| White Flight analyzes the work of authors who looked to international travel to escape mass society during the high Cold War era, a period of cultural homogenization that lasted from the late 1940s through the early 1960s. After World War II Americans traveled the world in unprecedented numbers, inspiring the sociologist Dean MacCannell to argue that tourists formed an emancipatory class whose world-historical consciousness centered on the creative use of leisure time. Many writers shared this idealism, although they did not try to instantiate McCannell's social holism but rather valorized radically individualistic self-making. The ideology of this new global frontier complicates Edward Said's model of the master-slave colonial binary, as post-WWII American travel narratives are simultaneously postcolonial and imperial. On one hand, writers resisted cultural hegemony and state control, fashioning prototypical models of hybrid selfhood and anticipating various developments in postmodern culture and theory. On the other hand, their vision of freedom was a specifically middle-class vision of liberated professionalism, a creative fusion of work and play that functioned to elide social inequality and marginalize collective struggles against oppression. White Flight argues that writers such as William S. Burroughs and Saul Bellow were therefore complicit with forms of neocolonial exploitation. The dissertation's concluding chapter argues that Richard Wright wrote against frontier libertarianism and the escapism of a globalized "white flight," as he imagined a postcolonial resistance movement that would extend middle-class self-empowerment to everyone. As a supporter of the Enlightenment and the work ethic of Protestantism, Wright problematizes our contemporary emphasis on cultural hybridity and the resistance of master narratives, arguing that a firm commitment to progress, education, and universal rationality in fact enables global mobility and cultural in-betweenness. |
