The ambivalent American: Political travel writing during the Cold War

Focusing on six American writers who traveled to the Third World in the second half of the twentieth century---Richard Wright to Indonesia in 1955, Mary McCarthy and Susan Sontag to North Vietnam in 1968, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti to Nicaragua in the 1980s, and William T. Vollmann to Afghanistan in 1982---The Ambivalent American traces a literary imagination of Left and liberal internationalism during the Cold War. This dissertation explores how authors sought to understand and sometimes affiliate themselves with the movements of the newly christened Third World, while at the same time they were questioning the authority and legitimacy of the United States and the Soviet Union. Their Cold War travel writing is uncertain about international political commitment and ambivalent about what it meant to be an American abroad, yet these authors trust their roles as writers to negotiate these dilemmas. Instead of treating uncertainty and ambivalence as weaknesses, then, this dissertation considers how these travelers emulated and reconsidered a cultural icon: the writer who travels abroad to support and write about a political cause. With this focus, The Ambivalent American hopes to reorient discussions of Cold War political travel and international solidarity away from limited judgments of loyalty and betrayal.