Telling America's Story to the World: Literature, Internationalism, Cultural Diplomacy

Telling America's Story to the World is a superb work ... At the heart of Stecopoulos's story lie questions of power and agency that link the U.S. state agencies that sent writers abroad for propaganda purposes and the writers themselves, who rightly viewed themselves as ambassadors of their own endeavors, and who used their travels to carry out their own initiatives -- often, in the process, reconfiguring their own relationship to the United States. Stecopoulos elegantly unpacks these competing agendas while also tracing how they factored into the development of U.S. literature and its place on the international stage since the late 1940s ... Telling America's Story to the World is a must-read that shows how knowledge of cultural diplomacy is indispensable to the study of U.S. literary history. -- Deborah Cohn, Provost Professor, Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese, Indiana University-Bloomington

Harilaos Stecopoulos's magisterial book makes a tremendous contribution to cold war studies, American literary studies, and diplomacy studies, fields that have rarely been put in extended dialogue with such rigorous attention to their own logics and concerns. The result is a major and important step forward in our understanding of how U.S. writers from the World War II era through the War on Terror played a role in propagating an image - multiple, multivalent and complex - of the United States during periods of war and occupation ... An astute critic as well as a sophisticated cultural and intellectual historian, he reads the complexities of the texts and authors he treats which produces a more nuanced account of the relationship between cold war literature and geopolitics. This is a book that all students and scholars of U.S. literature produced during the second half of the twentieth century will need to read. -- Brian T. Edwards, Dean and Professor of English, Tulane
University

So much has been written about the so-called Cultural Cold War, and the role of U.S. intellectuals in promoting it -- and for that matter the role of the Cultural Cold War in defining American Studies -- that it's pretty to think there's no more to be said. What Harilaos Stecopoulos shows, with his characteristic archival surprises, flashing wit, and political insight, is that the writers the U.S. state sent abroad for propaganda purposes often felt otherwise -- making links, forging connections and non-state organizations, ultimately exploring the possibilities of a New International of cultural workers. The range, reach, intricacy, and buoyant storytelling of this superb study set entirely new terms for our understanding of literary diplomacy and offer a blockbusting model of American Studies. -- Eric Lott, author of Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism

A major study that finally gives readers of literature a persuasive picture of liberal internationalism's unpredictable effects, Telling America's Story to the World proves that U.S. efforts at cultural diplomacy amounted to more than enduring cartoon portraits of Cold Warriors at the CIA weaponizing novels, jazz, and abstract art for ideological combat. Instead, Harilaos Stecopoulos recovers how authors commandeered their roles as vexed ambassadors of U.S. democracy to forge distinct styles of worldliness. Writing with crystal prose and clear purpose, Stecopoulos combs a vast archive of literary diplomacy from the Popular Front to the War on Terror, and he beads together stunning readings of Ralph Ellison, Robert Lowell, Langston Hughes, Maxine Hong Kingston, and scores of others. This book is among the essential contributions to the geopolitics of U.S. literature. -- Harris Feinsod, author of The Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures

Telling America's Story to the World represents a major rethinking of the impact of cultural diplomacy on postwar US literature. While addressing the complicity of imaginative literature in American empire, Harilaos Stecopoulos powerfully and judiciously demonstrates that writers of many different kinds also spun out cross-cultural, internationalist visions of America and the world. In so doing, they often exceeded or even contradicted the aims of the state institutions that sponsored them. A bold, ambitious, yet nuanced study of the literature of alternative internationalisms. -- Jahan Ramazani, author of Poetry in a Global Age

This valuable contribution to Transnational American Studies investigates how U.S. state propaganda employed literary authors in the national interest. The author also shows how such governmental efforts produced an unintended counter-narrative. U.S. writers like Faulkner, Hughes, and Kingston served as cultural ambassadors only to grow more internationally aware and hence critical of U.S. exceptionalism. A unique combination of diplomatic and literary history, this book illuminates the complex globalization of postwar American literature. -- John Carlos Rowe, USC Associates' Professor of the Humanities, University of Southern California

Telling America's Story to the World reveals the internationalist tenor of twentieth-century American literature by examining how novelists, essayists, and poets leveraged culture and aesthetics to create cosmopolitan connections. Harilaos Stecopoulos's research is extensive, his argument persuasive, and his writing fluid and lively. In its account of an alternative internationalism, this book is sure to reorient American literature's relation to the world. -- Russ Castronovo, Tom Paine Professor of English and Dorothy Draheim Professor of American Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison