the other hand, I am building a new understanding of the process of cosmopolitan development as such drawing on Hans-Georg Gadamer's intercultural hermeneutic, Martha Nussbaum's work on the emotional structure of thought and Paul Smith's location of agency in ideological conflict, I argue that cosmopolitanism is best understood as a mode of solidarity across national, racial, class, and religious borders, something constantly evolving and entailing necessary moments of (Cynic) detachment and (Stoic) re- and multiple emotional attachment. I thus offer a theory of affect-driven cosmopolitanism-in-process, which develops through emotional engagement in recurring moments of ideological interpellation.To illustrate how this process works in practice, I provide four 'case studies' of actually existing cosmopolitanism(s) in 20th-century U.S. writers, as expressed in their life choices and in their fiction and non-fiction writings. Each of the writers considered---Kay Boyle, Richard Wright, William Gardner Smith, and Pearl S. Buck---developed partially lived and ever-shifting sets of beliefs and solidarities that not only outgrew the domestic concerns of the American nation, but also transcended narrowly defined attachments to their own racial, ethnic or religious communities. As we recognize the importance of the "imaginative engagement" with the literatures and cultures of "other" people for the furthering of a less isolationist and more cosmopolitan vision, it seems crucial that we also reengage with such writers within (and often on the margins of) the American literary canon who went beyond the American nation, both physically and imaginatively, in order to engage seriously and openly with Others.