| This dissertation focuses on the relationship between exile and intimacy in post-World War II literature. Establishing James Baldwin as a crucial theorist whose work connects 20th century American culture with a set of key 21st century concerns, I assemble a transnational group of writers whose work extends Baldwin's insights into the taxonomies between private and public life. I employ three of Baldwin's texts, his essay/autobiography, The Fire Next Time (1963), his germinal essay, "The Uses of the Blues" (1964), and second novel, Giovanni's Room (1956), to introduce the synchronic conversation on what I call, "exilic intimacy." Employing a "synchronic" critical methodology, the project orchestrates a conversation between Baldwin (African American), Adrienne Rich (Anglo American). Andre Aciman (Egyptian Jewish), Hanif Kureishi (Pakistani British), and Marjane Satrapi (Iranian French). The work of these writers provides insights into the relationship between the material and metaphorical notions of exile while suggesting modes of intimacy that move beyond the public/private split.;Reading these transnational texts in relation to the work of an African-American writer helps us re-imagine the role of the U.S. in the world in the second half of the twentieth century. I examine U.S. poet Adrienne Rich's poetry collection Twenty-One Love Poems (1976) and essay, "Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying" (1975) and demonstrate how these texts cultivate an intimacy that refuses blockades between private and public life. While Rich emphasizes the personal as political, Andre Aciman's essays, False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory (2000), privilege palimpsests of memory and nostalgia in reclaiming an intimacy that resists a fixed, secure home. Hanif Kureishi's novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) emphasizes the exploration of the imaginative and aesthetic as a form of erotics, and as a way of cultivating intimacies that can acknowledge multi- racial, sexual, and political formations. Finally, Iranian French Marjane Satrapi's graphic memoirs Persepolis I (2000) and Persepolis II (2001) excavate the schizophrenia on individual and national levels as the Islamic Republic mandates strict separation between private and public life, which Satrapi combats through aesthetic and political gestures that situate uncomfortable and risky intimacies. |
